Anastrophe (an-as’-tro-phee): Departure from normal word order for the sake of emphasis. Anastrophe is most often a synonym for hyperbaton, but is occasionally referred to as a more specific instance of hyperbaton: the changing of the position of only a single word.
“Flying through time—flying over dawn’s horizon like a fat bird struggling to stay aloft—measuring the moments, the minutes, the seconds, the hours, the days, the years, the weeks, stopping never, rushing into the future, fleeing from the past, painting the illusion of the present on the surface of nothing—no now, only a stream, a river invisible swirling into yesterday bereft of now. Nothing stops, it only goes until your consciousness dies and you are turned into ashes and scattered on water or earth.”
I was having crazy thoughts. I was driving to Elizabeth, NJ from Toronto, Canada. I was bringing my mother’s ashes “home.” She had gown up in Elizabeth in the 1950s. She grew up in the Polish section of the city. Her dad ran a deli that had sawdust on the floor and a giant pickle barrel.
Her urn started rattling as we neared the Delaware Water Gap. At first I thought there was something loose in the back of my SUV.
Mom moved to Canada when I was eight. She worked in a snowshoe factory. She took care of all phases of gut manufacture and the production of snowshoe webbing. She hated New Jersey—hated it enough to leave me, her toddler, behind.
She left me with Aunt Katrina. Aunt Katrina was very protective. I had to take a bath every night and change my underwear every day. I had to tuck a napkin in my collar when I ate dinner. She accompanied me to school until I graduated so I wouldn’t get “killed” by the members of “Hell’s Kielbasa,” an adolescent banana-seat bicycle gang that picked on smaller people in our neighborhood. They never actually killed anybody.
Suddenly I heard a voice say “Katrina is an asshole. New Jersey sucks.” I heard it clearly from the back seat where mom’s urn was. The voice said, “Stop here!” The voice said, “Dump me in the Delaware River! Do it or I’ll blow up you and you your stupid car!” It was my dead mother, so I complied with her wishes. I carried the urn down to the river and dumped it in—the ashes floated away like time passing into the future until it sunk.
When I got home to New Jersey, I filled the urn with ashes from my barbecue grill—a clever ruse. I felt like a good son. After her funeral, we scattered the ashes in the Elizabeth River. My Uncle Chuck said they smelled like hot dogs, but he didn’t push it. That’s the closest I came to being busted. Mom was on her way to the Delaware Bay, ending her voyage in the Atlantic Ocean.
R.I.P. Mom!
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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