Kategoria (ka-te-go’-ri-a): Opening the secret wickedness of one’s adversary before his [or her] face.
The battery was dead on my calculator. I should’ve bought the solar powered one that I saw for sale on E-Bay.
I opened the battery door on the back of the calculator. No wonder it wasn’t working. SOMEBODY had removed the battery and left a note on a little strip of paper that looked like it came from a fortune cookie!
The note said: “There’s another note in your Bose noise-cancelling headphones.”
I dropped the calculator. I ran upstairs and popped open the battery flap on my headphones. There was a rolled-up piece of paper where the battery should’ve been. I couldn’t get it out, so I got my little tweezers from the butt of my Swiss Army Knife, pinched the paper, and out came the note.
The note said: “The guy across the street is feeding your cat.”
Damn! No wonder Sydney was starting to look like a black and white watermelon with four legs and a tail. Not only that, he had stopped rubbing his head on my ankles. He had stopped purring. He had stopped scratching the inside of his cardboard box. He had stopped following me around the yard. In short, he had stopped being MY cat! He had been ‘stolen’ by the guy across the street.
I was furious. I put on my wooden shoes, picked up my DeWit Junior Double Handhoe, and clomped out of the garage to confront the guy across the street. I was going to put a furrow down the middle of his forehead!
Just as I got to the end of my driveway, he came out on his front porch. He was shirtless and I could see the tattoos plastered all over his upper torso. He was wearing filthy sweatpants and bright orange CROCS. He was waving a Brooklyn Smasher over his head with his right hand and shaking a nearly empty bag of kitty treats with his left hand. The kitty treats made a rattling sound.
“It isn’t a secret any more!” I yelled. “You’ve been feeding MY Sydney! You’ve made him into a kitty treat junkie. Now . . .”
Before I could finish my sentence Sydney came waddling past me. I could hear him wheezing. His tail was sticking straight up in the air. Furry belly sweeping the asphalt, my poor junkie cat waddled out into the street and laid down to catch his breath.
He lay there panting for about a second when I heard (and mostly smelled) the liquid manure sprayer truck downshift. There it was, heading down the hill to douse a cornfield–headed right at Sydney!
Holding my nose I ran toward Sydney, scooped him off the pavement with my free hand, and threw him out of the way. I turned to face the stinking tanker. I closed my eyes. I was ready to die!
I woke up to the distant rumble and lingering stink of the truck. I was alive! I was laying on my back. One of my wooden shoes was missing. I tried to sit up, but my shirt was stuck to the poop on the pavement. I was too weak t0 break the bond.
Uh oh! My neighbor was coming toward me–Brooklyn Smasher in one hand and Sydney tucked under his arm. I struggled to stand, but I just couldn’t break free. In my weakened state, the poop held me to the road like Gorilla Glue.
Sydney was flailing, trying to free himself from my neighbor! Claws extended and yowling, he tore at the guy across the street. He tore at his hand, his wrist and his forearm. He drew blood!
In a rage, the guy across the street dropped Syndey in his driveway. Swinging his Brooklyn Smasher at the panting pile of fur running full waddle down the driveway he yelled “You ungrateful blob! I’m going crush your greedy skull and then I’m going to club your butt-face owner.”
I struggled and tore my shirt off. I was on my feet! I lunged for the guy across the street. I fell. I twisted my ankle. That was it for me.
The “Smasher” was swinging toward Sydney’s helpless little head. In wide-eyed terror, I screamed “Sydney, get out of the way!”
The wind began to howl. Two riders were approaching. They pulled up and shut shut off their engines. The wind died down and I heard Sydney growl. Distracted, the guy across the street had turned turned to look. Sydney was going to escape!
The two men on Harleyback were frackers! Frackers–I had seen them before. They were known throughout upstate New York as the “Two Riders of the Frack-o-lypse.” Day and night they patrolled the rural roads of upstate New York looking for ponds and freshets to suck dry. The water was smuggled south to Pennsylvania in tanker trucks.
A New York State Trooper had captured one of the clandestine tankers two days ago. The tanker was cynically disguised as a yellow school bus. With tinted windows and a pink marching rabbit drummer wearing sunglasses emblazoned on its sides and rear emergency door, it appeared to be one of the small fleet of experimental battery-powered UV-blocking school buses under development by 3M™ and Energizer™ batteries.
The diligent Trooper was riding the rural roads with his windows down. He pulled up behind the bunny emblazoned ‘school bus’ and something just didn’t smell right. He muttered to himself, “Diesel” and flipped on the cruiser’s siren.
The bogus bus sped up–40 miles per hour, 50 miles per hour, 60 miles per hour. The Trooper was in hot pursuit and was about to radio for back-up when the bus’s rear emergency door flew open and a tsunami of stolen H2O spilled out cracking the cruiser’s windshield and sweeping the emergency lights off its roof. Filled with water, the cruiser’s siren began making loud gargling noises–it sounded like a drowning turkey!
Suddenly, the bogus bus went out of control, flipped over twice and came to rest in a spreading puddle of mud.
Alerted by the gargling siren, a flock of 20-25 turkeys feeding in the field adjacent to the road raised their tiny heads in unison. Hackles up, they flocked up and began running and half-flying toward what sounded like a fellow meleagris gallopavo in deep distress–possibly dying.
Meanwhile, the drenched trooper’s out-of-control cruiser skidded sideways and safely came to rest on the road shoulder. The Trooper looked up and saw the crazed turkeys storming toward him. He heard a loud ka-blam from the other side of the road. Feathers flew, 6 turkeys went down and the rest of the flock scattered and fled. The Trooper heard a deep voice ask in Danish, “Hvordan går det?” He looked up and saw a red-bearded giant broad-shouldered man clad in cammo sheepskins smiling and reloading his shotgun.
The Trooper had seen the Norseman somewhere before. Without thinking, he grabbed his laptop and began trying to log into the USA.gov most wanted criminals website. The Norseman reached in the window, grabbed the laptop, threw it into the air, and blasted it to pieces with his shotgun. He smiled and laughed and and asked again, “Hvordan går det?“
The Trooper had trained for this. He reached for his gun. The tearing sound of Velcro™ . . .
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Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu). Bracketed text added by Gorgias.
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