SLASH - A Rycke Foreman Film

One day, a man was fiddling around with a hammer on a construction site, and he somehow managed to drive a nail through his hand.  It went through his hand, all the way through the back and out through the palm.  It was a big nail, too, pushing nearly two inches out of his palm with a good couple of inches of the head hovering above the entry point.

The man – let’s call him Phil – screamed like bloody hell when it happened.  Being the tough guy that he was, he was used to slamming the hammer down on the ends of his fingers, or smack across the broad plane of his thumb, but this was the first time he’d driven a nail through that much flesh.  Even after the red pain subsided to a numb throb, he continued to turn his hand this way and that, trying for the life of him to remember how he had managed to do something so weird and stupid.  The only conceivable way a nail could have been driven though his hand like that, with the point emerging smack in the middle of his palm, was if he had placed the point against the back of his hand, held it upright against the flesh with his other hand, and then struck it with the hammer held by, what, a third hand?  It just didn’t make sense.  But there it was, bright and shiny and dripping blood, a nail half-in and half-out of his hand.

Holly Day lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with her husband and two children. Her most recently published books are Music Theory for Dummies, Music Composition for Dummies, and Walking Twin Cities.