Protrope (pro-tro’-pe): A call to action, often by using threats or promises.
“Move it! Get out of bed! Do you want me to hose you down again? Your mattress is still wet from the last time you lazy piece of shit. Move it!“
I was so damn tired I was ready to endure another hosing. I had been forced to stay up until 3.00 am completing my mentor’s matchstick lighthouse—it was four feet tall and he had been working on it for 3 years, making me work on it for my “growth and development as a human organism.” The evil Junior mentor turned on the hose and I jumped out of bed—it was 6.30 am and my eyes hurt from glue fumes and my fingers were stiff from working with the matchsticks. My matchstick worker buddy Leonardo had disappeared. There was a small stain on the floor under his workstation that looked like blood.
I didn’t know what to do. I had been sent to Grimdale Orphanage when my parents died in a motorboat crash. My father tried to cut off a cargo container ship and was run over. The search for my parents was fruitless. They were lost at sea, presumably eaten by sharks. I’m sure my little brother had something to do with what happened. He made sure we didn’t go out that day and that we were taken care of by our Dutch nanny Abbe Bakker who wore wooden shoes and was crazy. So, we spent the day jumping up and down on pieces of tin foil “to feed energy to the earth.”
Anyway, my brother was immediately adopted. He would sit on the couch with his hands held like paws, panting with his tongue hanging out. A family who ran a dog kennel fell in love with him and off he went. I on the other hand, wasn’t so lucky. I had “Nasal River Syndrome.” My nose would not stop running. I carried Kleenex in my lunchbox instead of lunch, so I would have a constant supply of tissues for my constantly running nose. People would come to Grimdale to adopt an orphan and they’d see my wet shirtfront and lunchbox full of tissues and say “Next.” I had lived in the orphanage for 10 years and was turning 17 next month. Maybe my mentor could help me. I begged Mr. Twozlok to help me somehow. He told me it was my fate to leak all over my shirtfront and use 100s of tissues in a day.
So I went again to the weekly “Find a Family” event, absolutely certain that I’d be rejected by everybody. Then, an incredibly wealthy looking man waved excitedly at me. He had a jewel encrusted sponge around his neck and a 24kt. gold lunchbox with tissues hanging out. He said, “Clearly, you have what I have. Given the rarity of our malady, there is an excellent chance you are my son, plus you have one green eye and one blue eye, like me.” I started sobbing. I discovered that when I sobbed, my nose would stop running.
We went home to his mansion and he introduced me to my new mother. She hung a sponge pendant around my neck and welcomed me with a big hug. I was ecstatic, but I still had unfinished business—learning how to sob on demand and solving the disappearance of my friend Leonardo.
POSTSCRIPT
Leonardo’s remains were found dismembered and stuffed into Mr. Twozlok’s Lighthouse. It was discovered that the lighthouse was the symbolic representation of a central feature of the cult that Twozlok belonged to. He was an elder and was charged with burning a lighthouse with a dead young male stuffed in it. The ritual appeased their god’s need to make people do bad and disgusting things every 50 years as signs of their faith.
Sobbing on demand was out of reach until the boy chopped up an onion to go with some home fries he was helping his mother prepare. They made his eyes tear up, and if he made a grunting sound, it approximated sobbing. From that time on, he carried a small gold case filled with fresh onion slices that he would dice the lid with the pearl-handled pen knife his father had given him engraved: “Let your tears roll down like nature’s saving rain,” Although he smelled like his mother’s nearly magical meatloaf, he knew the onions were his salvation. This was driven home when he met and married a girl named “Matahari” (an onion variety) whose family owns a 200-acre onion farm in the Salinas Valley near Monterey. He manages the farm and phones his parents every Sunday to let them know how he and Matahari are doing. He is happy.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)
The Daily Trope is available 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 