Acoloutha: The substitution of reciprocal words; that is, replacing one word with another whose meaning is close enough to the former that the former could, in its turn, be a substitute for the latter. This term is best understood in relationship to its opposite, anacolutha.
My cat was mewing, talking softly to his catnip toy. Then he yowled and batted it across the floor. I yowled too and he looked me like I was nuts—crazy as the mouse that would pop out of the hole in the baseboard and taunt him with his whiny chatter. You never knew when he was going to stick out his head and start the cat and mouse games. I think the two of them actually enjoyed it. Melody could’ve caught the mouse hundreds of times, but he didn’t. He would fake-chase the little mouse.
But, then the rat moved in. Sleek and shiny with a low-profile slink, seemingly floating across the floor, silent, devious.
He took over the mouse’s little hole in the baseboard, gnawing it out so he could comfortably fit through. He was unlikeable. He wouldn’t play and we could hear the little mouse trapped behind the baseboard. The rat was holding him prisoner. We could hear him thrashing around and squealing. I got a flashlight and looked into the hole when the rat was out rummaging through trash cans. I could barely see the little mouse in the back shadows of what had become the rat’s nest.
Somehow the rat had found a piece of an adhesive rodent trap and stuck the little mouse to it. He was being tortured by the rat! I feared he would wriggle and whine until he died of starvation. Goddamn rat.
We got some rat-sized adhesive traps and put them in the kitchen along with a half-eaten raspberry jelly donut. That night, I was asleep when I was awakened by a sort of tickling feeling on my forehead. I brushed my forehead and saw blood of the back of my hand as the rat scampered off the end of my bed. The bastard had bitten me. I had to go to urgent care and get antibiotics. I got back from urgent care and went back to bed.
The next morning I made my way into the kitchen and there was the fu*king rat stuck to one of the traps. Melody was sitting there looking at him. I swear he had a cat smile on his cat face. He purred.
All I wanted to do was kill the rat. I stabbed him at least ten times with a steak knife from the kitchen drawer, and then crushed his head with the hammer my father had given me last Christmas. Then, I put his body in a paper bag and took him outside, doused him with gasoline, and burned him to a crisp. Then, I went back inside and I pried off the baseboard behind which the little mouse lived, and rescued the little mouse, and fed him some bits of New York State aged cheddar. He gobbled it up. Then, I used nail polish remover to free him from the trap. I nailed the baseboard back on and he scampered through the hole.
I called an exterminator and told him to get rid of every rat he could find, but to leave the little mouse alone.
Everything is back to normal now. Incidentally, Melody has overcome his catnip addiction and is now a drug-free cat. I attribute this to some extent to his friendship with the little mouse and the quality time they spend together.
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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