Excerpt from “Tail” (previously published in PMS:poemmemoirstory Journal)
After Stacey Levine
I woke up because something was pressing against me, a hard knot at my lower back. I rolled over and felt the bed, the sheets, the quilt. Nothing. It made me think of camping, the roots and stones under the sleeping bag. I stood up and ran my arm in sweeping motions over the mattress. Nothing. Sun poured across the bed.
Even as I bent to check the mattress, I could feel whatever it was still pressing against me, in the same spot. Slowly, I reached around, hiked up my nightgown and put my hand on my back.
There was a lump under my skin. Hard, bony, unmovable. I carried a stool into the bathroom and stood on it. I turned and lifted my nightgown, and there, perfectly centered above the crack of my ass, was the lump. Sideways it looked like a little tent, as though someone were pushing a drumstick through from the other side. I stood there and stared. My pale bottom and thighs, the strange thing on my back.
I got down and put the stool back in the kitchen. I stood and looked out the window. There was a cold hard light on the morning. The neighbor boy slammed out of his house and ran down the weedy driveway between my rental house and his. I watched him, his thin legs beneath him, and I thought, Cancer.
Cancer! I put my fingers in my mouth, four of them, and bit down. I was alive and whole, it was impossible. I thought about crying, or calling my mother or brother but I didn’t do those things. Just stood there, vaguely wishing there was coffee, and then I made some. Maybe I shouldn’t have made coffee if I was dying of cancer but what the hell else would I do on a Sunday morning? I couldn’t go to the doctor’s office. And nobody went to the emergency room for lumps, did they? What was done with lumps anyhow? Removed, dissolved? Did they usually appear overnight?
I watered the plants. I read the comics and watched a movie. Sometimes whole blocks of hours went by and I forgot about the lump, and when I remembered it, I wasn’t as frightened as I felt I should have been. It was backwards. I felt as though there was something wrong with me because I wasn’t frightened, not because I had the growth on my back.
It was like I’d been waiting for it.