“Ouch, that was quite the tumble.” I laugh.
My daughter stares at me, fighting back tears, looking at me for clues as to how she should re-act. I laugh again.
“Are you bleeding?” I ask. We have a rule: no blood, no crying.
She scans her body for any excuse to let out the water works. Her fingers freeze on her left elbow. She shows me the wound. “See look, blood.”
“Pffft, it’s nothing.” I kiss her scrape as if my saliva had medicine in it. “There, all better.”
“But it’s not better. It really hurts.”
“Your blood tastes like rust,” I say as I help her back onto her new bike.
“Is that a bad think, dad?”
“Nah, it means that you have the heart of a race car.”
She buys it. Off she goes again, wobbling from side to side. I make a quick mental note for later. Google: rust flavoured blood.
Erik D'Souza 