“The bricks may pack a cell until there’s almost nothing left of the cell but bricks”

- Richard Preston, Crisis in the Hot Zone

Since Preston is trying to elicit fear within the reader, his antimetabole here emphasizes the dominating force of these “bricks.” The sentence begins with bricks invading and ends with the bricks, illustrating total destruction of the cell, and therefore, life. The brevity of this sentence also contributes to the portrayal of the bricks as unstoppable as the conquering of the cell was short enough to describe this succinctly.

“I’m sure he thought I was afraid of what I’d get from him, when really I was afraid of what he’d get

from me.”

-Leslie Jamison, ‘Since I Became Symptomatic’

The antimetabole of this quote completely flips the intention of the action previously described, presenting an unexpected twist, reflecting both the irony of the man not knowing, and the sudden appearance of the entire pandemic as a whole. Both parts of this sentence also work to portray how the pandemic has unintentionally turned people wary of one another, distancing them emotionally as well as physically.

ANTIMETABOLE

//Definition: A necromancer who uses their powers to reverse the flow of time and restore life. Rather than raising the dead for ill intent, Antimetabole cherishes life and sees their abilities as a gift to aid people in returning to a former state. In the sea, they tend to focus on reviving drowned sailors to allow them to experience another beginning.

// NECROMANCER

//In a fight, they can take human form and focus on supporting their fallen allies to grant them another chance to start over. every site.

“Endings are bittersweet, and who’s to say they should ever happen at all…”

REFLECTION

I had decided fairly early on that Antimetabole would be a necromancer for the "reversal" aspect of the term. However, I did not draw them until later on in this series of characters, and somewhere between their conception and their design, I saw drawings of mermaids and got reminded of their existence and got filled with the urge to draw one. Therefore, Antimetabole ended up as a necromancer merperson, but I'm glad about this change because this made me take this character in a direction I hadn't anticipated.

Initially when I'd decided on them being a necromancer, I was fairly committed to the idea of a typical necromancer aligned more with dark than light, however, as I considered what role a mer-necromancer may play, I settled on drowned sailors. Then I began to reflect on the term as a whole and decided to play into the part that a return to the beginning can be due to an appreciation of this beginning, and within this context, life. Therefore, Antimetabole became a good-hearted necromancer rather than a stereotypically evil one.