Last Cent
A dad walks into a market followed by his ten-year-old son. The kid is
spinning a 25-cent piece in the air and catching it between his teeth. As
they walk through the market someone bumps into the boy at just the wrong
moment and the coin goes straight into his mouth and lodges in his throat.
He immediately starts choking and going blue in the face and Dad starts
panicking, shouting and screaming for help. A middle-aged, fairly
unnoticeable man in a gray suit is sitting at a coffee bar in the market
reading his newspaper and sipping a cup of coffee. At the sound of the
commotion, he looks up, puts his coffee cup down on the saucer, neatly folds
his newspaper and places it on the counter. He gets up from his seat and
makes his unhurried way across the market. Reaching the boy, the man
carefully takes hold of the kid's balls and squeezes gently but firmly.
After a few seconds the boy convulses violently and coughs up the 25-cent
piece, which the man catches in his free hand. Releasing the boy, the man
hands the coin to the father and walks back to his seat in the coffee bar
without saying a word.
As soon as he is sure that his son has suffered no lasting ill-effects, the
father rushes over to the man and starts effusively thanking him saying:
"I've never seen anybody do anything like that before-it was fantastic-Are
you a doctor?"
"Oh, good heavens, no," the man replies, "I work for the Internal Revenue
Service." |
