Gap

It was mid November and I had been working at Gap for a few weeks. Being that it was just before the whole “Thanksgiving/Christmas shopping fiasco,” they had all five hundred employees working to unpack the stock whenever there was a spare moment.
I had just gotten to work and seeing that the Body floor was pretty dead, my manager Lucy assigned me to unpacking stock along with a girl named Samantha. I was feeling fairly confident since I’d done this the day before. All around us, people were hacking away thin white strips of plastic that kept the boxes closed, removing clothing from the boxes, and staking them into semi neat piles. Seeing us, one of the stockroom guys turned to us. In his hand he held a box cutter. Looking at it I could tell that it was dull, but the guy handed it off to me anyway and took his leave.
I began the long process of unpacking. Since the blade was dull, I had to come up with my own method of cutting through the plastic strips. I stabbed the middle of the strip, cut right, and then cut left. I was on my forth box when I came across a plastic strip that was even more adverse to the blade than the rest. Further action had to be taken. With my left hand now holding the stubborn plastic strip down, I began my method. Stab the middle, cut right, cut lef-… the box cutter slipped from my had and had pierced an artery in my left arm.
Blood came squirting out like a fountain. My immediate thoughts were: “Wow, I can’t believe I just did that!” and “I guess Quentin Terintino wasn’t over exzadurating with the blood.”
Immediately I grabbed and applied pressure to my forearm where I’d cut myself. Blood seeped through my fingers and onto the floor. I ran to Lucy and said, “Lucy! I’ve been stabbed!” As she looked at the trail of blood I’d left in my wake, she turned pale. Apparently blood wasn’t her thing. She began to look sick.
Either out of concern or simply to remove the sickening sight of me bent over holding my bleeding arm; she ordered me to the bathroom to wash my wound. Two steps in, the bright florescent lights flip on and the door slams behind me, and locks.
My mother had taught my brother and I at a very early age some of the finer points on what to do should you hurt yourself… among those: don’t put ice on a burn (you’ll only make it worse), apply heat to stiff or soar joints/muscles, cold to swollen and/or bruised muscles, and apply pressure to bleeding wounds. Armed with this knowledge, there was no way in hell I was going to remove my hand from my arm while it was still gushing blood.
I did the only thing I could; I stood there listening to my boss and coworkers as they ran around freaking out and yelling advice from the other side of the door. My head began to feel light and the edges of my vision began to turn black.
It was at that moment I began to contemplate death; more precisely my death. Although I had never imagined or wanted to die in the Gap, the overall idea didn’t seem too be frightening. In fact, to slip into that ever-increasing black void seemed more and more comforting as the minutes wore on.
It was then that Lucy burst through the door. She grabbed me and sat me down in a blue plastic chair. The EMT’s they promised were coming. There were two of them. They were both middle aged, over weight and balding. They weaved their way between the mannequin parts and boxes. There were no introductions. Without missing a beat they said, ”So I heard you’ve got a Gap in your arm.” They laughed at their “clever” joke, but although I smiled and laughed with them, I couldn’t help but thinking “Nice guys, how long did it take you to think that one up?” “Oh, hah, yep,” I said aloud instead.
In the end, the wound that made pools the size of Lake Michigan, ended up being an inch long, and a quarter of an inch deep. Thanks to that slit in my skin, I received my first stitches of my life that night.




that paper went over alot better than I though it would.