Sliver

Danny came over and sat next to me on the couch. He winced when he put his hand on the armrest, putting his weight on it to sit down.

"What's wrong with your hand Danny?"

"I was making a tweak pipe with a lightbulb and it exploded in my hand, I still haven't gotten out all the glass shards."

"How long ago was this?"

"I don't know, a week."

"Danny are you fucking kidding me?! We have to get that shit out now."

I pulled out my little swiss army knife. The blade was blackened and sticky from using it to scrape pipes, I put a lighter up to it to melt it off and sterilize the blade. I looked at Danny's hand. I could see places where the skin had actually began to heal over the tiny shards of glass.

"This is gonna hurt Danny boy."

He shrugged. "It's gotta come out somehow."

He took a pull from the plastic half-filled bottle of Popov vodka, I did too and used a little to clean off the knife a little more.

The knife worked well for the bigger shards, and the tiny tweezers were ideal for removing the jagged fragments from his palm. The whole process took about a half an hour and Danny took it like a man, hardly wincing even when I dug into his palm to get the deeper rooted shards. When we were finished I had him dump a little of the vodka into his hands and we both took a pull from the bottle to celebrate the successful surgery.