Effing Papercut

A papercut.

Nothing dramatic, no cinematic blood spurt, just that tiny slice across the edge of my thumb when I was opening the damn gas bill. One of those quiet, invisible hurts that seems to whisper: this is the beginning of something bad.

I sucked the thumb, tasted a bit of iron, then went to the sink and let cold water sting it. It wasn’t even bleeding anymore.

The bill was worse than the cut. They wanted nearly double what they did last month.

I’d been turning the heat down, sitting in the apartment with two sweaters and a hat, but somehow I was paying more. There’s a math to the universe that punishes the already punished.

So I did what I always do when life taps me on the shoulder with its greasy hand: I went to Benny’s Bar.

Benny’s is the kind of place where the light never really lands. You drink in shadow, pay in cash, and keep your eyes low.

The air smells like sour mop water and warm whiskey. I like it that way.

I sat on my usual stool, wrapped a napkin around the papercut so I wouldn’t smear blood on the glass, and ordered a shot of rye with a beer chaser.

“Paper got you again?” Benny asked, wiping the counter with a towel that looked dirtier than the counter.

“Gas bill,” I said.

He nodded like I’d told him about a death in the family. “They’ll kill us all, those envelopes.”

I laughed, though not really. I drank.

There was a woman two stools down, with yellow hair like straw, and red lipstick that looked whitewashed on in the dark. She’d been coming around the past few weeks, always with that same tired look that said she’d seen better days and decided they weren’t coming back.

“You look like you’re losing an argument with life,” she said.

“Life’s been cheating,” I told her.

She smiled, slow, broken. “Ain’t it always?”

We drank in silence a while. The kind of silence that isn’t empty but heavy, full of all the things you’ll never say.

The papercut started throbbing again, sharp now. I checked it. Red line, a little puffed.

Infection, probably. Figures.

She caught me looking at it. “You’d be surprised what little things can take you down,” she said. “My ex’s cousin died from a splinter. Got infected. Blood poisoning.”

“Hell of a way to go,” I said.

“Yeah. They buried him with the two-by-four he got it from. Family thought it was poetic.”

The next day, the thumb looked worse. Swollen.

Pink creeping up toward the wrist. I told myself it was nothing, just irritation, but I kept watching it, like a snake watching its own tail.

I skipped work. Drank coffee.

Watched dust drift through the light like tiny ghosts. The city outside made its usual noises, sirens, arguments, and tires squealing on wet pavement.

Everything continues like always. That’s the thing about the world: it never notices when you start to rot.

By nightfall, I was sweating. Fever crawling up my spine.

I thought about the blond woman, the way she said “little things can take you down.” She was right.

I stumbled back to Benny’s, hand wrapped in a dirty rag. He looked up from the register.

“Jesus, you look bad,” he said.

“Paper got me again,” I told him.

He poured me a drink without asking. The whiskey burned like medicine, but it didn’t help. I felt the pulse in my thumb, a steady beat, like the world laughing at me.

I thought about all the ways a life unravels: a word said wrong, a step missed, a letter opened too soon. But a papercut, that’s the most honest of them all, small, stupid, and absolutely fatal in its own way.

I raised the glass, bleeding thumb and all. “To the little things,” I said, and drank.