Her cheeks were full with blue bursting veins just under the skin, spreading across her face like those patio vines you hear about in Florida or maybe Thailand. Teague Ritter straddled her like a wimpy boy riding a belly up milk cow. He had a bowl of the stuff in his one hand and a spoonful of it in the other, trying to stab it into his beloved’s mouth as she wriggled under his bony frame, failing in her attempts at mouthing “no” and stressing the integrity of the recliner to its absolute limit.
This girl was about to burst. And so was the chair.
The sludge was Teague’s own invention. He’d gone through enough Muscle and Fitness mags to understand totally the concept of the hard gainer. He knew macros. He considered protein thoughtfully. The final result was this: Ground beef, Greek yogurt, raw eggs, runny eggs, egg shells, Cadbury eggs, steel cut oats, salt to taste.
“I can’t,” she’d said through tears the first time she did this dance, when she was much smaller. Her protest was short-lived; Teague reminded her they’d had a Catholic wedding.
“Love, cherish, obey,” he said to her. He repeated it like a snake charmer would, and after a few turns through the phrase they were nose to nose, gifting the line into each other’s mouths on hot breath. Love, cherish, obey … love, cherish, obey … love, cherish, obey … until she accepted a spoonful and rolled it around the soft parts of her mouth to demonstrate her commitment to their divine covenant.
“Well?” he asked, blind-scooping another bite for his feeder.
“I can’t taste the Cadbury eggs,” she had said, in a muffled tongue.
***
She wasn’t a little girl when the whole project got going, but six months in she really suffered under her new shape.
“As Jesus carried the cross,” Teague reminded her, to which she fell into total hysterics from the profundity.
Somewhere under all that new body was their growing baby. Their miracle was three months then from entering the world, 14 years from varsity football, 18 or 19 years from the NFL Draft, depending on how his true freshman season at Penn State would go. He might have to stay in school for his sophomore season, Teague allowed. He didn’t like the prospect though. Thoughts of an underwhelming first year of college ball made him shudder. Still, Teague thought himself a pragmatist. He’d dabbled in rationalism. He left room for all possibilities in the roadmap to Rinner glory.
Teague was staring down the barrel of his 40th year when he found her and claimed her as his wife. She was a clerk then at the gas station in town, hired by her father who owned the place. Teague, he respected the business class. When he saw her square stout body behind the register, he swallowed hard and dug a thumbnail into his palm to keep his voice from shaking. “Ma’am,” he said to her, “I’d like to take some measurements, if you’d allow.”
Poor Danielle had never gotten much attention from real men. She stepped out and adjusted her blouse, hiked her jeans up to cover her modesty. Teague sprung loose a length of measuring tape from his jacket pocket and recorded every inch of her he could get a number on. He was pale and greasy and only clipped 150 pounds, which he carried across his 6-foot-4 frame daintily, like a stiff wind could sweep him up and off to the next county over.
***
In his day Teague was the next big thing, but you’d never know it by seeing him now. By eighth grade he was just a whisker under a full 6 feet tall and slung the leather so fiercely the Walton Jr. High Tigers football team went 8-0. The varsity coach was already fluffing him up in the halls, grabbing him by his farm shaped shoulders and showing him to whoever was nearest like he was a prized horse.
“Mr. Ritter here is gonna be the first freshman QB to win a single-A state championship in Pennsylvania history,” Coach would say. Or, in the right company, through a whisper: “Think of all the pussy this kid’s gonna pull.”
Teague was longer than his years. He smirked at this. The pussy he was going to get? How about all the tail he’d already gotten? He’d done ’em all. Seniors and freshmen, one cousin and a friend of his mother’s. If it sat to pee and wouldn’t flip a boat, young Teague Ritter would have it. His life was laid out like a gilded path. Football and women, women and football. State championships, the Heisman trophy, the Philadelphia Eagles. New woman for every game, every award ceremony, every Super Bowl trip to Disney.
That summer heading into his first year of high school, he finally got hold of Kaitlyn Ritter (no relation), a real gem of Walton High. She was the varsity catcher on the softball team, the perfect build for the era. A real bouncy blonde. Angular in some places, soft in others. A trunk on her like a mature Oak. They were in a cornfield, hidden from the world only two weeks before football season was set to begin. If it weren’t for football, Teague’s track coach thought he could have been an Olympic mid-distance runner, the way his motor turned with such little effort. The previous spring he’d clipped a 2:06 half mile in a pair of muck boots. But that summer his lungs shriveled, and he found himself out of breath with the whites of his eyes turning blue, in moments that didn’t make sense. This was one of those moments. They’d tried it in all sorts of ways already, him and Kaitlyn, but Teague didn’t have the juice to be running point. He laid down in the dirt under her weighty haunches, and that’s the very instant his path to glory closed behind a gate that no toll could lift.
Teague knew real fear — he’d had frothing 15 year old big city linebackers blitz the A gap. He’d spotted a free corner flying off the tackle a moment too late. The one cousin made him sit outside the bathroom while she peed on a stick. But none of these things produced the pure adrenaline spike he got then when Kaitlyn pumped down on his bird in that cornfield. It was shock. A radiant sensation like electrocution. Then it was a searing, total, excruciating pain. He couldn’t even yell. When she finally looked down, the future of the Walton High football program lay white as a sheet, unconscious, his pelvis crushed and flattened in the dirt like a roadkilled frog after a summer rain. She ran off for help but she’d gotten turned around in the corn. She hit not town, but the bank of the Susquehanna River. Instead of turning back, she floated down the river like a line cut bobber and surfaced at the back of an old farmer’s house, where she finally was able to ring for help.
At the hospital they brought him back from the brink. The doctor ran all the tests, and at the end he stood there holding up the x-rays while Mr. and Mrs. Ritter wept in the corner of the room.
“Osteogenesis Imperfecta,” the doctor said with a heavy sigh.
“No spells, doc, please,” his hovelled father said through tears. “Just give it to us straight.”
The coach was a wreck. He tried to organize an empty casket funeral for the boy’s gridiron career, but the mortician had no open plots to spare. Coach was gone shortly after. He perished in a drunken automobile accident on I-80, the night the Tigers lost their third straight game to fall to 0-3.
For a year Teague did nothing but lay in bed. He’d sit himself up in the corner and work on his throwing mechanics. An imaginary ball in his hand, turning over his shoulder and letting that sucker fly. He knew without his hips he was nothing in the pocket. And there went scrambling, too. And if he were to suit up, some sort of full body padding borrowing from medieval design, what happens the first time he gets driven into the ground? The end of Teague Ritter, that’s what. Father saluting the hearse taking his corpse off the field, his mother flogging herself in the stands for not speaking up. It was all too much. He put down the imaginary ball and never gripped its laces again.
***
Teague Ritter went on to have a perfectly fine career in advertising. After receiving his GED he got an office grunt job at the feed factory where his father was a foreman, and soon enough he was writing ad copy for the hog slop. He wrote this, which made it onto every 50 pound bag of finish feed sent out in the region: “Grow em true for a ribbon blue.” It was a hit across the board. He moved into a corner office and led a team of three. But something was missing, a hankering for something more, something lost. The women in the office knew of his condition, and they viewed him with the eyes of watchful mothers. That he could not stand. Even this Teague Ritter was no victim. His heart was buried under a mountain of ad copy but bled over with the lust he’d never lost. What Teague Ritter wanted most in the world was to be back under center. That had never changed and never would.
But if he couldn’t have that, what Teague Ritter wanted most was a son. He no longer had the heart for frivolous carnal pursuits, not after all that he’d seen and done in another life. But still he found himself nightly bathed in the sick glow of a refurbished laptop, researching dark web forums on the ideal female form for rearing champions. Wide hips, narrow shoulders. Big feet, big hands, large breasts. A frame too big could spell disaster in the conception, but a good mother needed room around her bones to grow. He began rummaging the dumpster at work for empty bags of the products, clipping the ingredients list off the back and collecting them at home. Starter feeds and finish feeds, dry and grind and mix.
A month later on the way home from work he went the long way, listening to the fall wind rush through his window. The way it lifted and played with the ornamental display in the autumn-tinged trees made him think of the Almighty. “God,” he finally said, the words spilling out of his mouth with no direction, like dumping a cup of bleach on an anthill to see what shakes out, “tell me how to do it and I will never stray from your light again.” A few seconds later there was a ding and a dash light that warned him he was running on fumes.
Danielle had always wanted to be a mother. She wanted it more than anything in the world, but her shy style made her feel like a lost cause. She’d grown up the child of nonbelievers. She surrendered herself to God on her own while crossing the road from youth to womanhood, when the chemicals in her were burbling and rupturing her skin. She’d been waiting since then. There’d been rednecks and retards through that gas station day and night for years. They’d flirt and wink and whistle, but no one had ever told her what the next move was. And none of them respected God. When Teague bounced around the room with that tape measure, calling out numbers in his soft voice, she was beginning to really feel it. Any secret doubts about placing faith in Him were spurned. But before he could whisk her away, she fiddled with her fingers nervously, spoke up for maybe the first time in her life. “My first love will always be the Lord,” she said.
Teague nearly collapsed then, had to hold himself up on the corner of the counter. “Thank you, thank you,” he said to the ceiling. When Teague got home he dug out the family bible, and turned his studies to the gospel.
***
Teague gave to her all the love he had right back. It was divine intervention. Their first vacation as an engaged couple was to a rural bible school in the Catskills. They would have no secrets between them, the Good Book a bridge to which each had shared ownership on either side of the spine. He told her everything. Of the life before he painfully recalled to her every memory he had of finding mud for his turtle: “Some sucked on it, spit on it. A half dozen did anal,” he said through deep retching tears, “I even shot a wad in my cousin.”
She forgave him. Of course she forgave him. Held him in her arms and caressed his fragile skull with long, petting hands. “He who is without sin,” she reminded him.
The night of their vows, when they initiated consummation, Teague asked her to pray over the 20 year plan he’d told her. The glory was to be as much hers as it was his.
“But how?” she pleaded, “How can we know?”
To this Teague only smiled and held his wife’s face between his palms, smushing it up like a pug. “My dear, did we forget Genesis 21?”
She recoiled. “Never!”
Danielle was devout but she was not blind. The feeding was a hard sell. But he’d done the studying, he told her. He knew the math. It was the crossroad where science and destiny met and held hands. It was the injury that sent him to work at the feed plant, where he honed the craft. And from the feed plant it was prayer that delivered him to Danielle. Fate on fate on fate, turtles all the way down.
She’d suffered through it all for him, for their love, and most of all for God. By the end Teague had convinced her never to leave the La-Z-Boy. He’d read about how meat chickens sometimes carry such a profound, unnatural weight toward the end of their lives and wind up with legs snapping out from under them. It is cruel but it is the cost of feeding a country, the cost of rearing a champion.
***
Teague brought Danielle to the hospital in the back of his pickup truck on the day of their child’s birth. A dairy cow hip clamp lifted her into the birthing station, where seven doctors held parts of her body up to make room for their new joy to find the light.
And it came. It came out healthy and crying after a quick two-handed smack on its enormous bottom. It was put on the scale and totaled 19 pounds. Doctors and nurses poured into the room to get a look at the rotund marvel. “Get me my baby,” Danielle whispered to him in her delirium. “I want to see him.”
But the doctor overheard. A wry, impish smile peeled across the doc’s face. “Not a him,” he said.
Teague went into a frenzy. He rushed over to try to find it, lifting up its legs, pulling them apart. Pushing skin down here and lifting it up there, the child wailing in calenture at all the hot hands prodding. Between the massive infant’s legs there was no bird. There was no pecker, no coin purse, no sack, no nothing. Nothing between the legs. And that was it for our man Teague Ritter.
Be not deceived, God is not mocked. With his hands clasped in front of him, Teague collapsed onto the hospital floor, his bones splintered like a shattered vase. His spirit wafted in the air space of the room, visible like tiny diamond pinpricks in the last light reaching through the window before dusk.
— Chuck Strange is a writer from the Northeast, where he lives with his wife and daughter. He writes at easterngray.substack.com. On Twitter: Normal_Chuck