Epiplexis (e-pi-plex’-is): Asking questions in order to chide, to express grief, or to inveigh. A kind of rhetorical question [–the speaker does not expect an answer].
How do you think I feel? Do you think I’ll ever recover from Joey’s death? Can I live without him? How can I throw a handful of dirt on his coffin and watch it sink into the ground, buried forever in this decrepit old cemetery?
This is the worst day of my life since I lost my bid for Homecoming Queen to that slut Margaret Pinole. I took diet pills for a month. I had a hairdo like Marie Antonette. I got my gown from “Off the Truck” a well-respected Mafia cut-rate retail store. My gown looked like a puffy white cloud tinted by the setting sun and floating over South Beach, Miami. I lived in Linden, New Jersey, but everybody had relatives retired in Florida. My Aunt Pickle and Uncle Red lived there. Aunt Pickle watched game shows while Uncle Red went fishing. In New Jersey, Uncle Red ran numbers until lotto was legalized. His numbers came from the number of shares sold on the New York Stock Exchange. After the numbers, he had a used car lot. It was called “Stars Cars” and was stocked with “babied mobiles.” He took only cash and would not tell anybody where he got his cars from. One day, Joey asked him and he beat the shit out of him and told him he may “die” if he pushed it.
I think that beating may have hastened Joey’s death. I think when Uncle Red hit him in the head with the rock, it did something to Joey. He wasn’t good at anything after the beating. For example, he used roll-on deodorant and he kept rolling it across his chest. Sometimes, you could see his heart beating through his Banlon shirt. The weirdest was that he couldn’t talk without singing what he was he was saying. He had a beautiful voice. He sounded like Frank Sinatra. Everybody loved his speech. He would say something like “I’m goin’ to the fu*kin’ deli” and it would sound like nightclub act in Vegas. Eventually, he went to work for Western Union doing singing telegrams. That’s how he came to have the affair with Mr. Big Shit’s wife. As soon as I found out she disappeared from the face of the earth and big my brother Orzo cut 2 of Joey’s fingers off. I kept them in a jar over the kitchen sink so stupid-ass Joey wouldn’t forget that what he had done was wrong and there was a price to pay.
I took the jar down when Joey died. He was torched in back of the “Palsy Walsy Pub.” He’d gone outside to take a leak and somebody threw gasoline on him and sent him up. I went looking for him and saw the smoking heap. Then I saw the glint of the giant gold cornicello I had given him as a surprise for being good for 2 months. It was lying by the heap that was Joey. I fell down on the ground screaming and crying. I was out of my mind. They took Joey to the morgue and my brother Orzo drove me home. I put Joey’s cornicello on the kitchen windowsill.
Joey was innocent. He wasn’t mobbed up. He was just a telegram singer. The only thing I can think is he was fooling around with an another woman and a husband found him out. What else could it be? What a shit, but I loved him. When he sang “Cara Mia” I would melt like hot wax dripping down a candle.
A couple days after Joey burned, I got a condolences card from somebody named Sal that I didn’t know. It said: “Sorry about your husband.” I knew it was the killer trying to needle me. The dumb ass had put a return address on the note. A Good Samaritan took care of him. The police found his head on Rte. 9 on the road shoulder somewhere near Elizabeth. Fu*k him.
It turned out he was a rich ass sorry bastard who collected debts for a living. That doesn’t exactly make me want to cry.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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