Cut
He woke up every morning knowing he would put on his overalls, drive the twisting mountain roads that led to the paper mill, and come home covered in tiny lacerations. The man who’d hired him had warned him about this, saying, “I hope you don’t mind an occasional paper cut.” At the time, he'd just needed a job and hadn’t had a papercut in a long time, so he’d more or less forgotten what they felt like. They sting, especially when wet, and, unfortunately, paper mills are damp industrial environments. “But the cuts can be avoided with the proper protections.” That’s what the hiring manager had said, anyway.
The problem was that safety precautions were sometimes ignored in pursuit of production deadlines. Maybe a sleeve rose a little too high, or a glove was misplaced during lunch. But this didn’t matter much because, as a member of the QC (or quality control) team, he wasn’t supposed to wear gloves. So, he wound up with paper cuts on a routine basis. Sometimes as many as two or three a day.
You might be surprised to learn that the problem with a cut like this is actually that it doesn’t slice deep enough. Well, the truth is that it tears. He’d looked it up. The microfibers in the paper tear the skin, but the resulting blood flow is insufficient to clot, leaving the nerve endings unprotected. And there are a lot of nerve endings in a finger.
So, he began to wonder if having a job was worth this much pain. I mean, couldn’t they have a robot check the paper quality? He would be out of a job, but the constant tearing of the skin, the persistent irritation, the existential sting that tore at him as he received another brutal yet unofficial injury.
There are no reports of a mill worker getting a paper cut. There are men who lose limbs in that kind of facility. Palettes have been known to crush floor workers. You want to submit an injury report because you have a minor skin irritation? One that doesn’t even need stitches? If it was your jugular that was torn open, then sure, but your pinky finger? Do you even need that one to do your job? To exist? To live your everyday life? Is there any evolutionary need for a pinky?
If you were wearing a ring on it, you wouldn’t be working this job. No, sir. You’d be on a yacht somewhere, sipping a sauvignon blanc, rosé, or even champagne, but that's not your life. You work in a paper mill, and you are subjected to paper cuts every. single. day.
You’ve lost count, but that’s probably a bad thing because the body can only handle so many minuscule openings and reopenings. The skin starts to wear down, growing thin like an old man or woman who’s lying on their deathbed, wondering where all the time went and if they should have behaved differently toward their children, especially since they’re not there beside them, ushering them toward the white, blind light.
Maybe if that was all he had to worry about, it would have been okay. But it’s not, because he occasionally experienced a nick while shaving. He might have had sensitive skin, but there was often a little blood around the Adam’s apple or at the corner of the lip, where the skin is particularly thin and delicate.
Then there were the mishaps with a knife in the kitchen. He’s cutting a side of beef, and his finger gets too close to the blade. It’s not necessarily a trip to the emergency room, but it does take some first-aid training to staunch the bleeding.
He probably should have known better than to get into whittling, but his grandfather had done it before him, so there was a genetic component to the activity, and sure enough, learning how to carve wood meant that he was going to get injured. This one required stitches, but he got right back on the horse, so to speak. Apparently, he got it in his head that he was going to carve a mallard and take it hunting. Based on his history, he might be safer around shotguns than paper products.
Meanwhile, he’s going to work every day, cutting his fingers and palms and dropping all kinds of f-bombs when his hands get the slightest bit wet. What he doesn’t realize is that with all the cuts, he’s getting awfully close to one thousand, which proved fateful one night when he was sitting down to have a few beers.
One too many, actually, because he dropped the bottle on the floor. And as he was cleaning it up, he cut his thumb. Not badly, but it was what one might refer to as the last straw because he fell over and died right there in the middle of the kitchen floor, which is great for the paper mill because they usually lay people off before they get that far along.
In this case, they pointed out that he’d been drinking. In other words, they lawyer up because no one should die this early in life, so everyone assumes it’s a work-life balance thing, but it’s not. It’s death by a thousand cuts, which everyone experiences in one capacity or another.
Just count yourself lucky you don’t work somewhere dangerous, like a paper mill, where paper cuts are part of the job. Count yourself lucky that you can die of something else rather than get sliced open again and again, wondering when in the hell it’s all going to end, only to find out it’s a lot sooner than you expected.
Published June 2026.