Acervatio (ak-er-va’-ti-o): Latin term Quintilian employs for both asyndeton (acervatio dissoluta: a loose heap) and polysyndeton (acervatio iuncta:a conjoined heap).
My truck spun around in circles—slipping and sliding and screeching and jumping, and flipping over. I was hanging from my seat belt freezing my ass off when there was a knocking on my window. I couldn’t see anything, but I could hear the knocking. Then I saw it. It was a big black crow pecking on my window. It flew away.
Luckily I had a “survival knife” I had bought on the internet a couple of weeks ago. I struggled for a half-hour to get it out of my pocket. It had an emergency seatbelt cutting blade. The blade had a “v” notch that you put around the belt and pulled. That’s what I did. My knife sliced right through the belt and I fell, slamming hard into the truck’s ceiling, breaking the overhead light and embedding pieces of the lens in my head, and hurting my neck too. I was bleeding and in severe pain.
I reached down to the door handle to get the hell out of the truck. I could smell gasoline and was fearful I would be going up in flames soon. The driver’s side door wouldn’t open, neither would the passenger side. My knife had a glass-breaking tool. I banged it on the window and nothing happened. I kicked the window and nothing happened. That’s when the crow showed up again. He pecked the window hard, just once, and it shattered. I swear I could hear him say “Loser, loser, loser” as he flew away.
I wrote it all off to panic hallucinations—that my glass breaking knife blade had somehow done the job and then I passed out or something.
I had an illegal handgun in my glove compartment. When the cops came they searched my truck before they would permit it to be towed away. I saw one of them reach in the glove compartment. He said, “What’s this?” I was screwed. He held up a crow’s feather.
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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