Summer with the Slug Rats
Wounded
I trudged up to the bathroom to clean the scrape, our dog at my heels.
When I was a kid, moms cleaned cuts with something whose commercial slogan should have been “Liquid Hellfire, the napalm of antiseptics.” She’d tell me, “Oh, that doesn’t hurt.” It made me question her grasp on reality.
I used soap and water, which stung a little. With the dried blood and dirt cleared away, I saw the wound was a scrape across my shin bone that ended in a gouge on my calf. The gouge bled a little until I dabbed it with toilet paper.
They had been right. If I had waited, the wound was deep enough to get infected. I thought about other times I’d been wounded, often by my own poor choices.
“Here’s the lesson,” I said to the dog. “Stop the bleeding first, clean out the wound despite the pain, allow time to heal, accept the scar.”
The dog wagged her tail in agreement. She got that I was talking about more than my little scrape.
Today I will care for my wounds.
Summer with the Slug Rats ? 2020 by Ken Montrose
Summer with the Slug Rats is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters and anyone you might know is purely coincidental.
Other works by Ken Montrose are available at: www.greenbriartraining.com https://www.pinterest.com/kenmontrose/mt-rose/