by Sarp Sozdinler
Zora and I take the cab downtown to make it in time for the five o’clock matinee. This part of town is a dead spot at this time of day—too late for the morning people to show up and too early for nightbirds to care about. Zora is still jittery from all the coffee and pills she took for lunch, swiping away at her phone. I’m busy giving directions to the driver. The tumor on the side of his face is the largest I’ve seen in a while. It looks like a second, unfinished face—and purple like a bruised fruit. I don’t say anything about it, it’s beyond helpless at this point. There’s no saving him. It. In the papers I’ve been reading more and more about people like him lately, those who have to live with tumors the size of a limb, a fist, a small animal, all befriending an outgrown enemy.
“The guy is a goner,” Zora remarks after exiting the cab.
When the doors of the movie theater slide open, the warm air pours out and washes over my glasses with its steam. Behind the blurry globe of my sight, everyone looks equally ugly, tumors or no tumors. Zora heads over to the popcorn stand, which leaves me hanging next to a lifesize cutout of actors we came here to watch. The cashier appears to have the beginning of a tumor on the corner of her lips, which garbles her words as if an actual speech balloon were oozing out. I can tell she senses my gaze on her, that she’s trying hard not to break the eye contact with Zora. I can hear her talking about her tumor like a separate entity, like a second shadow that just wouldn’t let go. Ieeeesh, bieshhh, sheeesh. Chomp chomp. There she creates a new grammar with three words and two pronouns: one for herself, the other for it / its. She talks and talks. The punchline is that there are so many things she’d like to do with her life, now that her life is practically over thanks to this unexpected epidemic. With each new word, she dies over and over in her little moment, in her beautiful ugliness. I can’t decide whether she herself or her tumor is harder to look away from. Is it the egg or the chicken?
Inside the theater, Zora scoops the better seat right away. The rows are full of tumorous people, the older kind scorning the new. They giggle. They fight. The actress on the screen tells someone offscreen to shut up. Zora’s face assumes an otherworldly quality in the technicolor light of a sex scene, her cheeks bright with wonder. All those limbs passing over her eyes, the actor’s fist-sized cheek tumor superimposed on her face, warning me of something I can’t at once decipher. Watching her shovel palmfuls of popcorn into her mouth, I can’t help but fix my gaze on the mole to the side of her nose taking countless many shapes like some ghosts in the pandora’s box. In the half-dark of the movie theater, I can’t tell if it has grown slightly larger than before. I can’t tell if my love for her would suffice to save her. I can’t tell if I would love her with an outgrowth, still. I can’t tell if it is my lips or hers that quiver with horror, or both. I can’t tell if anything about our love, our hearts, our faces, is benign anymore, each stained by one cancerous color after another. One color after another.
Sarp Sozdinler is a writer based between Philadelphia and Amsterdam. His work has appeared in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Wigleaf, HAD, Hobart, X-R-A-Y, Burial, Expat Press, Pithead Chapel, Don’t Submit, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. He serves as the editor of The Bulb Region