Epizeuxis: Repetition of the same word, with none between, for vehemence. Synonym for palilogia.
“Help, help, help!” It was 2:00 a.m. It was my goddamn parrot Larry. He was crying for help, so I had to check and see what was wrong. As usual, it was a false alarm. His seed dish was empty and he was pecking at it and crying “Help!”
I had inherited Larry from my Aunt Lana and I would inherit $500,000 if I took care of Larry for five years, or if Larry died of natural causes before the five years had passed. My aunt had died the previous week in a mysterious poisoning incident. Everybody joked that it was probably Larry who killed her. She and Larry had a notoriously bad relationship ever since she had bought him at an estate auction of Zippy Williams’s worldly goods.
Williams was found dead on his kitchen floor, his throat cut by a cuttlebone—the sharp internal bone of a Cuttlefish. Cuttlebones are often given to birds as a source of calcium, and also, to sharpen their beaks with. Everybody laughed and joked about Larry being Zippy’s killer.
Zippy had been paroled after spending ten years in prison for feeding his wife to a wood chipper. He claimed it was an accident, that she had gotten sucked into the chipper when she was looking for a missing erring. Her hair got caught in the chipper, and that was the end of that.
One of the terms of Zippy’s parole was that he obtain a pet and “learn how to nurture and love it.” That’s where Larry came in. His previous owner was an EMT who had fallen out of his kitchen window and died. Larry learned how to mimic the obnoxious “wee-wah” sound of his owner’s emergency alert box, and also to say “Help, help, help” like his owner yelled when he would frequently get up in the middle of the night and run out the door to an emergency.
Clearly, Larry had a checkered past.
Now, Larry was mine and I didn’t know what to do with him. His midnight antics were making me crazy.
Thanksgiving was just around the corner. Maybe I could pass Larry off as a small turkey and eat hm for Thanksgiving dinner. Only my girlfriend would be coming over. It might work.
First, I had to take off his head. I got out my biggest kitchen knife and headed for his cage. He knew what was up and he started yelling help. He got around my knife-hand and flew out of his cage, still yelling help. I dropped the knife, realizing it wouldn’t look like natural causes if I cut his head off.
He flew to the top of the bookcase and pulled what looked like a vitamin capsule out of the basket on top of it. He flew at me and shoved the capsule in my open mouth, dug his talons into my cheeks and flapped his wings until I swallowed it.
Almost immediately I saw colors and little men climbing my living rom walls yelling obscenities over their shoulders.
There was pounding on my front door. It was the police! The policeman told me that “Somebody called 911 from this address yelling “Help!” I told him it was my bird (who had gone silent when the police arrived). Then I asked if he was the Atman or the walrus and told him he better take care of the unpleasant little men climbing my walls.
Somehow, Larry was able to make a small cut over his eye. I was arrested and charged with animal cruelty and put under observation for “bizarre statements and paranoid delusions.”
Larry was sent to Florida to a place called “Parrot Kingdom.” I have heard he performs segments from the second act of “Don Giovanni” for the “Parrot Kingdom” tourists.
“Parrot Kingdom” has received the $500,000 from my Aunt Lara’s estate.
I will never know where the drug capsule came from that Larry shoved in my mouth. I suspect he had it hidden under his wing when he moved into my house from Aunt Lara’s. But, where did it come from? Maybe Aunt Lara was a fan of psychedelics? She often talked about attending “Woodstock” and how she was Peter Max’s mistress for a week. She made macrame plant hangers, tea cozies, mittens, balaclavas, and coasters for a living, and sold them on her Etsy site “Knot Now.”
I am homeless now and I owe it all to Larry. I have often thought of hitch-hiking to Florida and killing him.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
The Daily Trope is available on Amazon in paperback under the title of The Book of Tropes for $9.95. It is also available in Kindle format for $5.99.
The Daily Trope 