An excerpt from my novel-in-progress

The wife looks out the window. In the distance, she can see the tumor.

It is half-hidden behind a shrub at the park that abuts the alley behind the house. It is fiddling with a leaf and oozing a small pool of blood. The tumor sees her seeing it and withdraws, pressing itself into the leaves, concealing and congealing.

The wife looks at the dough ball. She pushes an errant raisin back into it.

It’s possible the tumor wasn’t a tumor at all. It’s fall. The leaves are turning vermillion, goldenrod, pumpkin. Perhaps she mistook a seasonal change for sickness.