Salad fingers

Nailed it. Really.

There was blood. Rivers of it gushed from my middle finger into the sink, spilling over the kitchen bench and flooding the floors, and painting the kitchen a crimson fury.

The sudden pain and then the shock sucked me into the moment so that it was all I knew. The muted sounds of Melanie and Maala asking what happened. If I was okay? I squeezed and choked my finger and tried in vain to pull the digit right off to end this whole ordeal right now.

Curly leaf parsley proved too great a foe once again. In fact, it was the ingredients of the whole event that made it a symphony in utter madness. 

A bunch of garden-picked parsley. 

The new knives. 

A hangover from a long day’s work. 

Wine.

The knife working the herbs.  

Schunk. Schunk. Schunk.

The hot sting of an angry blade slicing clean through nail and the tender flesh beneath.

And then the blood. 

In Ancient times, they’d write about such acts of great torture. They’d chip and scrape and chunk the stone from the walls as they illustrated for generations to come the courage amid the pain. A man grinning like an idiot in the red face of doom. 

But the house shook in my rage despite the courage, and I stormed through the hallways and rooms cursing the Gods for mercy. Maala’s panic filled the air. 

My wife dialed the phone and then I was at the emergency room signing insurance forms and probably my life savings away. They couldn’t stitch it back up because there was nothing to stitch. The skin and meat sliced right off. My quick-thinking wife sandwich-bagged the discarded piece of flesh and stuffed it into my shorts pocket like it was a snack for later. “Just in case they can stitch it back on.”

The nurse calls me honey. And she says everything will be alright but this is going to sting. It does and I wince. Not at the pain but the feeling of liquid on an open wound. 

A few millimeters deeper and further up the finger and the nail would be toast she tells me. But the nail will grow back. They jab my right arm with a tetanus shot and wrap my finger in gauze and bandages and hand me a metal finger protector so I can still work my at-home desk job. 

I’m handed my forms and guided back to the reception where the lady who had me sign tomes of paperwork smiles and looks at me with pity. 

“Make sure they look after you,” she says, gesturing to my friend Omar who drove me here. “And welcome to Texas!”