Beta got invited to go to Italy with a friend’s family she’d been overnighting with, so she had to come home and pick up some fresh clothes and the father brought her home, and the younger daughter of the family was along, and instead of just picking up clothes and leaving again they stuck around and visited and when it became clear they were sticking around we had to serve them something. So I got a bottle of okay white wine from the cellar and we made spritzers and some juice for the kids, but we had no chips or anything like that but then I saw the oranges hanging from their wire orange hanging basket in the corner of the kitchen and remembered that Beta had been hungry for oranges; hesitant to make a huge juicy mess by peeling them, though, and serving them in sections (and everyone else in the family is too lazy to peel their own oranges) I recalled another way oranges were served in my childhood and sawed them into wagon wheel slices with a table knife.

This the children found new and attractive and they really dug into the orange slices, so I kept making more and more. Then, of course, I sawed into the tip of my left middle finger, since I am a right-hander and was holding the oranges with my left hand. Although that part of my left middle finger is largely numb due to a past klutzy injury to several nerves in that hand (always work away from yourself when working with sharp tools) I still immediately knew that something was amiss, because it felt differently than sawing into an orange.

Blood was everywhere. Well not everywhere, but the finger was deeply cut. I left the knife and oranges and went into the bathroom to wash and dress the wound. Everyone else kept talking and drinking and eating oranges as if that was part of slicing oranges. In the bathroom I found that we were out of bandaids so I went up to the upstairs bathroom and all we had there were 101 Dalmatian print bandaids, glow-in-the-dark Casper bandaids and insect-motif bandaids. I chose one of the latter, even though, wrapped around the wound, the print looks less like a cockroach and more like there’s a lot of blood running out the bandaid.

Back in the kitchen, the children had finished the orange slices and were cutting and eating more with the same bloody knife. I thought, lucky I have no STDs as far as I know, although the acid of the orange juice might disinfect the knife and blood fairly well, who knows.

I poured myself more wine and contributed to the conversation by asking questions, mostly, and making humorous remarks, or what pass as such with me. Then they finally left.

Two weird things happened that night as we were in bed. First there was some weird burglar sound in the cellar. Usually that means a cat is locked in somewhere and trying to escape, but we searched the house and found neither burglar, cat nor open window. Then later, at 1.30 in the morning, a picture of Beta fell off the wall. That freaked me out because pictures falling off walls, like clocks stopping and spontaneous combustion, are common occult occurrences in “Weird but True Tales of the Occult” type books. I made Alpha call Beta the next day, she is fine, apparently the extreme flood-related humidity just caused the adhesive holding the frame to the hook to fail.