And so, I hobbled to the bathroom, my cousins now crowded around me, and placed my bloody stump under the bathtub faucet. Aunt Bonnie bent down and tried spreading the wound so the water could clean inside of it. I could tell she was trying to see if the dark spot was going away, if it was only a piece of dirt, and not an open artery spilling out the last of my life force. The spot wouldn’t go away. The bleeding had somewhat abated, but it hadn’t stopped entirely. We wrapped it in paper towels.

Aunt Bonnie picked up the phone again. I could tell her concern was growing. She’d had a perfect record so far, in terms of making sure I hadn’t died, but this time was shaping up differently. I mean, all told, even if I had died (spoiler alert: I didn’t die), her record still would’ve been pretty good. One death out of mostly not dying is not too bad.

She dialed my mother again, and I could hear her answer.

“Hey, Deb,” Aunt Bonnie said, less convincingly calm this time. “Almost here?”

“We’re five minutes away,” my mother said. “Something’s wrong, I can tell.”

“Well,” Aunt Bonnie said. “There’s been an incident.”

A moment passed while my mother waited for news that I’d been decapitated, castrated, or worse.

“Well, Matthew stepped on a piece of glass, and uh . . . he might have cut an artery.”

“AN ARTERY!?” I could hear my mother scream through the phone.

“Yeah, maybe just a little bit,” Aunt Bonnie said.

But my mother was already crying. My father, you could hear, was yelling from the driver’s seat, “Goddammit! It’s always fucking something!”

“Oh, God. Why are you crying?” my brother was asking from the backseat.

“Auntie Bonnie said he cut an artery!” my mother was sobbing. “Do you want me to scream like he’s doing?”

The dog, I’m sure, vomited one last time.

This is how my family reacts to news.

A few minutes later, the car came shrieking down the gravel road. My mother leapt from the passenger seat, and before I had a chance to say hello, I’d been swept into the backseat, boxes of groceries tossed onto the pavement to make room for my failing body, and we were speeding back down the gravel road to the emergency room.

•  •  •

“You just need a few stitches” is what the doctor said when he’d finally had a chance to look me over.

“Are you sure, Doctor?” my mother was asking. “Are you sure he hasn’t cut an artery?”

I would make fun of her for questioning the doctor on something that would be obvious to a doctor, but then again, this was small-town Michigan. The hospital was in between a Dairy Queen and a Blockbuster Video.

“Um. Yes,” he said. “He’d be dead if he cut an artery.”