The Lump

The Lump by Ken Pisani

Issue 2.17 | Fiction

Cover Art: L. Erickson

He ignored it at first. Something hard beneath the surface, pressing against the skin left of his stomach as if trying to get out. Need to lose some weight, Darryl thought, dismissing any cause for concern. He knew there had been no family history of cancer—none of the tumors, lumps, or growths passed down in other families like eye color or buck teeth—not even among his extended family of aunties and uncles, bastard sons and daughters, half-siblings and cousins many times removed. Regardless, ignoring it seemed foolhardy, considering that Darryl’s family medical history also included a father who disregarded every symptom of disease he ever felt until all the illness festering inside, tired of being snubbed, killed him all at once.

Darryl continued his days and weeks as if nothing were different, going to the gym on his way to work as a Sorry-to-Bother-You telemarketer, out for drinks with his friends, home for dinner once a week with his mother and the brother who never moved out and seemed inclined to die someday in the room they once shared as boys.

“Shouldn’t you be callin’ some poor bastard at home, ruining his dinner?” Kenny chortled through a gob of mac and cheese.

“Every time,” Darryl sighed, because his brother Kenny did, in fact, do this every time. “How do you still live in the room we grew up in, and have the audacity to make fun of my job?”

“Audacity, that’s a good thing, innit?”

“It is when Barack says it,” Darryl said, draining his beer and getting up for another.

“Keep pouring beer into that belly, it’s gonna burst,” Kenny chortled some more.

“Last time you were in a gym, they called it Phys Ed.”

Darryl pulled open the refrigerator door festooned with photos of them as boys, long-dead uncles, a grocery list, and a magnet with the face of Jesus.

“Get me one.”

“Get it yourself.”

“Boys!” Mrs. Turner scolded. “I won’t have you fighting at the dinner table.”

“Bunk bed-sleeping motherfucker,” Darryl muttered, setting a beer on the table just out of Kenny’s reach.

“You okay?” his mother asked, leaning in for a closer look at Darryl. “Something isn’t right.”

It startled him. His mother was all intuition; she knew things she couldn’t know and events that hadn’t happened yet. That her sister, his auntie, was pregnant, that a cousin far away had been shot. That her husband, despite no outward signs of distress, wouldn’t live to see morning, and so she held him through the night. When a trusted neighbor she never liked was arrested in a child porn raid, and shocked neighbors gathered in the street, she never even moved from her chair. I told yous fell from her lips like incantations. If some dogs could smell cancer, Darryl knew, so could his mother. Now, he was goddamn worried.

“Maybe his Bluetooth headset gave him a brain tumor,” Kenny said.

The food caught in Kenny’s throat when his mother hit him with the spork half of the heavy wooden salad tongs.

“You take that back, you take that goddamn back!!” she shouted at him.

“All right,” he cowered. “I’m sorry!”

“Didn’t tell you to apologize, said you take that goddamn back!”

“I take it back!”

“Now go to your room,” she ordered.

For a moment Kenny stared at her. Then he got up from the table. Darryl snorted a laugh.

“He’s doing it,” Darryl said, enjoying the moment like a gift. “Actually going to his room like a bad little boy.”

His mother hit Darryl with the same salad spork and he flinched and yelped, and then the two of them finished their meal in silence.

Darryl stopped on the way home to have sex with a woman who had no other interest in him beyond the love-making. At first, that was fine with Darryl; if you’d asked him to describe a perfect relationship, this might have been it, beautiful and willing as Wanda was with no further obligation required of him. But over time, it had come to irk him.

“How come we never go out?” he said.

“Ask me nice.”

“Would you like to go to dinner sometime?”

“Nope,” she replied.

“Why not?”

“You are not relationship material,” she said, kissing him. “You are all dick and tongue.”

Darryl chuckled, unduly pleased at her assessment of him, and dropped the subject. Wanda laid her hand across his stomach.

“You getting fatter?”

“Oh, so now you’re some kind of Guess-your-weight carny?”

“Can’t help it if I feel more girth,” she said, sliding her hand across his stomach. “What’s that?”

“What?” he replied, knowing full well what.

“Something under the skin.”

“It’s nothing,” he said, and began to sweat.

“If that shitty job of yours gives you health insurance, get it looked at.”

“Why does everyone think my job is so shitty?”

“Know any little kids who want to grow up to call people at home to sell them stuff they don’t need?”

He knew it was a rhetorical question and remained quiet. Suddenly, she pulled her hand away.

“That shit moved,” she gasped.

“You’re crazy,” he said, sitting up and stooping to pick up his clothes from the floor. But he’d felt it too.

The doctor at the PPO assured Darryl he had nothing to worry about. Probably. It was likely a sebaceous cyst, or a fatty lipoma. Probably. Maybe a swollen lymph node, which is sometimes but rarely caused by cancer. So probably not. She could remove it in a simple office procedure, close him with a few stitches and send him home.

Darryl agreed, and the doctor froze the area with an aerosol spray and injected a little numbing agent under the skin. He’d be fully awake but, reclined to a prone position on the examination table, he didn’t have to watch. Before entering the doctor’s office he’d swallowed a Xanax from his shirt pocket, stolen from his mother’s medicine cabinet, and was feeling pretty chill. He popped in his air pods, put on a little Coltrane. Suddenly recalling that the saxophonist had died of cancer, he switched to Otis Redding, who’d died in a plane crash, which Darryl considered less an ominous portent here in his doctor’s office. He was halfway through “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” and pondering that he’d never loved anyone at all so far, except his mother (a different kind of love that didn’t count). He needed to stop the easy booty calls to Wanda and find a woman he could love who’d love him back, a resolve that pleased him. He hadn’t heard his doctor gasp and swear and drop her scalpel, but he felt the draft from the open door and looked up to see his doctor joined by two others in white coats staring in astonishment at his abdomen.

Darryl looked down to see a deformed, fist-sized face staring up at him from the small hole in his stomach.

“The fuck!” he exclaimed, loud enough to hear himself over the chorus.

He pulled out his air pods and sat up, and the thing protruding from his belly seemed to flinch. His doctor vomited into the sink while the senior doctor calmly snapped photos on his phone.

“Fetus in fetu,” he mused. “I’d heard of it, but never expected to see one.”

“Fuck-what in what, now?” Darryl shouted.

“Is that thing alive?” the other doctor asked, leaning in for a closer look and, as it looked back at him, the doctor with the phone assured him, Yes, it sure appears to be.

“A twin,” the doctor continued, finally putting away his phone. “Absorbed by you in the womb. A parasite, really, tapped into your blood supply, drawing the nutrients it needs to stay alive.”

Darryl’s doctor vomited some more into the sink.

“Well, cut it the fuck out!” Darryl demanded, still (understandably) shouting.

“Oh, we can’t do that!” the doctor declared. “Don’t you understand? It’s alive. Primum non nocere.”

“Save the exorcist talk! Just finish the procedure!”

“Can’t do it.”

“It’s my body. The thing is in my body.”

“That’s exactly the problem. It can’t live autonomously outside your body, so to remove it would violate all kinds of laws and statutes—not to mention the ethical issues.”

“Give me the knife,” Darryl demanded. “I’ll finish it.”

“That would be murder,” the senior doctor declared. “You’d be in serious trouble. I’ll have to provide these photos and the doctor’s report to the proper authorities. If the fetu were to suddenly disappear, you could face criminal charges, and even jail time.”

“I think I need to go home,” Darryl’s doctor whimpered.

“I understand completely,” the senior doctor agreed.

“What about sewing me back up?”

“There’s a lot of moving parts here, Mr. . . .”

“Turner,” his doctor offered weakly as she slinked out the door.

“Mr. Turner. I think we all need to take some time to properly digest this . . .”

The other remaining doctor tried unsuccessfully to stifle a laugh.

“. . . and revisit at a later date.”

“So you’re sending me home? With a gnarly puppet head hanging out my stomach?”

“Don’t forget your co-pay on the way out.”

At home, Darryl washed down a bong hit with a long swig of wine. He thought he’d heard a muffled grunt when he snapped on his seatbelt and had driven home squirming in discomfort. He refused to look again under his shirt, and his current state of inebriation allowed him almost to forget it. He further distracted himself watching a reality show where attractive young people pretended to be falling in love minutes after meeting in a Jacuzzi. They said things like, “I never felt this way before” and “I never met anyone like you,” and Darryl began to finish their sentences by muttering, “on TV.”

“I really hope this can be something special . . .”

“. . . on TV,” Darryl said.

“You’re just the most amazing person . . .”

“. . . on TV,” he giggled.

“I waited my whole life to feel something like this . . .”

“. . . on TV.”

But that last one wasn’t Darryl.

Darryl pulled up his shirt to see the tiny head grinning stupidly at him. It started to giggle, also a little high, and Darryl passed out on the couch.

It was nearly lunchtime the next day when he awoke, still on the couch, hours late for work and with a hangover. Sitting up, he clutched his head and groaned, and the thing at his midsection groaned too. Darryl headed to the bathroom and took off his shirt, standing before the mirror. They both stared at each other.

“Please tell me you didn’t talk last night,” Darryl pleaded. “I imagined it.”

“Yes, talk,” it croaked.

The thing had learned small bits about the world in Darryl’s belly, like parents who read to their babies in the womb or play Mozart in the hopes of gestating a prodigy. But because its cognitive abilities had continued to develop long past that of a fetus, it was able over the years to process information and imagine the world outside. It was angry at Darryl for trying to excise him from his body, and especially at the doctor, whom it might have bitten had the numbing agent not rendered it nearly inert.

Darryl found another Xanax and forced this one into the mouth of the thing lurching from his midsection. It struggled and even attempted to bite him, but ultimately swallowed. Darryl pulled a black dress sock from his drawer over its head, hoping it might succumb to sleep like a bird in a covered cage. He called in sick (without mentioning the nature of his condition), and his boss was annoyed that Darryl had called his personal cell. Darryl wasn’t sure if being bothered by an unwanted caller was irony or hypocrisy or some other thing people often confused, and he would have called bullshit on his employer if he didn’t need the job and health insurance more than ever. 

“I need your help,” he told Kenny at home, his younger sibling grinning wider than necessary at the sentence he never believed he’d hear from his big brother.

They walked into the room they used to share, and Darryl unbuttoned his shirt and pulled the sock away. The fetu drooled a little but otherwise remained asleep and unresponsive.

“The. Hell. . . ?”

Darryl explained his predicament while his brother looked at it closely.

“Damn, is it snoring?” Kenny said.

“I slipped it a Xanax.”

“You stealing those from mama? She’s been blaming me.”

“Can we focus here? You have to help get this out of me.”

“How am I supposed to do that? We gave each other tattoos in middle school, and both got infections!”

“We’re smarter now, right? We’ll sterilize the knife, and swab everything with antibacterial.”

“You need to see a doctor.”

“They won’t do it. Say it’s illegal.”

“I’m not going to jail for you!”

“No one’s going to jail. No one has to know.”

Just then, the fetu groaned and rolled its head.

“Damn, it’s waking up,” Darryl said. “Give me another Xanax.”

“Don’t have any.”

“I know you, you got a stash somewhere.”

“Fine,” Kenny said, and plucked a tiny pill from a colorful assortment in an ashtray hidden in his sock drawer.

Their mother entered with a tray of cookies, as she had so many times before, without knocking.

“How are my boys getting along?”

Mrs. Turner stopped dead in her tracks, and her smile vanished. She stared at the thing extruding from her eldest son’s midsection. Its eyes opened, and it looked straight at her.

“Mama,” it said in a voice that rasped like sandpaper.

She had to be helped into a chair, Kenny grabbing the cookies before they fell.

They sat for a very long time, Mrs. Turner in the room’s only chair, fanning herself, reciting “Lord have mercy” over and over, the boys sitting across from her on the lower bunk. Kenny bit into a cookie. The thing looked up at him. Kenny broke off a small piece of cookie and surreptitiously fed it to its tiny mouth.

“Good,” it mumbled.

“Don’t feed the damn thing,” Darryl shouted, jumping to his feet.

“Well if starving it would kill it, it’d already be dead,” Kenny argued.

“It gets its nutrients directly from me. But that’s not the point.”

“Dear God, what is happening?” their mother said and began to weep.

Darryl explained again, this time to his mother, what the doctors had told him. She took it all in and confessed that she had been so certain all those years ago that she’d been pregnant with twins, even after the doctor told her she wasn’t. She was so sure, she had a name picked out and waited for Nathan to follow Darryl.

And now, here was Nathan.

She convinced her sons not to make any hasty decisions—and there certainly wouldn’t be any damn killing under her roof. They’d all sleep on it and maybe in the morning, with God’s good grace, some viable solution might present itself. Darryl passed a note to his brother and turned his back on him so the thing couldn’t see Kenny press another Xanax into a small bit of cookie. He fed it again, and again it said, “Good.”

“Lord have mercy,” their mother repeated, and left the room.

The thing slept through the afternoon, and the Turners sat for an early dinner. Darryl and Kenny finished every beer in the house and laughed with each other in a way that they had not in a very long time. When the conversation briefly turned to the elephant in Darryl’s stomach, Mrs. Turner forbade further discussion. Soon, they were all tired and went to bed. Mrs. Turner hugged Kenny first and then Darryl, holding him a beat longer and, with the bulge pressing against her, had effectively hugged all three of her children.

In the middle of the night, Darryl’s stomach started to itch. He climbed down from the upper bunk and made his way to the bathroom where he turned on the light and lifted his shirt. The thing looked back at him in the mirror, guiltily, both tiny hands extruding as it attempted to pull itself free.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Darryl sighed, too tired to offer resistance or even muster the revulsion called for by the situation.

“Cramped,” it said. “Stretching.”

Its nails were at least seven inches long and curling, and Derek bore the scratch marks on his belly that had awakened him. Sighing again, he fumbled through the medicine cabinet until he found the nail clippers. He sat on the toilet and carefully trimmed its nails.

“Thank you,” it croaked, and sat quietly while he finished.

He returned to the room of his boyhood where Kenny, awake now, could see how worn out he was, even in the darkness. He sat up and wrote a note, handing it to Darryl.

I’LL DO IT

“You sure?” Darryl whispered.

“You’re my brother, man,” he replied. “But not here. Not in mom’s house.”

They stopped at a 24-hour CVS on the way to Darryl’s house, its interior lighting particularly harsh at this late/early hour. Pharmacy section closed behind a roll-up gate, empty aisles, a couple of teenagers trailed by a security guard, and a lone check-out employee perusing a tabloid magazine featuring Hollywood’s Fattest Stars. Wordlessly, the brothers filled a basket with gauze, antibiotic ointment, hydrogen peroxide, lidocaine cream, butterfly stitches. They had difficulty locating chloroform and scalpels and quietly asked the cashier. But not quietly enough.

“Murder! Murder!” the thing shouted, thrashing underneath Darryl’s shirt.

In their haste to race from the store, Kenny still carried the full basket, all its items security tagged, and now the store alarm added to the chaos. The store’s security guard held them until police arrived and, after investigating the commotion coming from Darryl’s stomach, those officers were understandably disturbed by what they found. They cuffed the brothers and put them in the backseat of their squad car, where Kenny was just grateful not to have been shot. Placed in a cell at the precinct, alone, they argued over who to contact with their one phone call. Darryl knew a lawyer friend while Kenny wanted to call their mother.

“Mama,” the thing croaked again, and Darryl slumped on his cot, holding his own head between his hands as if trying to crush it.

After about an hour, the police captain himself showed up at their cell with a chaplain. The captain lifted Darryl’s shirt for a closer look at what had been described to him.

“Please don’t kill me,” the fetu said hoarsely, and the captain reacted not at all while the chaplain clutched his rosary closer.

“A miracle,” the captain said, and the chaplain nodded his agreement.

“Yeah?” Darryl growled. “You take it then. Or maybe you got a daughter at home, she can walk around with it during bikini season?”

“God didn’t give it to us,” the captain replied.

“He chose to bless you with this,” said the chaplain.

Crazy zealot motherfuckers, Darryl thought.

“You’re free to go,” the captain told Kenny.

Kenny had seen enough movies to know that the presence of a prison chaplain meant only one thing, that they were going to walk Darryl to the electric chair. Kenny had seen too many movies; they were of course going to do no such thing, but Kenny rushed home to tell his mother anyway.

“You’re among friends, son,” the captain said, sitting on the cot next to Darryl.

“Yeah? My friends drink too much, make bad choices and give terrible advice.”

“Maybe you need better friends, then. Look, I think I can piece together what’s going on here. And it’s morally wrong.”

“So I’m supposed to be stuck with this forever?” Darryl replied.

“God never gives us more than we can carry,” the chaplain said.

“People jump out of windows or eat the wrong end of a gun every day.”

“Is that what you’re thinking?” the captain asked. “Suicide?”

“Nah,” Darryl waved him off. “Just calling bullshit on what we can and can’t carry.”

“You’ve been given a gift,” the chaplain said. “It’s not our place to wonder why.”

“You gonna charge me with something?” Darryl asked, ignoring the chaplain.

“In the morning,” the captain replied. “In the meantime, we can’t let you harm yourself. Or others.”

He waved to the guard, and two other guards brought in a straitjacket. Darryl resisted as they strapped him in.

“Fuck this! I want my motherfucking phone call!”

“When you’re calmer.”

“You can’t do this!”

“We can do anything. We’re the police.”

By the time his mother arrived, she was apoplectic. It hadn’t helped that Kenny told her they were going to execute her son, even if she didn’t quite believe him. (Darryl was always the smart one, Kenny prone to hysteria; she wondered where the fetu—Nathan?—fell on that spectrum.) Mrs. Turner demanded to see her son but was refused by the desk sergeant.

“I want to speak to someone in charge,” she shouted at him.

“I’m riding the desk tonight,” he told her. “That makes me in charge. And I was told—”

“You were told,” she cut him off, “by someone higher than you. That’s the person—man or woman—I want to see.”

“The captain isn’t available.”

“You make his ass available,” she shouted, slamming her fist on his desk.

Two officers approached and took hold of her. She hit one with her handbag and he backed off while the other tightened his grip. She swooned in place, and the officer’s attempt to restrain her suddenly became an effort to keep her on her feet. Kenny was unconcerned, believing it a performance by his mother to lure the captain from his office. But as they helped her, struggling for breath, to the bench, it became apparent this wasn’t a ploy.

“Damn it,” she gasped. “I was hoping to see one of you boys married first.”

“Don’t, mama,” Kenny pleaded. “I’ll get married!”

“Start small. Get a job first,” she smiled at him and touched his face. “Take care of your brothers. Both of them.”

By the time they let Kenny in to see his brother, he couldn’t speak. Red-eyed and alone, he didn’t have to. Darryl knew immediately their mother was gone.

“Mama,” Nathan wept under the straitjacket.

Kenny couldn’t convince Darryl, in his despondence, to call that lawyer friend of his. He soon appeared in court, handcuffed behind his back, the prosecution arguing he presented a danger to the fetu he could strangle or smother at any moment. Darryl stood silent, refusing to enter a plea. His court-appointed attorney pleaded not guilty on his behalf. The judge, agreeing that the defendant still posed a threat to the fetu, denied bail.

The magnitude of what Darryl was up against became apparent as they made their way from the courtroom through opposing protestors under HIS BODY HIS CHOICE signs and LIFE BEGINS AT THE FETU banners. Media attention grew when Darryl, still silent and confined in a straitjacket, began a hunger strike. Cable news reported that the man charged with attempted fratricide of his unborn twin—accompanied by pictures of both—refused any food or water or attempts to force-feed him.

“Told you to get that looked at,” Wanda muttered, sadder than she could remember, and then shut off the TV.

After two weeks, Darryl was moved to a hospital and placed in restraints. He was given nutrients intravenously and, it was decided, to feed the fetu directly. It gobbled the pudding but didn’t like much else—especially the soup. Too salty, it hissed.

It flirted with the nurses who fed it and it was pleased to have caused one RN to giggle at an easy quip, although most of the staff resisted interacting too much. But the small bit of food going to the fetu’s tiny stomach wasn’t enough to sustain Darryl. He soon slipped into a coma, and a decision had to be made.

“We have to save it,” the hospital administrator insisted, and the others agreed.

—

Kenny took Darryl’s old job at the telemarketing company. A dying wish by his mother, after all. Darryl’s former boss, feeling pretty terrible about how things turned out, had agreed to try Kenny out and both were surprised to find that he was pretty good at this, affable and persuasive. Kenny also now understood that the job wasn’t simply about harassing people, and he wished he could take back all the negative things he said to Darryl about work. About everything.

Kenny came home to find Nathan in the baby carrier on the couch being fed by the nurse they hired—the one who giggled, paid for by the state.

“See you tomorrow,” she said on her way out, and Nathan gave a little wave with his tiny hand.

Kenny pulled a beer from the refrigerator and poured a little into a sippy cup for Nathan. They drank quietly and watched a reality show where attractive young people pretended to be falling in love minutes after meeting in a Jacuzzi.

“It’s hard to let go,” the blonde on the show said, about to face elimination. “This has been the most amazing journey . . .”

“. . . on teevee,” Nathan hissed, and chortled a little.

—

 Ken Pisani is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter and member of the Writers Guild of America West. His debut novel “AMP’D,” published by St. Martin’s Press, was a Los Angeles Times bestseller and finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Ken has also contributed to The Saturday Evening Post, The Louisville Review, Salon, Publishers Weekly, Huffington Post, Literary Hub, Washington Independent Review of Books, Carve, Cedar Hills Press, and other publications, as well as the anthology More Tonto Short Stories, published in the U.S. and U.K. Learn more on his website and Bluesky.