Tonight I sliced open my little finger whilst trying to open a tin of kidney beans to make some felafel for my boy. My little finger spurted not so little amounts of blood all over my carpet and anything else liable to stain (but none of the washable surfaces, it seemed).

So, testing the absorptive capabilities of a Handee Ultra paper towel, I called my boy to come and get me so that we could go and have it looked at. He left work and ran up the stairs to find me in a little bloody huddle on the floor. We grabbed up my stuff and went to leave.

“Wait!” he said, eyeing off the bookshelves. “You should have something to read.”

“Um.” I continued to bleed all over the place.

He picked up The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. “This?”

“No, I’m not reading that just yet.”

Stephen King’s Duma Key. “This?”

“Read it already.” More blood.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

“That’ll do, although we did just see the film. . .”

(He did also pick up Leonard Mlodinow’s The Drunkard’s Walk, which I got him for Christmas, for good measure. In fact, with my finger all fuzzy and weird, we ended up reading that together for a few hours).