The weirder thing is what the fucker started to say to me.
A back-of-box recipe for meatloaf was my attempt at rekindling sit-down meals. Phones in the middle, the whole old-fashioned deal. She had asked me how my workday was, and I was about to return the favor when I noticed it.
A lump.
On the right of her belly, poking out from her post-work pajama shirt. It wasn’t too noticeable. You could forgive anyone for missing it. But seven years of married life will have you catching the slightest freckle out of place. And that lump was wrong.
When I pointed it out she all but brushed it off, as if she already went through the process of worrying and letting it go. But I demanded we get a professional to check it out, and after some back and forth she agreed.
The word “malignant neoplasm” was what he kept using. I thought, we’re not fucking doctoral candidates, we’re people. It took six questions just to get the son of a bitch to say tumor.
Looking at her in the observation chair, the lump seemed to have grown in the twelve hours since I had first seen it. Impossible I know, the doctor said the same, but again, you know these things. That swelling knot of evil making its home in her left abdomen, I started to feel it sinking its roots in.
That’s right about when it said its first word to me.
feed
It might be hard to grasp, but there was no misunderstanding where this voice had come from. It had beamed straight to me, missing those other two entirely. The squeaky, almost infantile speech relayed its primitive instincts direct to me. Completely oblivious to the sentience of the body it was to feed from. It seemed to relish in its security.
It was like the lump was mocking me.
I wonder if it knew the doctor would soon tell us the tumor was currently inoperable. The medical jargon is beyond me, but something in its placement made it a precarious surgery, too much of a risk. Other options had to be exhausted before it grew large enough to cut out.
She and the doctor seemed to understand this fine, however I couldn’t make real sense of it.
But it would eventually be cut out. Peeled into the light by scalpels and dug through until its deepest roots were exhumed. I took solace in that thought as we drove home.
Its next little jest came at breakfast. I tried to maintain normalcy with some french toast, since it’s one of the only things I can dependly cook well. She was going to grab for her fourth slab when it spoke.
more
I couldn’t help but wince as she went through her fourth piece in a few bites. Then to the fifth. She was never a big eater, especially with unhealthier foods. It seemed to be…orchestrating her hunger. She saw how I looked at her, said it was just a craving. I pretended to have to leave early, unable to sit still watching her any longer.
Now I knew. It was fucking with me. Keeping me in the loop while it fed on her.
Did you know tumors rewire the way the body processes nutrients? They greedily take the good stuff for themselves, leaving the host body with scraps. You can eat more, try to offset it, but it’ll just feed the fucker more. The host gets weaker and weaker while it gets fatter.
Not the best wiki read for my lunch break I suppose.
In bed that night I held her close, feeling the warmth of her body as I had thousands of nights before. We would joke she was a human heated blanket. A rose-scented radiator. It must’ve been reading my thoughts that night.
warmth
It was feeding on the burning of fuel in her body. Enjoying its little undisturbed refuge. I had to move away in bed, the mere thought driving me up the wall with anger. I felt it on my back as she scooted over to me, pressing it up into my spine.
That fucking lump. Bulging right out. Right there.
Infuriating in how seemingly simple it is. If you have a pimple, you can pop it. An annoying scab, you can scrape it. But for some reason this has to be worked around. The most obvious, outward issue, and for some reason we can’t just deal with it.
safe inside here
“Did you hear that?”
I had to just ask. Even though her confused response was a certainty. I told her to brush it off as I closed my eyes to try to sleep.
I spent months hearing its squeaky little fucking voice.
Every time a new treatment was tried, or tests were done, I’d hold my breath hoping maybe he’d finally croaked. Maybe the medicines could choke him out. Sever whatever vessel connection he had in her body.
And every time it’d wait a second. Just until I had some hope. Then it’d speak again.
growing faster now
They scheduled a surgery day, said the tumor had grown large enough to operate on, but the date was impossibly far. The idea of waiting just exacerbated my anger further. She said she noticed a change in me, getting more temperamental I guess.
If she knew the things I was hearing she’d be doing the same.
I thought it ironic, because the changes were most obvious in her. That fucker had tripled in size, bulging to the point that it seemed ready to peel its way out. She had grown frailer. Her beautiful tanned skin running pale. I was now helping her up the stairs every night to bed.
Yet still the doctors were content with a surgery date weeks away.
I wasn’t.
I was in bed watching as she laid on her back. In recent months its size had become a painful nuisance, forcing her between a few less-than comfortable sleeping positions.This particular one had brought the tumor front and center. Always there intruding, rubbing its presence in my face.
boring through her
After hearing hundreds of these their variance was mostly uninteresting, but what was notable about this one was her face.
Looking straight at me, I knew.
She had heard it too.
Then the discomfort began. She began to writhe, almost a sort of movement starting to take place beneath her skin. I placed my hands around it, feeling its hardness, but also some gestation. Had it taken so much from her that it was beginning to become an entity itself?
She asked me to call an ambulance, but I shook my head. At first she seemed combative but its next words changed her mind.
tearing my way out
There was no time. She knew this, I knew this. Ten years of marriage meant with one brief look, we could come to a hard mutual understanding in mere seconds.
We knew what we had to do.
I don’t know who tore the first hole. It might’ve been her, those nails were sharper than mine. We dug in together though. I remember the look of surprise on her face, probably also not expecting it to be so deep inside. I repeated “I love you” to her. Over and over.
I did the heavy work. Eventually telling her to relax. She let my slippery hands get to work. Whatever tearing it had done wasn’t good enough, and soon…
I was able to extract it, for lack of a better term.
It was completely quiet now. It seemed to shut it up quite quickly.
It felt much smaller than I had imagined it would be. All that swelling for that?
No sense in dignifying it I guess, I didn’t even look directly at it. Just tossing it aside into my bedside waste basket.
I curled up beside her. Drifting peacefully into my first deep sleep in months.
It felt like days later when I was awoken by a firm hand on my shoulder.
To this day I don’t understand why the court kept saying the words double homicide.