THE NAIL, THE SETTER, AND THE STAIRCASE: CONCLUSION


Previously on The RyduffalO Pinyon:

"You know, I bet we could fix this old treehouse up better than new."

"Ahhhhhhhhh! Help me Julie, there's a nail in my foot!"

"Let's play a new game, I know, we'll run around the neighborhood looking for dogs to jump over!"

"Ahhhhhhhhh! Help me Julie, there a giant piece of glass in my hand!"

....

In the interest of being historically accurate, let me point out that the shard of glass in question was, in fact, giant. Some of you might assume that an ordinary sized piece of glass stuck into the left hand of an 11 year old boy might seem large to him, but actually be relatively small.

You'd be wrong. It was fucking huge, and damn you for assuming.

However, just to be clear, it was about 5 inches long and 3 inches across at it's widest point. The widest point didn't really concern me however, it was the pointiest point that was currently on my mind.

And in my hand.

As far as it would go.

And also on my mind, apart from the blood and pain of this traumatic injury, was the fact that no matter how much my hand hurt, there was still a dog to be dealt with.

The Setter.

It was snarling at me as if to say,

"Ha ha you fool, you fell right into my trap! I saw you degrading the other dogs around here and I put that glass there for you to fall on. Now you're mine!"

So I did what any real man would do in that situation, I screamed for my little sisters to help me.

They came running, but it was too late.
The Setter grew tired of taunting me, and attacked.

And what happened next is something that I won't ever forget or forgive myself for.

In a desperate attempt at self defense I kicked out with all of my might to keep the dog from biting me, and it worked.

My foot landed squarely in the throat of this hellacious beast named Lucy, and she fell back with a strange muffled yelp, coughed a few times, and died.

I killed her. I went into her yard, and I killed the Irish Setter that belonged to my neighbors down the street. And I was bleeding pretty badly now.

Not knowing that Death had just come for Lucy in the shape of my Converse, and thinking she was just stunned or something, I turned my attention back to my hand and the protruding foreign object I had unwittingly collected.

I pulled the glass out, and that was apparently the cue for the real bloodflow to start.

Within seconds, my hand wore a bright red glove that dripped and I began to seriously consider panicking. My sisters arrived at that moment and immediately got into a fight concerning what they should do to help me. It wasn't their fault though, they were kids and this was adult business.

But there were no adults around. It was the middle of the day and the only things populating our neighborhood were kids and dogs, and the dogs weren't in much of a mood to help us out right now. You understand.

So we went from house to house knocking on doors in the vain hope that maybe someone would answer one of them and fix my hand. This plan hadn't been thought through too well, and I was beginning to feel a bit faint. I'm unsure if it was loss of blood that made me feel this way, or the terror that comes with watching your hand spew red liquid everywhere you walk, leaving a blood trail going from house to house that would remain on the sidewalk until the next rains came.

Yes, I used the sidewalk. I was a dumb ass.

Finally, we knocked on the right door.
It opened and a kindly lady stood there, she looked down at my sisters and I and instantly sprang into action. She rushed me to the sink and went to work on my hand. She seemed to know exactly what to do, I mentioned this to her and she told me why.

She was a nurse.

That was the luckiest thing that's ever happened to me, and it kept my faith in God rock-solid for the next five years.

A few days passed, and my neighbors buried their dog Lucy who had died mysteriously in their front yard while they were at work. My sisters, to their credit, never told anyone about the murder and for that I thank them. Nice work, ladies.

After the whole excitement of my near-death experience faded, later that day, we went to work on a new idea. One that was fun, but didn't involve nails, or glass, or dogs.

We sat in the living room and brainstormed for a while with no little to no results, when my eyes came to rest on the staircase.

I thought to myself, that's a pretty steep staircase, I bet you could get up some speed going down that sucker, if there were only something to ride.
And then it occurred to me that if we took the mattress off of Claire's bed, it might prove to be just the vehicle we needed.

So we went and got the mattress.

Now it was time to try it out, and also the time for my big brother authority to kick in. We needed a guinea pig, and since I was the brains of the operation, I was ineligible. So I chose Julie, because she was the middle child and no one really loves them anyway.

She climbed aboard the vessel and peered down the steep flight of stairs to the bottom where we had collected all the pillows and couch cushions in the house and formed a rudimentary landing pad. I noticed her getting scared, and just to take her mind off of things for a moment, I said

"Don't worry Julie, you don't have to go if you don't want to."

And then I pushed her.

She and the mattress left the launching pad at the same time, but regrettably, she arrived at the landing zone much earlier than her chariot, after bouncing down the last half of the stairs. I made sure to laugh very loudly, so that Julie would think that all of this was funny, and not painful. It worked.

We discovered that you had to hold on to the front of the mattress while going down to avoid any unfortunate mishaps, and once that policy went into effect, it was smooth sailing.

We had finally found the perfect form of entertainment, with just the right amount of danger to keep us interested until cartoons came on. We spent the rest of that summer riding our staircase to glory, and as for me,

I haven't been impaled by anything since.



THE END