Ellipsis

Ellipsis (el-lip’-sis): Omission of a word or short phrase easily understood in context.

I was tired of everything. I was disgruntled. I complained. My demeanor was abrasive. I was going crazy . . . a loon irritating the hell out of everybody within earshot.

I was getting soft like a bowl of pudding. I knew I wasn’t dying, but something big was happening.

A self-described shaman from Connecticut had put a curse on me. I had told his daughter she looked like a mushroom with eyes—a really stupid comparison that she blew off with laughter. Immediately, I tried to think of a new and better insult. I compared her to a bale of hay, and then to a damaged guardrail, and then to a used tissue. She kept laughing at me, so I dropped my atomic insult bomb: “You look like a piece of shit.” She stopped laughing and hit me with a left hook and ran home crying to her father. Her father was enraged and swore if I came to see her ever again, he would put a curse on me as big as the moon. The daughter invited me over. I was curious. I didn’t believe in curses, so off I went. We sat down in the living room and I told her she looked like a bowling ball with legs. She called her father and told him I was doing it again. He pulled a wand out of his back pocket and pointed it at me and yelled “You’re a piece of shit!”

I laughed it off at the time, but with my emerging symptoms, I’ve got what look like corn kernels embedded in my skin. My mother took me to a dermatologist. She was shocked. She tried pulling the kernels out with tweezers, but it was impossible.

I was turning into a piece of shit accented with corn kernels.

I was awakened the next morning by the strong smell of shit—it was me. I had turned into a piece of shit and I was on the floor under my bed. I could talk and see, but I had no hands, or arms, or legs. I just sat there: a piece of shit. I didn’t know what to do. I yelled for my mother.

When she entered my room it looked empty to her. She started sniffing and said out loud to herself, “Somebody did number two in here.” I yelled, “I’m number 2. I’m under the bed Ma!” She looked under the bed and yelled “You’re a piece of shit!” She went downstairs and came back up with spatula and scraped me up off the floor and carried me carefully down to the kitchen. My father was sitting there drinking a cup of coffee, which he dropped on the floor. “Why the hell are you carrying a piece of shit around?” She answered, “Its our son.” He said, “I know it’s that goddamn shaman, he said he would fu*k our son over if he kept insulting his beloved daughter. What the hell is wrong with you son?” he asked. I said sarcastically, “I’m a piece of shit accented with corn kernels.”

Luckily, the shaman owed my father a favor. My father had saved him from being burned at the stake during the Evangelical Uprising that cost many good people their lives. My father had hidden the shaman in a box labeled “Bibles” and smuggled him out of the dungeon.

We got to his house. My father handed the spatula with shit me on it to the daughter, and he and the shaman embraced and spent some time talking about the good old days. I told the daughter I would never insult her again. I told her I loved her, and as soon as I was a boy again, we would go on a date—to the movies. I actually meant it.

The shaman pulled out his wand and pointed it at me and yelled “No shit Sherlock,” and there I was in my pajamas, no longer a piece of shit. The girl and I hugged. My life was back on track. My father told me if I ever insulted the girl again he would feed me to our pigs.

Everything is going well with the girl. I have made my little brother the target of my neurotic need to insult. Yesterday, I told him he looked like a walking talking cigarette butt. I am working on an insulting blog called “Demeaning is in the Message.”

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

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