gobbets

I was standing at the kitchen counter the other day making coffee when my bare feet picked up a stray shard of glass from one of the many water glasses Scooter has broken in the past weeks. My Darling B and I have a habit of leaving our water glasses unattended, and Scooter has the uncanny, possibly supernatural ability of knowing when we have left them unguarded, leaping up onto whatever table or shelf they’re on to lap up some water from them, and then often knocking them over when one of us returns to find him drinking from our glass, whooping “WHAT THE HELL, SCOOTER?” loudly, thus frightening him into scampering away, upsetting the glass. Most of our water glasses are durable enough to survive getting knocked over onto its side, but not falling from a table to the floor. The ones that fall farthest tend to explode into the tiniest of pieces which get scattered to the farthest corners of the room. No matter how carefully we sweep up after a catastrophe like that, there’s always going to be a few stray, toe-jabbing chunks lurking where you least expect to find them.

I’m not sure how a shard of glass made it all the way to the kitchen. Scooter hasn’t broken a glass in there recently, but maybe it was hanging out there since the last time months ago. However it got there, it wasn’t very big and we’ve gotten used to stepping on glass, so when it pierced my foot I almost unconsciously picked it out, tossed it in the waste basket and went on with brewing coffee. I had only just poured the first soak and was waiting for it to drain while I made myself a cup of tea. While the tea was steeping I filled the coffee cone all the way to the top, then flipped half-asleep through the news while I waited to collect the first run of coffee. The dripping from the cone slowed so I filled it up for the second and final time, fished the tea bag out of my cup and turned to throw it away, and that’s when I noticed the floor was awash in gobbets of blood! The glass must have poked just the right spot to open a vein. It looked like I’d been slaughtering chickens in there! My tea had to wait while I staunched the bleeding from my wound, wiped the blood off my feet, and mopped up the blood from the floor, easier said than done as a lot of it was already congealing.