trembling through it

by ja tyler

Cecilia attracted cancer at forty-eighth and nineteenth, sucking a one hundred in an arab’s taxi cab while watching the day burn through plate glass sale windows and gloss atop sandwich boards on the backs and fronts of the homeless declaring that the end was indeed near. Her hand twitched even then, flicking the lighter back into its purse and waving through a body sitting still. A tremor shaking the nerves loose in her somewhere as wonders of graying blond hair waved in the subtle air conditioning. Thinking of the precious moon ringing late last night again in her head today begging celebrations and congratulations and setting fire to her snowy heart.

Inside her body a search party declared the beginning and set out with freeze dried procurements and a flag to plant at the base of something grand.

He was twenty-five and she was forty-three and it was all just a numbers game under those silver streaking skyscrapers, so while she avoided the hot dog vendors with their luke warm drinks nestled in dirty ice she couldn’t take her hands off the young man with grease for hair and an apron stained with envy and all the things she wanted wrapped in glorious white wine and canapés and scallops lightly dusted and ribboned with proscuitto.

The molecules evil in their roots descended into a pink-hued lung and settled there like flakes of burning ash on citizens frozen in lava, wiggling no more underneath a scattered sunless life.

The sex had come again and again for weeks on end and eventually she ended up pregnant which was just the thing she wanted and just the thing he wanted and so they could gloat their happiness amidst stacks of golden crepes powdered in sugar and glistening with thin drizzled strawberry. There was no more waiting for streams of existence because he had come to her like a magnet and she had responded like the fronds of a plant and their smiles were both so pearly white, even late at night.

It spread from one to another on the blood and breathing wind inside of her. Staggered back and forth drunk with power. Set up a camp that devastated the land and decimated the water supply and somehow did it all quickly and quietly and sulkingly like a kid brother in a world of even newer diseases and plunders and methods of rape.

So a baby boiled next to a cancerous lung and neither knew of the other and he sharpened chef knives thinking of a son or a daughter who would smell to him like basil hugging tomatoes and the woman Cecelia, forty-three and newly smoke-free, was pricing cribs and cradles and changing tables instead of shopping down the next usual pair of manolo blahniks.

And though the tribe was miniscule it grew with wrath and the baby was all the while two cells making four cells making lips and eyes and ears and fingers inside embryonic fluid that was sparkling clean and jiggled playfully when Cecilia coughed in spasms and spit more and more red strands into the porcelain hard toilet of her hip uptown apartment.

And needless to say in time the kid was born and shortly thereafter Cecilia died of cancer and the guy cooked his ass off to make ends meet and his greasy hair simply fell out and the cartoons never made him laugh anymore even though the kid thought them hilarious, never really having known her mother, and was there ever anything as depressing as these lives we can imagine when a woman lights a cigarette in a taxi cab screaming by us as we press the button and wait for the walk light on nineteenth and forty-eighth?  

Among sixty or so other publications, J. A. Tyler has work recently with or appearing soon in The Delinquent, Thieves Jargon, The Feathertale Review, Underground Voices, & Word Riot. He is also founding editor of Mud Luscious. Read more at www.aboutjatyler.com.