The Lump

by Christopher X. Ryan

 

I called Mom at work, said I had a lump in my breast. “Men don’t get lumps,” she said. “This isn’t funny.”

“I can’t touch it. Flames radiate through my chest.”

She drove home, dug her fingers into the flames. I pictured her own lump from years prior lying in a landfill somewhere, encased in plastic with her name on it. Mom Joyce.

“Stop,” I said. “Jesus.”

Mom called Dad, had the same conversation. “I feel it,” she told him—him sitting on his back deck ten miles away, a finch eating seeds from his hand, the flutter of wings audible through the phone.

My girlfriend Sara cried herself to sleep; I had no idea she felt this strongly about my pain. My feelings for her, though, were multifaceted. She had a jutty chin and when angry bounced her foot as if tuned in to some unheard rhythm. The lump seemed to be making me feel something for her at last, as if it were pressing against a tender section of my heart.

An appointment was arranged with the same guy who’d excised Mom’s lump. A week later Dad and I were on the first ferry. Two hours later we were in Boston. We killed two more hours in Faneuil Hall. I arrived at the doctor’s office sleepy and satiated and sat among a dozen middle-aged women. They stared into their hands and coughed softly but no one conversed. I flipped through Women’s Day, aware they that were tossing looks my way.

The doctor said I could have the flames removed but it wasn’t serious. It might even go away. Fifteen minutes later I was back in the lobby where the women were sniffling dryly and looking at my tan legs. I’d been swimming all summer.

Three hours later, as we pulled up to my mother’s house, we saw half a dozen people zigzagging back and forth between our garage and the neighbor’s. My brother approached, hugged me, asked about the lump. “I’ll live,” I said.

“Good. We need help.”

Our neighbor George had lopped off his thumb with his table saw. He’d then walked over to the garage where my brother was practicing guitar and asked for a ride to the hospital. So the radius for the thumb was fairly wide.

Sara explained this as she hugged me, glad that the lump wasn’t really a lump. Her gaze was hard; she kept glancing at the grass. I got some lemonade and joined the search. On it went, past dark, fireflies twisted around our flashlight beams.

Then George himself came home, all sewn up, rendering the point moot. “There’s no thumb here,” he says, swishing his bare foot through the grass. The machine had pulverized the chunk of flesh and melded it with the sawdust. We’d wasted half the day looking for something that wasn’t there. I could have gone swimming. I could have gone somewhere.

 

Christopher X. Ryan lives in Helsinki, Finland, where he works as a writer, editor, and ghostwriter. Born on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, he has an MFA from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School in Boulder, Colorado. His work has been published in a wide variety of journals and magazines and he is represented by the Trentin Agency for his novel BOGORE. Chris can be found at TheWordPunk.com.

 

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