It was like someone had clandestinely dropped a stick of dynamite in that kid’s pants. One second he was squealing "mom!" and demanding a snack, the next I was wiping goo off my leather bomber jacket and scooping an eyeball out of Suzie’s ice cream cone.
The blood was EVERYWHERE! Pools of it sat dripping from the clutch-marks the kid had left in his mother’s dress, in the cup-holders of nearby convertibles...it even filled the finger-holes of my custom-made "Bad To The Bone" bowling ball, for god’s sake!
My mouth was hanging open at the time of the blast, as Suzie was telling me an "incredibly unbelievable" story about Carol & Tom, our next-door neighbours, and I was miming my disbelief, despite the fact that said yarn was neither "incredible" nor "unbelievable". As a result, I found myself shooting little almost-vaporized bits of kid from between my teeth while I picked bone-splinters out of Suzie’s back.
Despite the base-level grossness of spitting out human-gristle, I wasn’t three picks in before I realized that Suzie and I were speaking at a normal tone, that we weren’t competing for air-time with the wailing pleads of a child desperate for Heavenly-Hash.
It was suddenly quiet for the first time all morning. Even the mother of the exploded child, immobilized at first, seemed to be standing a little taller after a quick bathroom-respite, no longer hunched under the psychological-weight of a child-sized bullhorn permanently set on "shrill".
It’s a sad thing when a human life gets snuffed out, I suppose...still, it was nice to have a conversation at the ice cream store using my indoor-voice for once.
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