Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Lips and Clips

We were driving down Washington after work. We always drive down Washington after work. It's fall and the light was fading fast, so we were rushing through the cooling early evening to get to the school playground before dark. I was driving, and I heard muffled curse from Jae. I didn't look directly at her because I was driving, but I turned my head a little and glanced at her out of the corner of my eye. She had both hands up to her mouth, and said, "Pull over."

"What? Pull over?" I asked.

"Yeeeef."

I quickly signaled and turned right onto the next street. I parked on the curb and could focus on Jae for the first time. She had a large metal clip clipped to her lip. It was the kind of clip you use to clip a piece of paper to a board, and I'm sure that's what she had used it for, for clipping a drawing or painting to a board or piece of cardboard. Didn't seem like it should be that dangerous. I watched as she fought with it, wincing in pain. After about a minute she got it off. There was a definate dent in her lower lip. It was quite deep, more like a divet, though the skin wasn't broken.

"Got caught in the spring," she said.

I stiffled a laugh, but didn't really succeed. As I pulled away from the curb, she said, "Just goes to show you shouldn't use these on body parts." Then she clipped it to her right earlobe. "Ears are OK."

"Because they don't have any nerves."

"Right."

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good story.

JimII said...

My favorite part is that she demanded that you pull over. Why? Did you help her? No. Did she want you to help her? No. She was in distress, and she needed the car to stop!

Love it.

BTW, artfully done as well. You should think about being a writer or somethign.

Josh Gentry said...

I'm glad you both enjoyed the story. This is a blog searching for a reason to exist. My goal is to make it about story telling.

Anonymous said...

Just couldn't get it off with the car jiggling. There's a quandry, admit that you have a clip stuck to your lip or wait till you get home and hope your spouse doesn't notice.

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