“Ow!” I exclaimed, clutching my leg. “I’ve been stabbed!”
I looked down and saw my attacker, an innocent-looking barrel cactus hanging out nonchalantly on the side of the path in the garden center. I would have taken a moment to appreciate the organic symmetry of the perfectly round plant, but I had two dozen small cactus needles impaled in the side of my leg and wasn’t feeling big love for nature at that moment. The cactus looked none the worse for the wear. My leg, however, resembled a hedgehog in a very uncute way, and small spots of blood had begun to appear on my jeans.
“Stay still,” said my son, who was accustomed to living in the Wild West (and by wild, I mean a large, cosmopolitan city in the middle of the country) and was used to encountering these kinds of moody, unpredictable plants in his environment.
He bent down and started plucking cactus spines out of my leg.
“Ow, ow, ow,” I yelled each time he removed one. I decided this must be what it feels like when you have a fight with a very, very small porcupine, or get shot at by pigeons with blow darts.
Certainly, this was not the kind of activity I had planned for when we decided to go visit our adult kids for a few days. Food-truck hopping? Yes. E-bike tour of the city? Certainly. Arbitrarily getting assaulted by an Attacktus Cactus? Definitely not.
As he yanked out the needles with surgical precision, I began to wonder whether this violated any cactus assault laws and if I needed to file a report with the cactus police. Maybe there was a whole cactus gang out there terrorizing unsuspecting Northeasterners. That’s when it struck me that this might be more than a painful inconvenience. What if the spines were poisonous? What if the hospital was out of anti-cactus-spine serum? What if my insurance didn’t cover random cactus attacks?
Most importantly, what if I had to walk around in stained jeans for the rest of the trip?
“Excuse me,” I said, waving down a garden center employee. “Can you come here? I’ve been attacked by one of your cacti.”
He came over and looked at my hedgehog leg.
“Oh no!” he said. “How did that happen?”
“I was walking down this path and the cactus shot its spines at me.”
“They don’t actually do that,” he said. “You must have bumped into it.”
“No, it attacked me,” I insisted. “Your cactus went rogue.”
“Did you provoke it?” he wondered. “Call it names? Make some ‘yo momma’ jokes?”
“No!”
“Then you must have bumped it.”
“OK, fine,” I said. “But I need to know if these things are poisonous. Should I go to the hospital? Update my will? Delete certain mean posts from my Facebook account?
“No, you’ll be fine,” he said. “I’ll get antiseptic and some Band-Aids.”
“Is that it?” I wondered. “You don’t think I need a tourniquet, or a rabies shot?
“No.”
“What, then?”
He thought for a moment. “I can give you 10% off your purchase.”
I nodded. “That’ll do.”
Tracy Beckerman is the author of the Amazon Bestseller, “Barking at the Moon: A Story of Life, Love, and Kibble,” available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble online! You can visit her at www.tracybeckerman.com. To find out more about Tracy Beckerman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
