Assonance (ass’-o-nance): Repetition of similar vowel sounds, preceded and followed by different consonants, in the stressed syllables of adjacent words
I shot my snot across the room, sticking to my mother’s tomb it swung in the candlelight, I didn’t handle it well. Visiting my mother’s tomb has become a funny thing. The family stands there feeling no remorse for letting her die in pain, of neglect in her room, alone. In fact, we often break out in laughter.
This is a lesson for those who would be hated.
Mother was a horror. All three of us children were beaten every day with a length of lead pipe, three hard whacks per day. One on the butt and two on the back of the legs. She fed us four slices of baloney, with mustard once a week—on Sundays. In addition, we would have a mug of hot lemon water. I considered this my dessert.
For clothing, she knitted us “sheaths” out of wool. We were all boys—the three of us. The wool sheaths were very embarrassing to wear. They looked like dresses. The wool was undyed, so we looked like sheep. Mother would “herd” us around the house barking like a sheep dog and making us “bleat” by poking us with her crook and snagging us around the neck. Then, before bed, we had to line up in front of our bedroom door and recite “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
We had no idea where mother’s obsession with sheep came from. My brother Teddy, who was the littlest, loved being a sheep. He loved saying “What’s so baaad about this?” Well, it was pretty bad. At school we were mercilessly teased. The principal did nothing. He loved my mother, and rightfully so: she was beautiful. Then it happened. We found a copy of “The Three Little Pigs” by accident in a cardboard box in the garage. Although the story didn’t perfectly fit our predicament, it was close enough. The biggest one of us, Carl, would pound on the door in the middle the night and yell “I am the big bad wolf and I’m going knock the door down and eat you.” We hadn’t thought beyond that, but we did it. When Carl yelled, Mother came running out of her room yelling, “Eat the three little sheep!” She slipped and fell down the stairs. She was unconscious. With much effort, we dragged he back to her room and tied her to her bed. That’s where she died one year later, it was disgusting, but necessary. The coroner determined that she died from an eating disorder. We were free!
Before we left the tomb, we recited “Mary Had a Little” and and each threw a rock at mother’s crypt.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)
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