A Short Sketch

“What’s the other fellow look like?” I say to the man behind the shop counter. He’s sporting a mighty gash in his lip, just below the nose.

“It was entirely my own fault,” he answers. “I should have had more patience.”

“My god,” I think to myself. “Somebody really did punch him.”

“What happened?” I gasp.

“I was down at the farm on Sunday evening,” he says, “and I was in a horrible hurry to get home to watch the big match. I had the horse on a lead trying to force him into the stable. He didn’t care about the match and didn’t want to go into the stable. Wasn’t he as stubborn as me? He was planted on one end and I was pulling away on the other. Swearing at him, like.”

“Did he kick you?”

“No, thanks be to god, or I might not be here to tell you the story. There’s a safety catch on the lead that I was too impatient to close. The lead came off the halter and came back as fast as you please. Split my lip, so. Jaysus, there was gobs of blood everywhere. I grabbed a rag and had it up against the lip. I couldn’t see where the blood was coming from.”

“What did you do?”

“The daughter was there and she took hold of the halter and didn’t he follow her into the stable, prancing and showing off like a pretty boy. Then she drove me into town to the clinic. I thought for sure that there would be no one there on a Sunday and I’d have to go to Tralee and spend half the night in A&E. But a GP from SouthDoc was manning the fort and he went to work on me. Ten stitches it took before it was sorted. By the time I got home, though, the match was over.”

“You’re a lucky man it didn’t hit you in the eye,” I commiserate.

“Ah, sure, if I were lucky, it would have missed me altogether and I’d have seen the match.”