Antistasis

Antistasis (an-ti’-sta-sis): The repetition of a word in a contrary sense. Often, simply synonymous with antanaclasis.

I fell on the floor for the third time. It was time for another drink. I pulled myself up and stumbled to the bar with my shot-glass in my hand, it had my name painted on it and it was kept behind the bar for me, where I left it every night.

I met some really nice people on the barroom floor—a catholic priest, a hardware salesman, a millionaire from another town. We would talk in slurred speech about salvation, screwdrivers, and fine art. The millionaire thought art was the end of human existence, judging by some it, I concluded it was the end of human existence too, but not like he meant it!

I was a discount surgeon working at Costco, so I would add cutting and stitching to the conversation.

My surgical abilities were beginning to fail given my nightly regime of excessive drinking. I had not made any big mistakes yet, but it was just a matter of time. Time was not on my side.

I lived in a tiny apartment with no room—but I would tell myself that at least it was my room. When I woke up in the morning I had to struggle to remember where I was—I felt like a truck ran over my head and had crushed it like a melon. The juice on the floor was urine, and I was due at the operating room at eleven. That was three hours away. I was still drunk, and was grateful for the bar’s liberality, letting me meet with my friends on the floor. But I guess I took too much advantage of it.

I thought about hiring a stand-in, but Costco did not allow that. Luckily the surgery I was performing was extremely minor. A woman had a boil on the back of her neck, My job was to lance it—basically, poke a hole in it with a needle. Aside from the boil squirting in the attending nurse’s eye, everything went well.

I went home, showered and changed my clothes, and was back on the barroom floor by around 9:15, slurring words and conversing with my buddies. The hardware salesman wanted to talk about chicken wire. We all agreed that was a potentially interesting topic. We started talking about ways of unrolling chicken wire and flattening it out.

I got a call from the Costco Medical Center. They told me the woman I had lanced earlier in the day was dead. I told them I figured something like this would happen sooner or later due to my drinking problem.

Evidently, I had shoved the lance in way too far and punctured an artery in her shoulder. She died of internal bleeding, not even knowing she was bleeding.

I was convicted of criminal negligence and sentenced to two years in prison. I ran into my hardware salesman friend the other day. It was great running into my old friend. He’s serving a life sentence for killing his wife with a nail gun.

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

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