The Gun Room: Official Report [2011]

I'm not sure who brought him home, but suddenly my eldest son came crashing through the screen door and collapsed in the entryway.  He was crying and clutching his knee, which, from what I could make out, had been gashed by some broken glass.  So, I scooped him up, and though my back was killing me, I managed to carry the bawling and squirming boy up the stairs to The Gun Room.  (I figured, with all the blood, the tile would be easier to clean than the carpet we'd just had installed in the living room.)  I sat him down on top of my old service footlocker and tore away the remains of his pants.  His knee was bleeding profusely, but I couldn't tell whether there was any glass remaining in the wound, or not.  I remembered that my toolbox was under the bed in the next room, so I left him there and went to retrieve it.  As I entered the bedroom, the wife ran past me, smelling like the steak she'd been tenderizing, and I managed to reveal the gist of the situation by showing her the blood on my hands and shirt.  She moved to comfort the boy, who was growing hysterical.  I found the toolbox and moved back into The Gun Room just as the wife was placing a rolled-up towel into the boy's mouth.  He panicked, and I told the wife to leave so that she wouldn't do the same.  I threw open the latches on the Craftsman and rummaged through the tools looking for my dad's old needle-nose pliers.  After a few stressful seconds, I found them, wiped them off with a rag, and plunged them deep into the tissue beneath my son's kneecap.