The Blood and the Bulb

The Sun stares down upon me, passive and unconcerned with my pain.

Mud cakes my hand and bloods wells within the crevices formed by the hard packed earth.

I had laid my hand down hard upon a long forgotten shard of an old coke bottle.
The cut is deep.

How long had it waited there, placid and patient beneath a layer of soil.
Existing only for the day that I might venture out into the garden to plant an Elephant Ear.

Five, ten, maybe fifty years spent beneath those few inches of dirt, just so my hand would graze it just the right way and shed my coppery blood onto the mulch.

I curse a little as I clutch the asymmetrical gash to my old Sullivan East tee shirt, rising from my repentant crouch to scrub the filth from the open wound at the faucet .

Cool water  hesitantly gushes over the vertical break in my flesh, effortlessly eliminating the obscuring crud leaving only puckered pink skin and an accidental incision of surgical precision to survey .

I wrap my hand in gauze before hurriedly stuffing the bloated bulb into the loamy soil  and covering it with rich black dirt laced with blood of my veins , leaving the jagged bottle fragment where it lay to one day find another's hand as it had so perfectly found my own.