By Susan Scutti
Having abandoned her, the tumor slides beneath her door and crawls along the tile floor until it enters the catty-corner apartment where an even younger woman sleeps. Dreams flutter her eyelids, cause a muscle in her left leg to twitch: Once, twice, three times. Last year for five months her heart had filled with love, ballooned, a fully-inflated tire ready to begin a long journey. Then the puncture occurred: poof. No matter, she recovered and soon began a new job in a distant district of the city. There her personality, an organism not unlike an amoeba, expanded and neatly divided into two leaving her with a new Janus demeanor that evoked a feeling of satisfaction whenever she looked in the mirror. Whatever, she tells herself now as she travels underground on a rushing train, her breasts pressing into another woman’s arm. Days later a purposefully caffeinated technician, who prefers the darker Colombian blends to those from Africa, will perform the test revealing a lump. Today, the unopened window above the technician’s head displays a sunset made brilliant by harmful emissions. As he leaves for home, a tidy apartment containing three TVs, two computers, and one wife, his umbrella refuses to open. Again and again he presses the plastic button that normally makes the cheap thing unfurl; Who made this? he mutters as he walks through scattered rainfall. (Factory workers in a southern province of China.) While plummeting earthward, each separate raindrop becomes toxic, yet not nearly as lethal as the chemo endured by the younger woman in the cattycorner apartment who fell in love for five months last year.