The Little Sucker
Should somehow we get the chance to meet, say while on the way to a public shithole or at the mall where I usually get lost, ask me to flash you the middle finger of my right hand and I will show you an affliction I was led to believe was caused by dipping that finger in a bowl of turkey’s blood. Or a chicken’s. No, not pig.
And I will flash it the best way there is, but you’re not allowed to say anything to me lest you make me mad and I make a pie stuffing out of you. I was 7 or 8 when I first learned that flashing your middle finger and waving it high in the air is cool and that grown-ups loved to hate you for doing it. So I did it everyday. We did it everyday. On my way to school, I flashed it to my classmates on the other side of the road and they flash it back. I flashed it on my way to the community store to buy a bottle of cooking oil and the old woman at the store glared at me. I was definitely going to hell.
So, I prayed and promised not to do it again. But of course, it was fun to be a rebel sometimes. The following day, I flashed it to a dog staring at me while I was playing when after a couple of minutes later, I got the finger nastily cut by a tin can. My heart pounded and I knew I was being bad. So I prayed again. Comes the withdrawal. It was hard. So I did it again. This time, it was a knife that delivered the message. Either I was just too clumsy or that the heavens was too involved in my anatomy.
Later on, a wart, yes a wart grew at the top of the finger. A nasty little wart that has been stuck in there for years. tried to bite the hell out of it, clipped it, put medicines on it, still nothing. I have a wart. And so everytime I flash the sign these days, I remember, the dog that started it all.
