LUMP

by Claire L. Fishback

  “What?” I asked, once again.

  She pointed to the letter. I picked it up, straightened it out and read.

  Her mother explained that Gloria was adopted at birth. I read further and gasped, just as Gloria had.

  I knew he was doing it, and I didn’t stop him. If he could get it from you, it kept him from asking for it from me.

  My stomach turned, and anger burned in my heart. How could a mother, adoptive or not, allow a grown man to molest a young child? I didn’t know what to say, so I crumpled the letter and threw it against the wall. Then I picked it back up and burned it.

  “Where is your adoptive father?” I asked her.

  Gloria was quiet now, her head shaking back and forth slowly, her eyes red-rimmed. “Dead,” she said in a whisper, staring at nothing.

  After about an hour, in which tears continued to slide down her cheeks, she finally looked at me.

  “Why am I crying?” She wiped her eyes, took a deep breath, and stood up. “Aren’t you making stir-fry?”

  I didn’t tell her about the letter, but it explained everything.

  A year went by. We moved in together after three months, talked about marriage, but Gloria didn’t want to get married.

  “I won’t remember it anyway.” She plucked a grape from a vine and tossed it into her mouth. “Besides, we’re happy like this, aren’t we?” She held up a journal that I told her to write in. She could look back and read about the high emotional incidents we shared. Sometimes I wrote them for her, so she could read my viewpoint. I got the idea from a movie with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore. She flipped open the book, and I watched her eyes scan across the page. They got wider and wider, and then her mouth dropped open again. She looked up at me.

  “I remember this,” she said. She turned the book toward me. It was an entry from a month ago when I asked her to marry me.

  I laughed. “You crushed me, Gloria!” I said. I had written that entry for her. The ring I had given her sparkled on her ring finger.

  “I said, a lifelong engagement would suffice,” she said. That wasn’t in the book. “I love you,” she said suddenly. After a year, she had never said it, telling me she didn’t know if she did or not. Finally, she knew.

  I grabbed a pen and started writing down what had just happened. Gloria gave me things to say, her feelings, how it was all so overpowering. Then she stopped talking.

  I looked at her. Her eyes were glazed over, she looked through me, not at me. Suddenly, they rolled up into her head and she dropped to the floor.

  “Gloria!” I shouted. I went to her side and held her while she trembled in my arms. “Oh, God, Gloria!”

  The ambulance came, and I followed it to the hospital. Waiting during a time like this was torture. What happened to her? What was going to come of it? Would she remember me? The event we just shared?

  A doctor came out of the ER and approached me.

  “She’s stable,” he said with a grim expression. “It won’t be long, though.”

  “What?” I asked. “What won’t be long?”

  “She has a tumor in her brain,” the doctor explained. “You can go in and see her.”

  “Can’t you do surgery?” I asked, flabbergasted. I didn’t know what to say. I felt a panic welling in my chest, causing my heart to beat in my throat. My breathing quickened. My nose burned with tears. “Well?”

  The doctor’s lips tightened, his brow creased for a moment, and he shook his head. “We did everything we could, but it’s in a place that is too dangerous to get to. We would have to sever connections in her brain that would leave her in a vegetative state the rest of her life.” He touched my shoulder. “She doesn’t want that. I’m very sorry.” He walked away.

  I went to Gloria’s side. She looked like she had aged twenty years in an hour. Her skin was pale, her hair has lost its luster. I sat down and took her hand.

  “I love you.” She gave me a weak smile.

  I squeezed her hand, trying to control my tears. “The doctor said you don’t have long.”

  “Shh,” Gloria said. “I know.” She took a deep breath and swallowed hard. “I can feel, now.” She said. “I can feel the emotions of my past welling up inside.” A tear leaked onto her pillow. “At first, they were all bad feelings, they must have been from my childhood. But now,” she smiled and caressed my cheek. I pressed my face into her palm. “All I feel is happiness.” Her eyes twinkled. “And this overwhelming feeling that I don’t know what it is, but it has to be love.”

  I cried against her hand.

  “Don’t worry,” she said to me. “I’m not scared.”

  “I know,” I said. “You told me a long time ago you aren’t afraid to die.”

  “I know.” She smiled. “I remember.”

  A Sickness Like No Other

  I AM SICK. THIS SICKNESS I speak of isn’t some incurable disease, like cancer or the common cold. It is beyond that. It’s like, well, let me give you an example.

  I was walking down the street one day, and a thought occurred to me that the rubbish bins were conspiring against me. They weren’t talking out loud, but telepathically, and somehow my brain had been transmitted over into their telepathic channel. They were talking about rejecting anything I tried to throw away or tipping over as I walked by. They snickered and snorted, and when I covered my ears and tried to clear my mind they got louder and louder. The laughter penetrated my brain.

  Someone touched my shoulder, a youngish looking woman, and said something, but the trashcans were so loud, I didn’t hear what she said, and she scrambled away as if I were bleeding from my eyes. And indeed, I was.

  I’m not sure why these episodes occur, but it wasn’t the first time and it wouldn’t be the last. The telephone booths and newspaper stands did the same. Laughed at me, threatened to get me into trouble. Giggle, snide, and jeer until my spleen felt as though it would burst and spill precious fluids onto the ground.

  I remember, in horrific detail, the first incident in which the chortling and remarks came from the objects around me; I was at the bank.

  I had a check in hand ready to deposit, and I heard someone to my left comment on the style of my jacket, and another about the way I walked. They all made fun of me. I turned and addressed a young man with a pierced lip and asked him to repeat himself. He told me he had asked if I wanted to go ahead of him. I smiled awkwardly and thanked him. Then it came again, only from the other direction.

  “Look at that styoooopid hat, Aha! Aha ha ha ha ha!!!” A vicious cackling that set my teeth grinding. I looked at a small, mousy woman who smiled at me. She couldn’t possibly have said that. It was a deeper, masculine voice, rough and obnoxious. A voice and a laugh that made me want to beat my skull against the counter.

  “Over here!” I heard and then a whole chorus of them. No one around me was talking, and that’s when I knew. It was the chairs, the pens, the piles of goddamned deposit slips. I grabbed my ears and they kept on. They laughed at me as I ran outside. Then the telephone booths joined in, and the traffic lights and the trash bins and everything!

  People’s briefcases, newspapers, they all laughed, and I dropped to my knees crying and screaming, deafened by the incessant jeering. I looked at my hands, covered in blood and I thought I was dying. I was convinced it was seepage from my bleeding brain.

  The shrieks of hideous laughter did not cease until I reached my lightly furnished apartment three blocks away. As I closed the door, a few jabs at my masculinity ensued from a lone armchair, which I hastily threw across the room. My own furniture had turned against me.

  My apartment was void of furnishings by morning, and at last, my aching skull had a silent break from the insanity of the streets. The only thing I kept were the appliances, which hadn’t started in on me yet. They didn’t seem to hate me as much, or at least they didn’t tell me. Perhaps they would stay faithful.

  My sickness, as anyone can clearly tell, isn’t quite the type of sickness one might think of when the wo
rd is used. My doctors tell me to get more sleep or take a vacation. How can I when my seat on the plane would laugh at my very existence? And sleep, I only wish I could. My back is tormented by the hard wood floor. I’d tossed my bed out, you know, and I haven’t the courage to purchase an air mattress. It would most likely taunt me in my sleep, if I could indeed sleep knowing an ‘outsider’ was inside my apartment. That’s what I called them. Outsiders. And knowing they could not get in was the greatest comfort.

  It happened about two weeks after I had been locked inside what I now refer to as my sanctuary. I heard a titter, a giggle, and before I knew it, the blender and coffee pot were in on it too. I tried hard to ignore them, I tried to tell them to shut up, but it made them double their efforts. Mocking me with shrill, taunting voices.

  I ran to the bathroom, certain there would be blood pouring from my eyes, I could feel it. But there was none. My face was perfectly normal, aside from the dark circles under my eyes and weeks forth of beard growth for lack of shaving. I rubbed my eyes and looked at my hands, blood. Blood all over my fingertips. I snatched a look in the mirror again, no blood. Was my mirror, too good for words, distorting my own image of myself in the reflective surface?

  I laughed at myself. The whole thing was ludicrous. Inanimate objects couldn’t talk, or laugh or shout, “Hey, you stupid fuck face!” as you scuttle down the sidewalk.

  I laughed, and it felt good to laugh. I threw my head back and opened my mouth as wide as I could and out poured the loudest laugh that could ever exist. My soul was insatiable, I kept laughing. I laughed so hard I had to sit on the floor. I laughed until I pissed my pants, and then kept on laughing at having done so.

  I laughed at how I laughed, I laughed at how suddenly I didn’t feel so alone, that maybe I was one of them. I crawled, laughing, into the kitchen and placed my hands on the counter and laughed into the faces of the blender and then into the coffee pot and then the microwave, and the stove.

  I laughed until I realized I was laughing alone, and when I stopped, just as abruptly as I had started, they were whispering.

  They whispered that I was crazy. That I needed help and they should call someone. They whispered about how they didn’t realize I was like them, one of them. They whispered and whispered until their whispering was an unbearable hiss in my ear. I screamed at them to shut up, and for once they listened. I told them how it was going to be. How they would shut the hell up and quit bothering me. I screamed, nothing really, just yelled as loud as I could, and not a peep from them. They had been silenced.

  I got the nerve to go outside after the appliances in the sanctuary had learned that I was in control. As I stepped out of my apartment, I heard a single voice.

  “Excuse me.”

  “SHUT UP!” I screamed into the face of a lovely young woman. She cringed and started to hurry away, but I stopped her. “I’m sorry, I’m under a lot of stress.” I tried to keep it simple to avoid having to explain everything, although I wanted to tell everyone about my accomplishment. How I was now in control of them!

  “I heard you screaming, are you all right?” she asked me, standing halfway down the hall.

  “Yes, I am just wonderful!” I clicked my heels and started down the hall as well. As I passed her, I tipped my hat and grinned. A grin that would soon fall flat. For as I stepped outside, there was not a soul on the street. Not a car, not a sound. It was eerily quiet, and very still. No breeze at all. A gray sky blotted out the sun.

  A panic welled inside my chest. My heart pounded, and my breath quickened.

  “Where is everyone?” I yelled as loud as I could. Then they started up again. Yes, them. The ones who took away my sanity. They all spoke at once, like one giant rehearsed ‘surprise!’ for someone’s secret party, but they didn’t yell surprise.

  The people didn’t jump out with streamers and pointy hats. They didn’t even sound excited, but morbidly harsh. They, all at once, screamed, “they are dead!” and then they laughed.

  They all sounded different, it was a jumble of mixed laughter. Crazy loud laughter, giggles, chuckles, chortles, my head was full of laughter, and I could do nothing but stare at the emptiness of the streets and sidewalks. I ran back inside and there she lay.

  The wonderful woman who asked, who cared, if I was all right or not. The stranger from somewhere inside my building. A stranger who cared. Lifeless on the maroon carpet of the hall, her golden curls caressing her face like angel wings.

  She was dead.

  Nothing brutal, nothing hated, but dead as if the life was sucked from her lips. I ran to the other apartments and beat on doors, yelling to let me in. I kicked open a couple and saw the inhabitants all lying mercilessly dead. I was the last one. I was the only one left. They had done this. The inanimate objects. I ran back inside the sanctuary and called a random number. No one answered. I tried another, again, no answer. I called 911, and a voice picked up.

  “Hello, Horace,” it said. “They are all gone.” and the line died, too. I slammed my phone down and no sooner had I done so than it rang.

  “Hello?” I asked abruptly. “Who is this? Hello?”

  Nothing, silence. But whoever was on the other end was breathing, so I knew they were there. “Are you all right?” a voice asked. It sounded like the woman who lay in the hall. I dropped the phone and ran into the hall once again. She was gone. I ran to the fourth door down, taking a wild guess that that would be her apartment. I knocked greedily, and the door opened.

  “Can I help you?” It was her. She was alive.

  They all had to be alive again. I laughed hysterically and grabbed my hair. I knew my eyes were bleeding but didn’t care because I wasn’t sure if it was visible on the outside or not.

  I wandered aimlessly down the hall, bumping into the walls, stumbling and almost falling. I went outside, and it was all normal.

  Everyone was there, the cars, the street kids, the businessmen. They were all there, but not them.

  The ones who taunted me were silent. I started to laugh again, a laugh that pasted ‘lunatic’ across my forehead in bold, capital letters. Someone had called an ambulance and the paramedics pushed passed me to get inside. I stayed on the front steps of the apartment building, and when they came back out, the stretcher had a body on it, sheet covering the thing and all.

  A gust of wind picked the sheet up and flapped it back. I screamed.

  I screamed as loud as I could. I screamed and clawed at the body, at the paramedics. I screamed until my throat hurt and I couldn’t breathe.

  They were loading me into the ambulance.

  They were taking me away.

  I was dead. Dead and gone. Just like everyone else.

  The Interrupted Autopsy

  “IT WAS JUST A DOG BITE,” Dr. Morrison’s voice said.

  “So, why did he die?” Dr. Worthing asked.

  They spoke in hushed tones. Dr. Clempta listened and wondered why he couldn’t see them. He was laying on a cold, hard surface. Who they were talking about?

  “Poor Dr. Clempta,” Worthing mumbled.

  Clempta tried to sit up. He tried to open his eyes. He tried to tell them he wasn’t dead.

  Something drew a cold line from shoulder to sternum on both sides of his torso, and one long line down to his pubic bone, he screamed inside telling them he was alive. In his mind, he bucked and knocked the doctors away, but really, he lay still in the icy room, panic gripping his insides and twisting them together.

  “I’m hungry,” Worthing said. “Should we break for lunch?”

  “Break?” Morrison asked. “We just started!”

  “I know. But I haven’t had anything since breakfast.”

  “Fine. Help me spring the ribcage first.”

  Spring? Ribcage? His body vibrated as the blaring whir of a saw touched down and forced its way through his sternum. He felt pulled apart as his ribs cracked in protest to the rib cage spreader. But he felt nothing.

  “See you in a few,” Worthing said. The door s
hushed open.

  Clempta heard the metallic clinking of surgical tools. He yelled out in his mind, shouting as loud as he could for Morrison to stop. He managed a small grunt.

  He heard Morrison jump, chuckle, and then say, “Just the gasses releasing.”

  “Where . . .”

  “Just gasses,” Morrison repeated in a high voice. Clempta felt an indiscernible tug as Morrison sliced open the pleura encasing his organs. Each organ he snipped free felt like pieces of Clempta’s soul set loose. Individual tugs within his body.

  If organs had tactile sensation, Clempta would have felt a large and tender hand cradle his heart.

  “The lifeline,” Morrison whispered, his voice thick.

  Clempta had to move, had to do something to keep Morrison from clipping his aorta. He pushed hard, straining.

  His body jolted. A loud clatter and squeak of wet shoes. Morrison grunted as a loud thunk sounded. He hissed with pain.

  Clempta groaned. He twitched and lifted his hand toward his throbbing head. Barbed wire pain wound its way around his skull, piercing into his brain.

  “I . . . am . . .” The words whooshed with air.

  “Oh god,” Morrison whispered, breath coming in quick, shattered gasps. Clempta stopped to listen.

  Morrison’s shoes squeaked on the floor again, frantic sounds like terrified mice running for cover.

  “He was dead. I know he was dead. He was gone. He was dead.” Morrison whispered. Clempta struggled to sit up, to get his bearings, to understand the situation. His head ... so foggy.

  He swung his feet over the edge of the table. They struck the floor with a wet smack. Like hinges, the flaps of skin meant to cover his insides flopped shut. Morrison’s gagging sounds came from nearby as Clempta’s organs pushed through the flaps of skin holding them inside.

  A sort of pressure released and Clempta thought of a cystic zit being popped. He opened his eyes to a blurry, brightly lit room void of warmth and furniture. He stumbled forward, slipped and reached out, sending a tray of surgical instruments clattering to the floor. His intestines, partially held within by the flaps of skin, hung to the floor in a neat pile. He coiled the visceral organ around his hand like a length of rope.