If I’d had the fortitude in the moment, there are plenty of people I’d like to have cursed, namely myself for daring to think going outside was ever, ever a good idea, but also whichever redneck, yahoo motherfucker decided to throw a motherfucking broken bottle of shitty beer into a fucking lake. I can imagine plenty of terrible things a person can do, like getting a tattoo of another person’s face or drinking even a single swig of milk a second after the expiration date, but throwing a shard of jagged glass into the shallow part of a lake is among the worst of them, and not just because I happened to step on it, even though that maybe had something to do with it. Seriously, fuck you, sir or madam. I hope one day you step on something even worse, like a really hot beach or one of those extra-long Legos.

I was surprisingly calm in the moment, perhaps because the water was washing away the blood, and I limped the fifty yards back up to the house, where my aunt was sitting on the deck drinking her morning coffee.

“Uhh, Auntie Bonnie,” I said. “I think I cut my foot.”

By then, my aunt Bonnie was well used to my injuries. Virtually every time I was left in her charge, I’d come limping back to her with some broken bone, sprain, burn, or open wound. It became a running joke in the family that she should refuse to look after me because I posed too much of an insurance risk. My injuries were so routine that she barely blinked when I told her I’d cut my foot.

“I’ll go get a Band-Aid,” she sighed without looking up at me.

I don’t know why I didn’t stop her and say, “Listen, lady, there’s no time for Band-Aids, we need Super Glue and maybe also a miracle,” but she was a pharmacist, which is basically a doctor, so I trusted her. Either way, she was gone before I could say anything. A few minutes later, she returned with a bandage.

By then, there was a small pool of blood forming beneath me, and her eyes widened ever so slightly as she got closer, in that way that adults’ eyes tend to widen when they realize things are more fucked than they’d originally realized, but don’t want to admit it out loud.

“Oh,” she said with a kind of forced composure. “You really cut it, huh?”

She tried to say it calmly, but I have a knack for picking up on the panic in people’s voices, especially when they’re staring at an open wound in my body, and I could tell what she really meant to say was, “We’ll be lucky if we can save the leg.”