Lyle sipped his coffee and stared out into the street that ran behind his two bedroom, one bath ranch style home. As he sipped, he left the cup on his lower lip and his moist breath mixed with the hot liquid fogging his glasses then clearing, fogging his glasses, then clearing. The road and all his neighbors vanished into gray and then emerged from the gloom into perfect twenty-twenty clarity only to vanish again upon his next exhale. He decided that he preferred the gloom.

His coffee gone, Lyle spun and pulled too hard on the slider’s handle and the damned door ran off its track. He wrestled to realign the right wheels with the right groves, and while he did, a splinter from the wooden deck daggered through his sock straight into his big toe. God dammit. But luckily, he read an Internet article on splinter removal just the other day.

He kept his knives in the top drawer under the counter. The blades within were all sharp as razors but it was the cleaver that spoke to him, and as he limped down the hallway toward the bathroom the two-pound hunk of sharpened steel felt right and proper in his hand. Lyle sat himself down on the toilet’s closed lid, glimpsed his reflection in the heavy blade, and smiled.

The sharp edge of the heavy cleaver split the sock with a few flicks and the woolen garment fell crumpled to the floor. Lyle looked from the sock back to his foot and saw the splinter, not very deep sticking from his right toe like a toothpick from a mouth. He touched the exposed end of the sliver with the corner of the blade and palpated the digit like he might a ripe pimple. The plan, he thought, was simple and he dug around in preparation under the sink for a clean towel and a bottle of rubbing alcohol.

He used the cleaver again to cut the jeans around and just below his right knee exposing a pasty calf and ankle, then rolled the pants into a neat cuff above the leg’s bend, and applied some of the rubbing alcohol to the knife to prevent infection.

Blood began to drip as soon as the blade touched the skin, and Lyle padded it up with the towel. The edge dug into the muscle tissue and through the veins around the knee joint. His teeth clenched and still, he cut. A pencil-thick artery spurted across the small room and onto the stack of magazines he kept at the base of the bowl and he tied it off with a neat bow, and with a final flick of the blade through the last thin strip of skin, the leg, splinter and all, fell to the cold tiles with a thump.

Lyle smiled as he stitched and bandaged the wound, “There, no more splinter,” he said, then put the severed leg into an old cardboard box. In the garage, he found a pointed shovel that he took to the backyard. He opened a gash through the browning grass and down a couple of feet into the dry topsoil, then slid the box with the cursed splintered leg into the hole, backfilled, and replaced the grass before going back into the house to get ready for work.