Only in the Northland
Ole staggered home very late after another evening with his drinking
buddy Sven. He took off his shoes to avoid waking his wife Lena. He
tiptoed as quietly as he could toward the stairs leading to their
upstairs bedroom, but misjudged the bottom step.
As he caught himself by grabbing the banister, his body swung around
and he landed heavily on his rump. A whiskey bottle in each back
pocket broke and made the landing especially painful.
Managing not to yell, Ole sprung up, pulled down his pants, and looked
in the hall mirror to see that his butt cheeks were cut and bleeding.
He managed to quietly find a full box of band-Aids and began putting a
band-aid as best he could on each place he saw blood. He then hid the
now almost empty band-aid box and shuffled and stumbled his way to
bed. In the morning, Ole woke up with searing pain in both his head
and
butt and Lena staring at him from across the room.
She said, “You were drunk again last night weren’t you Ole?”
Ole said, “Why you say such a mean thing?”
“Well,” Lena said, “it could be the open front door, it could be the
broken glass at the bottom of the stairs, it could be the drops of
blood trailing through the house, it could be your bloodshot eyes, but
mostly…
“It’s all those band-aids stuck on the hall mirror.”
