The Event of Cutting my Finger Open

Or how juices were literally flowing…

It was a warm Saturday night when I made the wrong decision of using a professional knife to tear a pumpkin apart. It was not a festive, Halloween-ish pumpkin carving session, but a late-dinner kind of thing.

The knife had arrived, by surprise, a few weeks ago, wrapped around an apron and a note from the company I work for, a gift.
I guess I have a weak for sharpness… sharp blades, sharp minds, sharp words.

I had been waiting for an excuse to put the knife to use ever since. The half kabocha staring at me from the back of the fridge, its orange smile seemed to beg for a treat.

I was 3 inches in when the knife made an acute landing on my left index finger.
What a prickly way life has of literally pointing out our mistakes.

When you get injured, there are milliseconds in which you realize what happened, but before the pain kicks in. The milliseconds between you and the broken damp of blood, rushing to the end of the wound like wild salmon, a festival of red tones and textures scaping through a window of hurt.

The first thing I was immediately sure of was my own lack of sharpness.
I wrapped my purple dress around the wet wound because I didn’t want to stain the dishcloth.
Weird priorities guided by the price of laundry detergent.

At first, it felt cinematic. There’s a movie-like quality to blood. The way it dripped on to the beige sink, the way it went down the drain like cheap watercolour.
But once it fades, there’s anxiety and worries. Would I need a stitch?
The idea of heading to a crowded hospital in the middle of a pandemic gave me more stitches than I would ever need.

Across the phone, the hospital recorded answer announced a waiting time of 1h50. And we all know they tend to look at waiting times quite optimistically.

I had bandages and determination at home, and it would have to do.

It took three hours, many gasps and twice as many gauzes to stop the bleeding.
The pain, however, was way more persistent, knocking on the back of my nail as if a keratin door were about to open.

I went back into the kitchen, the kabocha now sad, the mouth of someone left unfinished, wrinkling from the heat and the tiredness. The seeds hanging from the orange strands, like plaster bagworms, slowly eating their way up and in.

From the back of my mind I could hear an echo:

“My thumb instead of an onion”, Sylvia Plath would majestically write, transmuting an indistinct, forgettable experience into a poem.
Maybe I should be writing, but all I could think of was how painful and annoying it would be to take a shower.
Later I rejoiced on the fact that I could play a silly game on my phone without my index finger.

Oh, the thrill of useless victories.

© 2020, Giulia de Gregorio Listo. All Rights Reserved

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