A casanova in mismatched heels

Steve had a lump. He had been wiping his underarm with a washcloth when he felt it, presenting underneath a terry champagne shroud. He said nothing to anyone for a month. Several times a day, three conjoined verified his discovery. He always used three fingers, disinterested by design and never a single, probing inquisitive one.

Sometimes Steve thought the lump was bigger, at others, smaller—wishes conflating into thoughts, certainties stumbling on hope; forgetting at each instant whether this lump, this piece of his flesh, aberrant and invasive, was supposed to grow and ripen, or whether it was to his advantage that this thing inside him should shrivel and recede back into itself, which was inseparable from him. One morning, precisely which morning he never committed to memory, Steve knew that the lump had grown. Rising, pivoting, bending, lifting, and moving, Steve inspected his pit in the bathroom mirror, one arm raised over his head, stubble protruding from his underarm scattershot, it’s concave surface paler than the rest, pigment reaped by countless a dual razors’s manicuring plastic cradled edge. He held his arm up without effort, but also without strength, his arm hooked and still, in tangent with the top of his head; waves of raven black hair, sprung luminous and cascading underneath his arm, eventually tapering into a dozen thick wet tips that sat propped and solid on the smooth light brown skin of his thin back.

He held his breath, once, twice and again, until he touched the varicose lump; this, his unaccompanied index finger’s maiden voyage; he moved the finger with conviction, but faltered, losing all courage at his pit’s never-ending give and refused to push the lymphatic cork too fat back into him. This Steve felt but didn’t see. He looked not at the lump but at his whole reflection, an amnesiac and a stranger; his face distorted by fear, an unrecognizable, trembling hummingbird quiver.

The doctor suggested that Steve wasn’t cleaning properly and prescribed hygiene, imposed a good healthy scrub. Within time, wasted, futile and ordained, the euphemistic lump belied it’s fast moving character, a system in revolt, a loom spinning misdiagnosed dirt into cancer, metastasized and pervasive.

Steven was given six months to live but half a year to be added to eighteen; Sagittarius to die mercurial, too swiftly and too young, morphing Mercury into endgame, dual capricious midwives giving birth to the dead.