Chapter 1 - West rivers

Just calling West Rivers Missouri a shithole didn’t do it justice. Every state has shithole towns, but not every state has a shithole quite like West Rivers. It is a town of about 1800 people deep in the Southern Missouri Ozarks. It isn’t on the way to anything and with nothing but a single narrow two-lane winding road leading to it, it wasn’t easy to get to either. The town peaked before the depression and had been losing population ever since. Its meager downtown had just two open businesses, the rest boarded up or in some cases burned out. Next to the downtown was an old rundown motel turned into apartments from there the trailers and shotgun houses spread out into the surrounding hills. The town’s only industry was chicken houses and a chicken processing plant. The only saving grace the town had was the beautiful hills and forests it was surrounded by, though it was hard to enjoy the view of them due to the persistent stench of the chicken houses.

It was the town’s chicken industry that brought Andrew there. Andrew owned and ran a biotech startup that had developed a drug that increased the growth rate of chickens by as much as 50%. The drug, Nanadrol, worked by both increasing a chicken’s appetite and decreasing its resting metabolic rate. This resulted in even more rapid weight gain than hormones and antibiotics did, and without the risks of resistance that agricultural antibiotics brought with them. At least that was his sales pitch to chicken suppliers. In reality, he had originally developed Nanadrol as a drug to combat anorexia in women, but it was much easier to get it approved for agricultural use than go through the FDA for drug approval. His father insisted he go the quick money route of agricultural approval, and since his father’s money funded his startup, he no choice but to go the agricultural drug route.

Andrew had been in West Rivers for nearly 2 weeks, visiting farms and chicken houses, enduring smells that made him want to throw up as soon as he stepped out of his car, and spending his evenings in the shithole town. He couldn’t wait to get back to Michigan and was gassing up his car at the edge of town on his way out to his family’s private pilot at the closest small airport. While standing there waiting for the ancient pump to slowly fill his car up, a car full of locals pulled up to the opposite pump. He could hear the couple in the car yelling at each other. The man was telling the woman in the car with him that she needed to go in and buy him some cigarettes because he wasn’t allowed in the convenience store. “Banned from a convenience store in this shithole, that is some trash”, Andrew thought to himself.

An overweight woman in her late 20s got out and slammed the door. “Bitch don’t you fucking slam my door!” The man yelled and jumped out of the driver’s side of the car. “Fuck you!”, the woman yelled back. The man pushed her. The woman yelled “Stay away from me!”. The man yelled “I will do what I want!” and pushed her again. The woman was wearing yoga pants that rolled under her stomach when she was pushed again. Andrew’s eyes were instantly drawn to her midsection and saw her belly hanging over the front yoga pants. He stepped to the other side of the pumps to see if she needed help, but just as he did, the attendant stepped out of the service station carrying a shotgun. “You are not supposed to be here!”, the attendant yelled at the man. The man yelled “Fuck you!” to the woman, jumped in his car and took off. The attendant turned around and walked right back into the gas station like it was a normal occurrence.

Andrew stood there staring at the woman’s soft, fat stomach hanging over the front of her yoga pants. She is a bit trashy looking, but cute, and her skin is perfect, not even so much as a stretchmark on belly or hips, he stood there thinking when the woman asked, “What do you want??”.

“Um… are you okay?”, Andrew asked.

“Do you fucking think I am okay?”, she replied.

“It’s just I saw what happened.”, Andrew said.

The woman jerked her yoga pants back up and pulled down her shirt so that her midsection was covered again.

“Where are you going? That piece of shit just left me here. I need a ride.”, she said.