Marked
- Jan 8, 2021
- 4 min read
by Katie Devine
Before she feels the lump in her left breast, she dreams about it. Her dream self squeezes her nipple and a single green pea pops out, coated in thick, cheese curd milk—colostrum, she presumes it to be, though she has never seen colostrum before and there is no biological reason it would be coming from her thus far barren body. In the dream, she licks the pea clean, then swallows it whole, and the next time she squeezes her breast two peas squeeze out. The following time, four. She repeats this ritual until she wakes up full, having filled a cereal bowl of peas and breast milk that resembled the Trix she had eaten as a child. Trix are for kids, she remembers the slogan claiming. Too much sugar, she remembers her mother claiming.
In real life, when she touches the lump — and she can only feel it when she is flat on her back and the nipple is flaccid — it is more like a soybean, edamame sucked from its pod, just below the skin’s surface. She taps her fingerprints in a circle around it, counterclockwise, and then clockwise, in case it feels different that way. She presses and releases, anticipating a soreness that never materializes. Her right breast has always been bigger, but she sees now in the mirror the left one has swollen and caught up. Along the sides of both breasts are stretch marks that look like fault lines on the maps of California they show after earthquakes.
She doesn’t know how long the lump has been there. On her last doctor’s visit, he reminded her that she had been there many times already this year for other lumps on her body. The one outside her vagina, an ingrown hair, infected (you should visit your gynecologist instead of picking at things on your vulva, he said, a word she is still, at thirty-five, too embarrassed to repeat). The one on the base of her neck, a pimple, also infected (have you thought of seeing a dermatologist he asked, not concerned with her specialist co-pays or out-of-network deductibles). The one he agreed to remove from the crease below her nostril, the size of a №2 pencil eraser. He numbed the area and sliced into the skin, chatting while he dug into her face. No husband or kids yet?You better get started soon! He laughed but her mouth was numb so she couldn’t feel if it was trembling the way it always did before she cried. Tests showed no abnormal cells; he left behind a white scar shaped like a tiny waxing crescent moon.
For the bump the color of Silly Putty on her bicep, the last visit, the doctor said it looked fine, just fine. But it’s gotten bigger, she said. Perhaps it stretched with your weight gain, he proposed as he looked more critically at her ass than her arm. Her mother echoed that sentiment by regularly sending her helpful suggestions in the form of new diets. I know you don’t like avocado, shewould say, but you can drop that weight for good! Her mother was a size two.
It’s itchy, she said of the spot. Dry skin, the doctor replied, writing on, then tearing off a page from his prescription pad. Put this lotion on the beauty mark, he instructed with a wink. She recalled that her father called moles beauty marks as well. She folded the paper in half, then in half again so it was the size of a credit card when the doctor chuckled and said, now don’t come back soon!
What she imagines the lump in her breast might be: a ball of swallowed sugarless gum that got lost on its way to seven years in her stomach; a marble from the Hungry Hungry Hippo game she played as a child; a pearl earring she’d lost during a one-night stand in college; an engorged spider sac, filled with tiny spider babies that will hatch and nurse from their mother inside her breast.
She calls a lover she has not seen in years. When he picks up his office phone, she asks if he ever noticed anything in her breast that felt like a vegetable or an insect and he replies wait, who is this? so she hangs up. She Googles breast lump and learns that statistically it is likely to be something benign like a cyst and that most young women do not get breast cancer. But is she young? If she could find someone to impregnate her now, the pregnancy would be considered geriatric. She cannot visit her provider as the websites suggest because her doctor asked her not to come back, and her HMO won’t cover another visit.
She slathers the prescription lotion on her still-itchy arm spot. The doctor’s diagnosis was accurate, and the mark will shrink back to its original size and shape when she loses weight from the mastectomy, then the chemo. What remains will be wrinkly and deflated like a used balloon. Her mother will suggest Ensure shakes and look at her with terror but also envy as she helps tighten the bandages and pull up her sagging sweatpants. What will leak from tubes in her chest is bloody and creamy but bears little resemblance to the colostrum of her dream. There will be no colostrum for her: no pregnancy despite the plethora of dates she started going on, no babies named Amelia or June after her grandmothers, no uterus to carry them once that, too, is removed. No more pea cereal dreams, no more nursing spiders, there will be only the deep, medicated, dreamless sleep that makes her feel more alone than ever. But for now, all she knows is that the pink lotion cools her skin so she rubs it, counterclockwise, into her beauty mark, and then there is no more discomfort, no pain, just the sweet, momentary bliss of a relieved itch.
Katie Devine is an MFA candidate at The New School, where she has been awarded Provost and University Scholarships. Her fiction has received support from Sirenland Writers Conference, Tin House Summer Workshop, Aspen Summer Words and is forthcoming in Pithead Chapel and Peauxdunque Review and is the 2020 short story winner of the Words and Music Writing Competition. She works in media brand partnerships and lives in Brooklyn with her dog, Eliza Hamilton.
