Epenthesis (e-pen’-thes-is): The addition of a letter, sound, or syllable to the middle of a word. A kind of metaplasm. Note: Epenthesis is sometimes employed in order to accommodate meter in verse; sometimes, to facilitate easier articulation of a word’s sound. It can, of course, be accidental, and a vice of speech.
“I was Wallyking to the malallarola.” I talked inside my head like I was a hoochy-coo baby-kins. It made me feel loved and protected, something I never had. My mother was cruel. My father was cruel. My brother was cruel. My sister was cruel. They each specialized in a different kind of cruelty.
My mother’s cruelty was simplistic. She would tie my shoelaces together and make me walk to school. It was a mile to school and I would always fall down two or three times and skin my knees.
My father would make me mow the lawn barefoot. He would sprinkle the lawn with thumbtacks and laughed whenever I stepped on one and yelled “Ouch.” By the time I was done mowing the lawn, I’d have five or six thumbtacks stuck in my feet.
My brother was horrible. He would put snakes in my school backpack. When I opened it at school, I would scream in terror and my teacher would beat the snakes to death with a ruler. Inevitably, some of them would escape and terrorize the entire school. I was always blamed for the snakes and was finally expelled from school, never getting past the eighth grade and going to work at the local car wash—Soap & Steel—as the wet t-shirt girl. Most of the cars were driven by fat sweaty men who would stare at me through their fogged-up windows, lick their lips and take their hands off their steering wheels. I knew what they were doing and I was disgusted. But, I needed the job to cover the rent Dad started charging me when I was kicked out of school.
Then, there was my sister.
What she did to me was pretty straightforward. She told me that the leg hair removal crème “Nair” was a great scalp treatment and would work wonders on my dull scraggly hair. I rubbed the whole jar into my hair. It burned, and the next morning all my hair had fallen out. My mother wouldn’t let me get a wig because I would look like a “two-bit whore.” She wouldn’t let me wear a knit watch cap because I wasn’t a sailor. So, I went to school bald. People kept rubbing my head and asking if it was magic. They said, “Hey cue ball,” “Let’s bowl a few frames with your head,” “Will it pop if I stick a pin in it?” It went on like this until my hair grew back. After the hair incident, everybody called me “Orby” and pretended they were spinning a basketball on their finger when they saw me.
“Baddy boo boo doo doo” I said in my head as I loaded my father’s Glock. I was going to blow away my whole family. They had made my life miserable. They deserved to die. First, I sent my mother to hell where she belongs. I reloaded and went looking for Dad. He was reading his newspaper oblivious to the gunfire in the kitchen. I emptied the Glock through the newspaper and he was gone.
My brother came home from work. I aimed the Glock at his crotch and told him to put the back pack full of snakes I had prepared over his head. He sniveled, and whined and squirmed around crying. I got tired of it and shot him straight through heart. He flopped on the floor, dead. In my head I said, “Oohny noohny bronother is deady weddy.”
Then my sister came through the door. I pointed the Glock at her head, duct taped her to a chair, rubbed Nair in her eyes and shot her in the top of her head until it turned to mush.
I was arrested, tried, and convicted of four murders. Given the cruelty I had endured, I was sentenced to five years. But, I was also diagnosed as insane. I am indefinitely remanded to the “Nice Home for the Criminally Insane.” It is nice here. Murdering my family felt good.
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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