Skin in the Game –

A sharp distinct click caused the boss to bite her lip. It was one she had heard a million times before. But this time it was everything. After the slide slid under the metal tabs, the tech examined the slide for a moment adjusting the focus. A smile came to her face and she looked up towards her boss. Her anxious boss looked back down at her with a heavy sigh and said cautiously, “Well, do you think we got it.”

“Oh yeah! It is lubricating and there is no cellular cohesion taking place either. The cellular structures remain intact and are not merging. The morphology exactly replicates vaginal tissue.”

She watched her boss lean back against the black table strewn with test tubes and scientific equipment, close her eyes, draw her hands into fists, then jerking them back shouting so the whole world could hear, “Success!” With that utterance, lab coats streamed into the room and scientific chaos theory broke out in obsequious joyful celebration.

– – –

Herman put the phone back down in its craddle. He grinned from ear to ear. He felt like dancing and doing an Irish jig, even though he wasn't Irish. Well, maybe a polka at least since he was Polish. He was old school. No cell phone for him. Not that it was needed. The farm was so rural that the best way for him to communicate with the neighbors and the various farm building was the CB radio he had purchased as a teenager back in the late 70s from a Radio Shack that today was now a pizza joint called the Pizza Shack. The fact that it still worked given the rough treatment it had received over the years was surprising. He reached past the phone on his desk and grabbed a rather weird looking mike stand. It looked more like a reject from a 1940s era movie. The chrome cage where there was a beige screen was drawn up close to his mouth with his right hand while his left hand held down a paddle switch which activated the mike. “Tracy, come in. You in the work shed? We have news.”

A crackle and a hiss later told him she would come right away. He leaned back in his old wooden rolling chair and looked out the window towards the hill that gently sloped back down to the family farmhouse he was in. He looked anxiously for Tracy to break the outline of the hill where it meet the soft blue morning sky. He watched clouds trying to anchor themselves to a half moon whose moonshine was lost in the morning’s blue sky and for a brief moment thought about the haying that needed to be down before they billowed out their streams of silvery goodness onto the north pasture. He was taken back to his focus as he perceived a figure cracking the uniform outline of the hill breaking the moonshine and becoming part of it. Rising with anticipation, he walked to the back door and strode onto the veranda waving to the figure inching down the dirt path. Seeing his unusual demeanor, the figure went from a casual walk to brisk one and then, were it possible for a human, a full galloping pony.

Herman, understanding that he had communicated more that he thought by coming out onto the veranda, shot out at a gallop himself and the two figures, one old and one very young, embraced in a swirl of uncompromising rapture. As they twirled, shrieks of “Really Grandpa” echoed against the barn where a dairy cow munched away at its feed in quiet solitude not comprehending the earthquake that shook the farm that cool September morning.

A month later, Herman sat in a waiting room with his precious Lena. The silence was thick with anticipation. The unspoken trepidation both were experiencing hung on them thicker than the sweaters that clutched their bodies and steeled them against the early morning hard frost they encountered coming into the medical wing of the research center.

They looked around at the poor attempt to make the room comfortable for them. Herman realized that the starkness of the room was comforting for him. He would rather they spend their money on better equipment. But, for his dear Lena, she needed a chair that hugged her frail frame and embraced her at this trying time. He leaned forward his hands clenched together and his arms resting on his legs. “It has been a long journey, hasn’t it dear?”

Lena let out a heavy sign and looked at her husband of nearly fifty years and smiled. He was hard working and true to her. His love for her was unbounded and a testimony to integrity. She never had to worry about a wandering eye or where her next meal would come from. He was a provider, a lover, a good parent to their children, and a true friend. But, that wasn’t why she was here. The two were there for their Tracy, her grand, oh so, grand daughter.

“My Misiu,” she exclaimed as she put her hand on her husband’s knee, “I remember the day she came in after her mother. She looked so girly and beautiful. I just had to say something about it. How pretty my little Kotku was.”

Herman looked back at her and unclenched his hands and gently guided his hand down placing it on hers. She looked back at him. In his unspoken silence, his eyes told her to please continue. “The little Aniołku really did look cute the first time I saw her as a toddler, didn’t she?” Herman nodded. “Too bad our daughter didn’t see that. Where did we go wrong?” she said pitifully.

“I don’t know my darling Lena. Somewhere along the line, she made a choice that excluded Tracy. The values we tried to pass on to her were forgotten or ignored because of ...”

“What?” she asked softly.

“Our mistakes, I suppose. We tried to teach her to love God, but she decided to love His rules instead. The rules are there to show us how to express our love for Him, not to torture innocent souls.” He shifted his weight. “Every year, we see the miracle of life come into the barn which shows God’s love for each one of us. But, you and I also know that nature makes mistakes a long the way. We take care of those mistakes and show them love. We heal them with love and tender care if we can.”

She pouted and looked to the door where she hoped a surgeon would soon appear with good news. “Why do we? Why don’t we just kill the mistakes and move on. That is what our daughter says we should do. She says if someone doesn’t meet God’s standard, we should let them die.”

“Because dear one, when we find a way to take care of the least of God’s creatures, we learn to take better care of the healthy ones and keep them healthy. God’s rules are meant to heal us. But some use those rules to hurt and destroy because they are afraid of God’s love.”

Needing reassurance, Lena asked him, “Tell me again, how is helping Tracy showing God’s love?”

“Because our lovely Tracy, when she was in the womb, had something go wrong. Her brain was formed as a girl and her body was formed as a boy. And now, science is correcting this mistake and she will be a real girl. She will be able to have babies and be a mother just like you.”

“So why then does our little girl hate her daughter so?”

“Because she thinks God did this to her to punish her and He didn’t. He has given us free will. Look, do you complain when you walk into a building and they have a ramp for someone in a wheelchair?”

“No, of course not.”

“Well, because they have a ramp, are you forced to use a wheelchair?”

“No, silly.” she laughed.

“Our beautiful Tracy needs a ramp to deal with her infirmity. She was born with the wrong brain for her body, so we made an accommodation for her to live with her infirmity. We don’t yell at someone for being paralyzed and tell them it is a sin to be paralyzed do we? We don't order them to give up their wheelchair because it makes us feel uncomfortable. So, why is it we yell at someone for being out of alignment with their biological body telling them it is a sin when we can show that their brain is misaligned.”

Lena smiled at her wonderful husband's clarity. “Thanks for you words of wisdom. They always set me right. I wished they worked on our little one.”

Patting her on the knee, he said, “I do too. She has missed out on knowing how wonderful her little Tracy is.”

With that, the door opened and a doctor in scrubs exited smiling, but looking very tired. She said, “Mr. and Mrs. Mazur, Tracy did just fine.”

Herman asked quickly, “And she will be able to have babies and won’t have to have lifelong HRT?”

“Yes, Mr. Mazur. She won’t have to take Estradol anymore. Science has come a long way to helping her. And, using current technology and the DNA of your wife, we will be able to create an egg in the lab that would have been her's had she had XX instead of XY, fertilize it with her husband’s sperm, and implant it in her so that she can grow her baby and give birth to it. Even more, thanks to my research, she has a vagina that won’t close up and gonad tissue that will make estrogen for her for the rest of her life.”

A little while later, Lena walked into a hospital room and took the hand of her lovely angel. “Babciu, thank you for your support. I love you.” Herman stood behind at the foot of the bed too and was all smiles.

“I love you too, Kotku. I am so happy that my precious little girl was finally able to become the woman she was meant to be.”

As the two women looked at the monitor beeping which showed her heartbeat, a thought occurred to both women. The spike of the heartbeat looked like the flame of a candle. The candle that was the prayer that was lite for Tracy the moment her heart started beating in the womb so many years ago.

The lovely heart God gave her. A restored heart that still beat embraced by a family that loved her for who she was deep inside.

Copyright © 2018 by AuP reviner