Lump
- Mar 12, 2021
- 6 min read
by Lindy Biller
(n) a compact mass, especially one without a defined or regular shape.
Phrases containing lump:
1. Lump of clay, thick and moldable, ready for shaping. The first thing I ever made was a coffee mug for my husband’s 30th birthday. The mug was squat and plain, speckled brown like a bird’s egg. He loved it, posted it on Instagram, drank from it every morning. Its lip was stubbled with imperfections. Its rounded handle was too small for his fingers. When it shattered, he glued the largest pieces back together. He says he likes it that way, all the cracks showing. In summer, the kids use it as a vase for dandelions. The blooms float and turn soggy and end up on the compost heap, and the kids go out to gather more. There are always more. In winter it mostly holds pencils.
2. Lump of sugar. On Thursdays we have tea parties. It’s become a sacred thing. Scalloped plates, cloth napkins, caffeine-free tea (rooibos chai today), some kind of store-bought pastry cut into quarters. I wait until the tea is warm but not hot, because my children haven’t mastered the art of small sips. I fill their oversized teacups (gleaming white, multifaceted like cut diamonds). My six-year-old drops one sugar cube into his cup and quickly pulls back his hand, as though feeding a snake. One lump or two? Such a clumsy word for glittering, six-sided sweetness. I add a splash of milk. We stir. My boys have invited guests: a plush brontosaurus, a plastic dump truck, a mass of legos they tell me is a dragon. It’s the best party I’ve been to in years. I sip my tea without sugar, trying not to think about the future.
3. Lumping along. I first encountered this one while reading Winnie the Pooh at bedtime. Just lumping along, Christopher Robin said, about the heffalump. There are heffalumps everywhere. Rooting around under beds, roaring through air vents, skulking in storm drains. They want the thing you love the most. I tell my children that monsters aren’t real, but they’re too smart to fall for it. I tell them I’ve monster-proofed the house, but they bring up reasonable concerns: once, a squirrel got in through the chimney and wedged itself into the furnace pipe and liquified into foul, blackish goop. The HVAC worker nearly threw up. Once, a mouse slipped in through a propped-open door and soon the walls began skittering like dry leaves. My kids crawl into my bed every night, and my husband drags his pillow and blanket to the couch, desperate for uninterrupted sleep. Once, we found a dead sparrow in the hollow beneath the kitchen cupboard. Tufts of feather, toothpick-sized bones. I still don’t know how it got inside. We smelled its death for weeks before we found it.
4. Lump of coal. For the kids who get themselves naughty-listed. My dad did this once, an attempt at a joke. He bought a generic red Christmas stocking from Target, slapped my name on it, and filled it up with lump charcoal (close enough). The stocking looked like a deformed, tumor-eaten limb squeezed into a shrunken sweater. When I started crying before I even looked inside, Dad was instantly chastened. He grabbed my real stocking from behind the radiator, the one my mother embroidered before she died. All the feathered things from the song—turtle doves and calling birds and French hens and swans and geese, and my name in loopy golden script. I’m sorry, Dad said, I thought it’d be funny. Inside the stocking, the chocolate coins had melted and oozed out of their gold foil wrappers and then hardened again, ridged and sloping like candle wax. My father excavated my presents. Strawberry lip balm, a ruined hardcover diary, rhinestone barrettes. He washed the stocking in the kitchen sink and laid it out in the winter sun.
5. Lump sum. A large payment all at once, instead of several smaller ones. Always take several smaller ones, if you have the chance. Sometimes you don’t. My husband tries to comfort me when I get in moods like this. He points out that I love my mother, even though I don’t remember her. He points out that breast cancer is rare in women under age 40, and that the ten-year survival rate is 84%, and that family history only establishes risk, not certainty. He’s missing the point. I could die today. This very moment. An aneurism. A sticky lump of macaroon lodged in my trachea. If I die today, my six-year-old will carry me under his arm like a well-loved book, pages creased and yellowed, flipping open to the same dog-eared pages. It’s something. Not enough. I want to give him more. If I die today, my three-year-old won’t remember me. Not a chapter, not even a verse.
6. Lumps, taking your. The first time my six-year-old saw Beauty and the Beast, this phrase puzzled him. Taking your lumps? he echoed, watching Gaston inhale raw eggs, three at a time. Like a lump of ice cream? It made me smile, this new unit for ice cream, instead of the agreed-upon scoop. I told him it means getting hurt or beaten. Like how his soccer team lost every game. Like when he fell out of bed and bumped his head like the proverbial monkey, and I rushed him to the ER, where the doctor kindly listened to me sob about my failings as a mother for ten minutes and then told me to put ice on it. Like the first time he rode a bike without training wheels. He tore the skin off both knees. He left streaks of blood on the sidewalk that stayed until the next rain. Eventually he learned. The idea is that you just have to take it sometimes, I told him. The hurt. My son still didn’t understand. Where do you take the lumps after you get them? he asked, and I told him I wasn’t sure.
7. Lump in your throat. The suffocating, swallowed-peach-pit feeling it gives me, reaching under my bra, probing with my fingertips. It’s not exactly a lump, by the standard definition. Not formless like clay, not rough and bumpy like coal. It feels smooth and round and small. I touch it while I’m making lunch and then tea and then dinner and all the space in between. I touch it while I’m gathering up the kids’ marble collection, which has scattered all over the kitchen floor—some of them swirled with tendrils of primary color, others milky and opaque, still others black as coal (comma, lump of). When my kids whine for a bedtime snack, twenty minutes after I cleared away their dinner plates, I yell at them, and they melt down like molten steel, and of course they do. Their mother has been ignoring them all day, poking her left breast like a crazy person. They climb all over the table, feeding on each other’s crying, and somehow the speckled mug falls. Explodes. Valentine’s Day carnations strewn across a tableau of water and glass. The peach pit in my throat swells, almost bursts. I apologize for yelling. I crumble soft chocolate chip cookies into instant oatmeal. I think, remember this. Not the yelling. The I’m-sorry part. The cookies-at-bedtime part. While they eat, I sweep up the glittering wreckage. My husband probably won’t notice the mug is gone. I’ve made so many by now. I sell them for forty dollars on Etsy and people leave five-star reviews. My husband tells people about it like I’m doing something supernatural, almost godlike, breathing life into clay, but it’s all just instinct. Muscle memory. While the kids eat, I kiss them on top of their heads. Do you know how much I love you? I ask (this much!) but their mouths are clotted with melted-chocolate happiness, and it was a rhetorical question, anyway.
8. At midnight, when my husband gets home, I accost him in the doorway. I don’t even give him a chance to peel off his scrubs, which are probably contaminated with blood or feces or chemotherapy residue, despite his best efforts. What’re you doing up? he asks, grinning as I unbutton my pajama shirt. He thinks I’ve been waiting for him. I have, but not for the reason he hopes. Feel this, I say, grabbing his hand, guiding it to the eastern hemisphere of my left breast. What would you call that? I ask him. He presses in small, practiced circles. He’s so calm, so professional about it, that for a second I believe everything will turn out fine. He presses a few more times, and he hesitates before speaking. A lump, he says.
Lindy Biller grew up in Metro Detroit and now lives in Wisconsin. Her fiction has recently appeared at Bending Genres, Okay Donkey, and SmokeLong Quarterly. She works as a writer at an indie game studio.
