By Clayton Margeson
Police found a metaphor
beaten to death on a walkway
near Phillips Hall
Tuesday morning. It had
sustained multiple wounds
from several unidentified blunt objects,
possibly baseball bats or uninteresting
statements.
Once a crimson red rose covered with thorns, this metaphor was used to represent things like love, death, and Sweden.
“Like in my poem, love is a rose, sexual, but dangerous,” said Claude Venders, poetry student and friend of the metaphor.
Venders wept openly at the scene of the crime, using his hand to trace the chalk outline where the metaphor had finally died. “I can’t believe someone would do this. Sure, it wasn’t young, but it was still alive. Damn it, when will this senseless slaughter of literary devices finally end?”
Police have arrested Todd Beckland, who is suspected of inadvertently murdering the metaphor while breaking up with his long-time girlfriend Kelly Burns.
“He did say ‘rose’ a lot,” Burns said. “He kept saying that he was a rose, and I was a rose, and our thorns were hurting, or some bullshit like that.” Beckland is charged with unintentional, unimaginative wordslaughter and will face a maximum sentence of one semester of a remedial writing class and one of introductory poetry to be served sequentially.
Junior philosophy major Aaron Garland witnessed the attack. He told reporters, “I was walking through my dorm when I heard the word ‘rose’ being repeated seven or eight times. And that made me think: Is there really such a thing as a rose? Or merely what we perceive as being a ‘rose’? Can anything actually exist independently of our perception of it, and, if so, is there a way to achieve knowledge of its essence or are we inescapably bound within the confines of our perception? Perhaps not, and perhaps what we perceive as physical objects are merely ethereal mental approximations that can, occasionally, double as metaphors. But not so anymore for ‘rose.’ Whether a metaphor or merely a signifier, that shit is dead.”
Instances of crimes such as this have increased over the last few years, especially with the rise of amateur writers in Chapel Hill. Police report that just last week they discovered a rainbow simile brutalized in a hate crime by NCSU students. Two months ago, an ironic twist and a pun died in what has been determined to be a murder-suicide pact. Forensic linguists predict that within the next five months, foreshadowing will be all but extinct.
In memory of the metaphor, students under the leadership of Venders’ prepared to organize a Pit Vigil, but ostensibly fearing to be beaten to death itself, the Pit Vigil is currently in hiding.