Flash Fiction: The Tumour

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Tadwell was expelled from the party because Marta told her friends that he tried to grab her breasts, when really, he was pointing to a button on her flaring lapels that said, "free hugs." 

 

It was raining outside, and he smirked to himself as he turned away from the party, feeling the weight of the umbrella in his hand. He pressed the button, and the plastic dome jerked away from him. He smirked because what Marta didn't know was that he had made out with Sandy in Marta's closet, pawing the warm patch between her hips as his tongue traced the contours of her teeth. 

 

He entered Mansfield Park and walked purposefully among the skeleton crew of its trees, watching the waves of water pelting the asphalt, the puddles, the waves inside of waves inside of waves. 

     

He saw the red bench as if it were an oasis in a long march across the Gobi Desert. His legs were tired, from walking, from standing tense and excited against Sandy's warm soft body, from the walk up to his father's apartment on the 29th floor because the elevators were temporarily out of service. 

 

He sat on the top of the red bench and remembered "The Red Wheelbarrow" poem he studied in his introductory lit course. "So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow beside the white chickens, in the rain." 

 

Those chickens appeared in his head now, headless and gushing blood, and this chain of thoughts led him to the tumour growing in his father's brain, filling his father's head with paranoid thoughts and hallucinations. On Wednesday, he had nearly clawed Tadwell's eyes out, thinking he had poisoned his father's apple juice. 

The domestication of wolves

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 The locks, frazzled and fit  

with keys made of honey 

hard from the hive, line drive-in 

through the cinematic zone; sunny 

with a chance of tornadoes 

you sat on the post office box 

runny eggs on a Sunday, fox 

out of luck, a matinee of ice floes 

the hunt comes up empty, rows 

of poppy-coloured seats, plush 

then you dropped off the box 

into the lush green thigh-high grass 

knuckle-plated keyhole, nickel glass 

sided window onto the Nickelodeon.

We spin and spin, conjuring the past 

prime arythmatic, insidious grasp 

of everything that exceeds;

you told me the wound which bleeds 

wound around the heart part of the brain;

it was when wolves were tamed when needs 

were met and not much more, with pain 

of course, wracking the nerves when the moon wanes.

 

You said something about a brain drain 

and I just smiled in gratitude 

even though my hopes fizzled 

down the drain. The door, you said, is open. 

 

It’s up to you now that you’re unbroken.