Chapter 1

Rat Face

(The Strange Tale of Abraham Lincoln Panim)

1

Abraham Lincoln Panim came into this world like any other baby. He was created with love, and love is what he got as he matured in his mother’s stomach.

His mom, Diana Panim, a petite, 30-something English teacher at a local high school with perfectly styled brown hair and a bent for the latest clothing styles, wanted her child—whether it was a boy or a girl—to have a better childhood than she had.

She never knew her mother and father, and was given up for adoption at birth for reasons she never knew. She went from one foster home to another, but never had a permanent place to call home. She never believed in herself, but others did, and as she became older she had many mentors that helped guide her into adulthood.

She often said that if she ever had her own child, things would be different, much different, and now, being of child, she could prove that.

Mrs. Panim grew larger and larger as the days went into months, and her pregnancy was a normal one. Except that every once in a while, whenever she ate cheese, or anything with cheese on it or in it or related to it, she would get a swift kick from the inside of her ever-bulging tummy. Even if she viewed a piece of cheese or even thought about cheese, she would get swift kicks in her stomach that made her sick.

She loved to eat cheese, and before she was with child, she ate cheese each and every day, and remembered doing so from the earliest memories of her life to now.

“This kid is at it again,” she thought one day as she got a swift kick, “he is giving me agita even before he gets here.”

Her husband, Marcus Panim, a struggling writer who was short in stature as well as he was in prestige, and who worked at a local publishing house writing for trade books about subjects he wasn’t really interested in, shrugged off all of this.

Putting his hands on his hairless head, he would tell his wife in such instances, “He is even a strong boy even now,” presupposing the gender of their soon-to-come child. “I guarantee that he is going to be a football player, or something where he can use his strength. And I will bet that he will make plenty of money.

“And remember, we agreed that I would name him. Any boy with such strength needs a strong name.”

Mr. Panim repeatedly told his wife that he knew their child would be a boy because he had a lucky penny, flipped it in the air, and if the coin landed on heads, the child was going to be a boy, if it landed on tails, the child was going to be a girl.

It landed on heads.

Mrs. Panim continued to feel the intense kicking every time she ate cheese throughout the nine months of her pregnancy, and nothing that she did could stop it.

“Doctor, I always get this kicking in my stomach whenever I eat or smell or am near cheese,” she said to her gynecologist, Dr. Newsom, a tall, willowy sort with nicely parted hair. “It doesn’t matter if it is American cheese, Muenster cheese, Mozzarella cheese, even cream cheese ... I get kicked inside to the point where I think the baby is going to kick itself out of my stomach.”

“Then don’t eat cheese,” the doctor told her, with a broad smile on his face. “Stay away from the cheese.”

“But I love cheese,” Mrs. Panim replied. “I think I have eaten some type of cheese each and every day of my life.”

“Well now, you can’t eat cheese,” the doctor responded. “NO MORE CHEESE UNTIL THAT BABY COMES OUT OF YOU.”

This made Mrs. Panim upset, but her husband tried to console her.

“So you don’t need to eat cheese anymore, at least until the boy is born,” he said, again assuming the gender of their soon-to-come child. “What is the big deal? Just don’t eat cheese for now, you can go back to it after the baby is born.”

“But I love cheese,” she told her husband. “Why does this kid kick me so hard when I eat cheese, even when I am near cheese, or even when I think of cheese?”

“He is showing you how strong he is,” her husband stated. “NO MORE CHEESE!”

Mrs. Panim accepted this declaration by her doctor and her husband, but she felt very bewildered at the notion that not only could she not eat cheese until after her baby was born, but that they baby she carried, that she helped create, would make her feel so uncomfortable when she ate a piece of cheese, any cheese.

She asked around among her friends who were either pregnant or had been pregnant about their pregnancies, and the odd occurrences they had when they were with child.

“No, not with cheese,” said a fellow female English teacher at the school where Mrs. Panim was a teacher, during lunch in the teacher’s room. “But every time I would have pickles and pasta, I would get really bad gas. I would eat them together, a nice bowl of pasta with pickle pieces all over it. I would wash it down with milk, and boy, did I get a lot of gas. But it is something I craved, so I ate it anyway.”

The other teachers around them laughed, but Mrs. Panim looked bemused as the woman went on.

“ ... heck, I could have filled up my tank with all the gas I had,” her teacher friend said, guffawing at her own joke as he sloshed a pickle into her mouth. “And every once in a while I still get a craving for milk and pasta and pickles.”

Mrs. Panim managed a weak smile, was cordial to her friend, but knew this problem was something much larger than what her fellow teacher had said to her about her own pregnancy problems. She even felt some stirrings in her stomach when she tried not to think about cheese, and true to form, as she walked back to her empty classroom in between periods, she got another swift kick, and another, and then one more, the strength of which sent her reeling to the ground in agony.

“Mrs. Panim, are you OK?” nervously asked a student who saw her fall and rushed to her side, along with dozens of other students.

With seemingly the entire student body circling Mrs. Panim, within minutes, medics soon arrived.

Mrs. Panim had completely blacked out when she fell, and was rushed to the hospital as students and teachers followed the medics and the gurney that they had placed her on right outside the front door of the school.