Fingers Are Like Carrots

Trigger Warning; what comes next is the product of an obsessive thought associated with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

I’ve been working on this whole meal planning thing. Not for dieting, but just to make sure I have something to eat for lunch. Milo says I make too much food anyways so why not make just a bit more and eat it all week?

My mother taught me this recipe for golden curry when I was young. She always put boiled chicken hers, but I don’t care much for dead birds. The recipe is quite simple. Boil potatoes, chop carrots, onions, toss in some curry cubes and coconut milk and wham! Decent curry.

I turned my basmati rice down to a simmer before turning to cut up my vegetables. The potatoes were already on the stove with a steady boil. The bite sized cubes bouncing up and down with each air bubble escaping. Almost as if they were on a trampoline.

The carrots and onions were waiting for me on the cutting board. Having already been washed and skinned, I didn’t need to do much but cut them into small pieces.

I’ve always thought to be careful when it comes to cutting onions, so I always cut those first. To make sure it has the most of my attention. Dicing it up was no problem. Takes me no time to cut half of it into tiny pieces to be thrown in butter. All throughout being careful to keep my fingertips away from the sharp edge.

But even with my careful, thought out process, I still managed to nick the side of my thumb just a bit. The tiniest drop of blood seeped from my skin. I tried not to think anything of it, but after I dried the blood and washed my hands, I could still feel where the blood sat on my skin. It’s weight pressed into me.

I had to look back and forth away from my hand to make sure the bleeding has stopped, but there’s never any more blood than the first drop. I shook my hands out, trying to rid myself of the feeling before moving to cut the carrots.

Lazily, I chopped away at the first carrot. Choosing to cut it into small circles. One right after the other, I began to speed up a bit.

Chopping things so repetitively leads me to daydream just a bit. Thinking one the family I might have one day with Milo. He’d be setting the dinner table with our son, or maybe daughter? I’d be in the kitchen making a dish not too different from this. Our kid might complain about the flavor, but we’d want them to have a wide palette of tastes.

Maybe I went too far into dreamland because I had accidentally cut the tip of my middle finger. It startled me, as the tip was just hanging off when I lifted my hand. I even managed to cut through the nail, which still stuck to the bit of hanging flesh.

I was shocked. The blood was coming out much faster and much more than the cut on my thumb. But what shocked me more, was that it didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would. Maybe I was feeling some sort of adrenaline? I didn’t know what was happening at that point but one thought bounced through my head non-stop.

It was something Milo had told me. When we first started dating, he did this thing where every time I yawned. He’d stick a finger inside my mouth. It was fun and playful until I did it to him. He closed his mouth, his teeth holding my finger in place. With a smile, he released and said “Like a carrot”.

I laughed and questioned what he meant. He told me you can bite and cut through fingers just like carrots.

This conversation rattled through my brain, being the only thing I could focus on while my hands had a mind of their own. And as I looked down, I saw that I had run out of carrots to cut, and had started chopping my fingers up.

The tips are all gone. I made it almost all the way to the second knuckle before coming to my senses. By then the blood was practically falling out of me. Pieces of my fingers mixing in with the carrots and I almost couldn’t tell the difference between them because of all the blood. I was getting code but yet I didn’t feel any pain.

I held my left hand up to my face, looking at what was left of my fingers as Milo walked in. He yelled some sort of profanity before the shock sent me to the floor.

But then, I looked back and there was another drop of blood coming out of my thumb. My long fingers are still intact. No longer the nubs I had thought they might have been. The onions have not quite finished being diced. Nothing happened. It was just a thought.