Cancer
They scooped off the wrong tit. Then they scooped off the right tit, which was the really wrong one, lumpy as a fist.
She had a swelling granuloma. Her tumor had a tumor. Though it was benign, it gave her a burning mammary infection, after which she renewed relations with Nick because he knew a thing or two about acquiring sub-market Ativan. They said the cancer was Borderline Advanced—she loved that term—Stage 2, meaning it was spreading tendrils but they only had to cut it and she’d probably live.
For three months after they cut it, her chest felt sunburned inside. She woke up, ate Ativan, and slept. The meat below her shoulders was red sore. When she grabbed bouquets above her head at work, she’d pop a stitch. When a customer yelled that they wanted tulips not hydrangeas, she saw swimming iridescent commas and her radiated heart would skit through her brain. Then, slowly, she got the flowers right again, and it was fine.
She told Nick that she felt like a wood doll with fire licking her. A wood woman crawling through a hatch with blades whittling her flatter and flatter. If there was a life beyond the hatch, so what, there was the whittling or else the fire. That must be hard for you, Nick said. She considered this. No, it was easy to crawl and crawl. After losing even the worst thing there was just more losing, say, the feeling of Nick’s hand when he pinched her nipples. Then, slowly, she got used to it, and it was fine.
He offered to buy her new tits because he knew she loved her old ones. Her old ones were stout teardrops she could make obscene with a tug down of the neckline, demure with a tug up, Swiss Army Tits, but she said no no no, perfect tits would be the worst thing, a bolt-on effigy of the corpsehood that almost took her for no reason. She ate clean and didn’t smoke and still she almost died and would. The medical term for new tits is Reconstruction.
After she said absolutely no new tits, Nick asked a few more times. He hadn’t changed. She hadn’t expected he would. The first time they met again, she looked him up on White Pages and staked out his new apartment at a cafe across the street. She nursed a cappuccino for hours before he walked in. She waved him over and asked if he had downers. He said it was fate. Later, she told him how she found him. He said that was fate too.
Not long after that, a man held a gun at her at work. She wondered if that was fate. He wore a ski mask and made her raise her arms like in the movies. She wondered what kind of stupid freak stuck up a flower shop. There was a credit union right next door, and she only ever saw kids working there. They’d probably just give you money if you asked. He blurted thanks when she opened the register. He wasn’t really stupid. It was Valentine’s Day, and he took half the cash they made all year.
After she gave him the money, he stepped back like he was leaving so she stepped forward and lowered her dead sore arms. He shot her in the left arm, the upper flab, and walked out. At first she wondered why her arm was wet. It felt like an ice pick chipping it. When she realized she was shot, she felt like the loneliest woman in the world. She thought: I’m shot, and my tits are gone. Maybe she was the stupid freak.
There were glass shards and knocked-over roses and puckered pink buds lumped in puddles on the bright linoleum. She wrapped her bicep with a few yards of the silk her boss used to make fake pink roses and called a cab for the hospital where they’d scooped off her tits. She locked up for the night, though the front glass was shattered open. Anyone could walk through and take it all.
It was tight hot where blood poured out her arm. She felt how she’d felt those months she couldn’t sleep on her side, with a scab unfolding under her. When the cab came she was holding roses she’d weeded from the floor. Clean up the mess, why not. She took the roses to the hospital where a woman with spidery eyelashes and smooth beige skin led her through double doors, through a long empty corridor, through a door at the far left end, into a small yellow room with a cot under a papery blue sheet. The wound was a punctured black fish eye. It stung like it used to when Nick pinched her nipple hard.
With light wounds, the flesh pushes the bullet out eventually, the doctor said. But I often remove it because people don’t like the lump. It’s a cosmetic procedure. I can order lidocaine if you want.
He said Cosmetic like he meant Unimportant. He wore a wedding ring. She wondered how he’d feel if his wife cut off her tits.
They’d take the bullet to an evidence locker. She wouldn’t keep it, though she’d tell Nick she had. All they gave her that night was permission to mix painkillers while nociceptors sang in her arm tissue. She learned that word from the trauma doctor. She learned many things from him that she wanted to tell Nick, like how there’s usually more damage in digging out the bullet than in leaving it for the body to surround. What she wanted was to tell Nick something that didn’t mean: Look at me, crawling and crawling.
While the doctor took the bullet out, she gushed on the cot. You’re losing a lot of blood, he said. You’re losing a lot. But, hey, you’ll just keep making more.
Selen Ozturk (@writingenjoyer) is a San Francisco-based writer born in Istanbul. Her writing appears or will soon in Evergreen Review, Hobart, Bayou Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, and SFGATE. She has received support from Bread Loaf, Grub Street, and The Writers’ Grotto. She works as a journalist.