It was an accident

Michael woke up and opened the patio door to a sticky August day with air as thick as soup. He let Dan sleep a little longer, thinking that since it was his day, he might as well enjoy a few more minutes before the onslaught of chores and houseguests and family members and you never know what. Michael put his tattered cargo shorts on and an old Banana Republic t-shirt. The work he’d be doing, he’d better not wear anything he cared about.

After putting the coffee on and brushing his teeth and petting the dogs and feeding them, Michael headed outside. Chore numero uno, the trash down to the street – and the recycling, too. It was recycling day. So he took both down to the driveway and placed them on the curb.

“Oh, shit!” Michael said, looking down the street at the neighbors’ gargantuan piles. “Bulk trash pick-up today.”

That’s right. They’d been saving these things for a month now, and had to get rid of them. If they didn’t, the guests at the party tonight would be falling all over the old lumber wood. So Michael traipsed on back up the hill – at the top, he realized his t-shirt had already soaked through, and only two minutes outside – and grabbed a pile of two by fours. When he got down to the curb, he thought, he’d have to split them in two, otherwise the trash people wouldn’t take them.

The first one split real easily. Michael stepped in the middle of the board and lifted the one side until it split – and so it did. And so did the second. But the third one presented more of a problem. No matter how hard Michael pulled, he couldn’t split the two by four in half. But Michael wouldn’t give up. The trash had to go, and it couldn’t go like this.

He closed his eyes, breathed in through his nostrils, and said to himself, “Mercy, let me get through the next five minutes,” and he lifted the short side of the wood with all the might he had. But he slipped off the middle of it, but while he did, the long side finally split from the short – yes, finally it broke. But it flipped up and hit Michael on the side of his head.

He had a dull sense of softness on the left side of his face, a milky wetness, and a blurry view outside that half of his body. And then he tasted the blood in his mouth.

Running back up to the house, he bumped into the Jeep and tripped on the step up to the kitchen door. When he got there, he yelled out, “Dan! I’ve had an accident! Come quick!”

And then Dan came out, eyes squinting and yawning. “Good morning, honey. How’d you sleep?”