How It All Goes Down
- Marla calls our narrator. She thinks she's found a lump in her breast, and she wants him to check it. He goes over there, hoping she'll forgive him for boiling her mother's fat if he does. Not sure that's a fair trade.
- In her room, he tells her about a wart he had on his penis and a birthmark on his foot that doctors thought might have been a new kind of cancer.
- Bonding over cancer doesn't quite make Marla feel better. So he tells her a story about his grandmother and her mastectomy.
- But mastectomy stories are not going to make Marla feel better about maybe having breast cancer, either.
- So he tells her one more story. This one is about a woman who was married to a mortician. Turns out he only wanted to sleep with her if she was cold and completely still. Yikes.
- We don't get to hear if this story cheered up Marla or not. Honestly, it could have gone either way.