Alliteration (al-lit’-er-a’-tion): Repetition of the same letter or sound within nearby words. Most often, repeated initial consonants. Taken to an extreme alliteration becomes the stylistic vice of paroemion where nearly every word in a sentence begins with the same consonant.
Crows cawing in the middle of the night. They were crowing away like they were having a convocation in the field across the street. I didn’t usually get too irritated by things like this, but my girlfriend had gotten up and was getting dressed. She couldn’t stand the noise and was going to go home. She wanted me to call her an Uber.
I resisted and told her all would be well. I took my double-barrel shotgun down off the gun rack and grabbed a box of shells—number six birdshot that would send the noisy bastards to their graves. I had no idea how many were out there, but I was sure when I fired the first shot they’d all fly away.
I got outside and saw that there were hundreds of them. They had shredded the scarecrow in the field and were all turned facing me. I remembered the movie “The Birds” and laughed to myself. I was getting ready to fire my first round and one of them flew past me and tore a button off my shirt. All the crows cawed like he had won a victory over me.
I yelled “Bullshit” and raised my shotgun to my shoulder, ready to kill a crow, and chase the rest away—back to Wisconsin or somewhere. Then, a crow swooped down and pecked me on the forehead. It bled. It hurt. I tried to get a shot off at the crow who had pecked me. I missed it. The entire flock started circling over my head. Most of them were clutching corncobs with their feet.
I knew what was coming! I ran across the street to take shelter in my house. My girlfriend was on the porch yelling “Where’s my Uber?” A crow soared in and let its corncob go. It hit her hard in the face and gave her a bloody nose. She was crying and cursing me. Just then, the crows swooped toward the porch like a shining thundercloud. We barely made it inside. I had dropped my shogun on the lawn, so we had nothing to fend off the crows with.
They started pecking on the front door and were beginning to penetrate the wood. My girlfriend and I huddled together on the living room couch. Our phones didn’t work. We were sure we were going to die. We talked about whether we would go to hell together or separately.
Then, suddenly it was dead silent. The crows had stopped cawing! We were going to live! I opened the front door and there were crows all over the porch. That was it. We were going to die after all. Mauled by crows.
The crows took off and circled over my home shitting on it until all of them had a chance to go. My house was coated with an inch-thick coating of crow-do. I do not know why they did it: they annoyed me until I took action, then they shit on me and my girlfriend and home. I know I’m not the only one that crows have shit on. It has happened to the White House in Washington, DC. I have a theory.
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
The Daily Trope is available in an early edition 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 