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Fat in Seven Weeks: Linda & the National Chub-up


SomeTormentedFA

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This is the first part of a longer story in progress. A girl called Linda Ellikopa is caught in a national festival where the aim is to eat whatever and however much you want for seven weeks. The question is how she and her peers will handle this outright permissiveness. I won't post all seven parts of this story here, otherwise I'd just be hoarding forum-space. If you like this chapter, you can find the rest on my DA page -> https://www.deviantart.com/firewarrior121/gallery/ <- alongside similar stories of progressively poorer quality. Enjoy :)

 

~~Fat in Seven Weeks: Linda & The National Chub-up~~

~Chapter 1~

  •   by firewarrior121 / Some Tormented FA


 

One morning a slender, a fit gymnast in Södrahem slipped off her aerobics rail by accident while performing a flip. Slamming to the ground on her back, she rolled around winded on the ground. When she could breathe again, she shouted, ‘Aaaagh…  f@ck this,’ went home, flung opened the fridge and proceeded to consume every piece of food. She gave no second nor third thoughts about her figure.

Thus began Södrahem’s bi-annual Tjockningfest of 2017; the big Seven Weeks in which the sovereign island-nation of Södrahem indulge in a very certain liberty; the freedom to eat as poorly and as much as you want for a ripping seven weeks. What happens each time makes the rest of the world cast a sidewise glance from afar.

((Some history to read only if you like: Here most people are either Swedish, Spanish, Australian or mixed race, ever since traders from Spain accidentally ran ashore on Södrahem’s south coast in 1799. They were looking for Western Australia to establish trade with Perth. Instead they found a new island. The short story is that the Spaniards were too slow to act. It had been a long time since the Spanish Empire in the 1500’s… One year later, Swedish merchants accidentally ashore as well, but they acted immediately, establishing a trade outpost and fortifying claims on the island. A short, four-year war, fought mostly with half-assed naval missions and angry letters, ended with the Spaniards getting tired and asking for citizenship from the Swedes instead. The island grew, went through some hiccups and eventually reached a standard of living where they got bored of insulting each other and formed a coalition in 1824. After some more hiccups, involving religious disagreements and a nine-month food scarcity, people were able to move on and learn to tolerate each other.))

Currently it was Monday morning, 8th of May, 2017 – not exactly beaming bright, but fresh enough to delight your spirits at the realization that today is the day you finally let go. Cafes and coffee shops were blistering with so much activity they struggled to maintain staffing, as customers came in to eat and drink everything they’ forbidden themselves until now; brain-fogging chocolates, tongue-numbing sugar treats, flavoured chips until you were too full, soft drink until you got a stomach ache, doughnuts until you felt sick, desserts until you grew round. It was not uncommon to wake one morning and find yourself carrying a ** belly. Sometimes even more than that.

While Tjockningfest only begun in 1825 as a brief time of indulgence in resistance to government-enforced rations, since then the economy had slowly blossomed. Now in 2017, Tjockningfest had bloomed into an entire holiday season of gluttony– a cultural event just as important as Christmas or Easter. So, if you put on a bit of weight, then so what. That’s the whole cultural fun of it. Tjockningfest ends, you shed the weight, best you can, and move on.

But we understand that, for some reason, Linda Ellikopa could never manage to do this. At nineteen years of age, this was her second Tjockning festival since turning seventeen, the age you could participate. While everyone she knew took Seven Weeks to eat whatever their salivating tongues wriggled towards, seventeen-year-old Linda seemed to resent Tjockningfest with the same attitude of an adolescent who turns Christmas into an excuse to criticize “society, man”. For two embattled years, she’d held off the Great National Indulgence, seeing it as nothing but decadence. This year, it looked like things were going to be no different.

‘Aw, come on Lindy-girl,’ her high school friends would plead. ‘Why does it have to be all about limits, here? Smash those limits! Live a little! You’ve only got seven weeks.’

Sure, they’d say that, but after a few weeks they’d appear at the graduation ceremony and Linda would find herself peering at their tummies, wondering if that was a little spill of belly roll she could see there. Then a week later at the graduation party, she’d be finding ways to ignore the way her friends’ hips seemed to be puffed up more than she remembered, their upper thighs looking thicker and their waists swollen. So Linda would eat as strictly as if she were her own prison guard, preferring instead to watch with a contemptuous eye as everyone joked, laughed and ate more than their bodies could cope with.

Linda wasn’t the only one. You could say she was part of the ‘prissies’; a minority of people who appeared to prefer breaking out in a sweat over restricting their food intake rather than let go for a few weeks. But we also understand that Linda behaved this way to, among other reasons, keep her head down… She’d been shunted into this corner of obedience by her parents who, crucially, were not Södrahemish.

Maria and Terry Ellikoppa moved to Södrahem at the respective ages of 29 and 27– only a year before Linda was born. Mr and Mrs Ellikoppa were outsiders; they were not Swedes, nor were they Spanish. Instead they’d come straight from Britain, nearly as Anglo as they come except for Terry’s Greek mother. So this curious cultural “festival”, in which the whole Island Nation of Södrahem spent seven weeks indulging in as much food as possible until, lo-and-behold, muffin tops peeked out from under shirts, was utterly questionable. But it’s not as if the ordeal was entirely insane to Mr Terry Ellikoppa. He understood it fine, at a grassroots level; the need to just let go once in awhile. It was just… disappointing. A neglectful state of affairs. Hundreds of thousands of people, all failing to say “no” to themselves. A deliberate surrendering of self control. For all anyone knew, that same mentality could leak into other things, other behaviors best left repressed, until anything might be excused. If you weren’t your own master, then who would be?

All this fright he felt… it found gravity, it found a center, in his daughter. He looked at her young from sleeping and knew this was where she’d grow up. In a place which allows seven weeks of the year to ignore your better sensibilities. Where would she find her self control if not in that very festival season? He never told her this directly, just gave her subtle cues; silent but obvious silences to any mention of Tjockningfest. At the age of seventeen, Linda became aware of the full scope of the power dynamic at play here, and found herself settling into a daughterly complacency. She’d never indulge in the Tjockningfest. Well, yes, her father did have to apply his paternal pressure, but… After all, it’s never been an evolutionarily natural decision to deny to your impulses. Then again, most parenting is exactly that isn’t it: to force behaviours into shape.

 

***

 

The year’s Tjockningfestival came, went, and faded away to show up in the nation’s collective memory like a fingerprint on setting clay. While Linda stayed trim, she watched with something between disgust and a kind of envy she wasn’t ready to admit to herself as everyone tore down their barriers, bulldozed through their inhibitions and had fun. Why couldn’t she let go like that? They looked so happy for those seven weeks, eating whatever they wanted to. Some of them came out of Tjockningfest sporting little muffintops and potbellies, but no one cared. Some lost them, some didn’t. Some even let their muffintops keep expanding. Some grew fast, some grew slow. Nobody seemed to worry so much. Except for the prissies, who could barely hide their sneers every time they saw someone still carrying around whatever weight they’d added to their bodies in the last two months. Some prissies were vocal enough to begin blogs, or write in a letter to the editor making an argument that Tjockningfest was unhealthy and morally degraded. Being only a recent voice, with the advent of concern for the ethics of fast food, the prissies had never gained that much attention. People pretended they didn’t exist. If anyone acknowledged what they said at all, it was only by giving a solemn nod of the head, and ‘Oh’ and an ‘Ah’– before shrugging their ‘do I care?’ shoulders and getting on with life.

Linda was never so vocal. It was her father who was most against the idea. Her mother let it happen, but especially at family gatherings, you’d hear him passionately discussing his point of view with relatives. Most of them– aunts, uncles, cousins, gandparents –saw him in the same light as a climate change denier and merely acted like they agreed with his opinions. Linda wasn’t blind to this dynamic. She wished he’d either shut up, or they’d stop pretending to agree and actually argue with him. Yet his views still had their effect on her. She’d taken them on, and they stuck. All until she turned twenty.

By March of the next year, 2018, now twenty years old, she’d begun university in Södrahem’s capital city of Hestia. This sent her packing 800 kilometers east of home, where she bunked down in student accommodation in the city center, paying her way through the year by working shifts behind a coffee machine at a hardware store. Since Soderhem’s trade workforce was so large at the time, hardware stores were bustling hubs of industry, hi-visibility shirts seething throughout the area. The moment Linda’s barista shift began, it was 100% go-time until she finished, breaks rarely afforded. The stress came swift. At first it was only all the anxiety of a new job, but once she’d learned to operate on her own, the expectations to perform came crashing down on her head, and it was suddenly her fault if anything went wrong. And when things went wrong, the stares she got from angry men up to three times her age felt even more threatening than ever, as if the mere stare of their weathered eyes, unable to stop lingering around her chest, would destroy her in a way no act of sexual assault ever could.

As soon as the second semester of university began in June, the work piled up so high it bolstered the severity of her stress as if it had been wedged under her barista stress somehow. Soon enough she found out her hips pushing out into miniature lovehandles when she leaned to the side. This scared the sh1t out of her so bad she starved herself for a month. When she thought about it, she realised that since being away from home, she was out from under her father’s watch, meaning she’d begun to behave the way she felt she needed. And that involved eating whatever steamed in the glass display cases beside the barista machine– pastries, sandwiches, cakes –all at a worker’s discount. But, as everything demanded her attention, she forgot about it and stopped coming down so hard on herself. Her father and mother weren’t here to mold her.

Then her boss quit, moved onto another job somewhere overseas, and a new boss appeared. Jennifer was her name, as far as Linda was concerned, she was an angel in comparison. The filthy stress left. She began to feel like an uncaged bird, and nearly went binge-eating again and had to keep stopping herself.

By the next year, 2019, she was twenty-one and confident enough to have said goodbye to most of her first-year anxieties. She was near omniscient about where everything was around the university campus, understood the scaffolding of her freedoms, knew what was expected of her, where, how and when. The same went for her shifts at the store. Thing is; at twenty-one, she was also becoming complacent. That is, complacent to the idea that her life was probably going nowhere soon. After the first-year uni student gloss wore off, it became pretty clear to her and her new friends that job prospects have never been that good for post graduates. So instead they splashed their spare money around at hipster cafes and pubs, having conversations and telling stories over cheap lattes and beer. Then Tjockningfest came around again.

It would fall on Wednesday, 8th of May, 2019. The month had kicked off with mass anticipation– big food companies stirring up the population to guarantee maximum sales, TV adverts, radio talks, supermarkets displaying signs and banners like billowing flags… People did various things to prepare. One was to fast. This seemed like a delivery of genius to Linda.

One sunny midday during a break between lectures, she recommended fasting to her friend Jaimie Bejanaro; an aspiring poet with untapped genius and a poverty of ambition, despite so much spare time and intelligence. ‘Maybe you should fast, just to be sure you don’t over do it?’ Linda suggested.

The reaction she got was a, ‘What, are you kidding me?’ from Jaimie, as she blew on a strand of mousey-brown hair tickling her nose. ‘Don’t worry about it so much. Stop clinging. Just let go. You’ll probably find what you were holding onto so bad was never there? It was all fake?’

Linda didn’t want to hear this. The way Jaimie spoke often struck chords of sense, but sometimes it was a sense Linda turned away from.

They walked across the city street choked with traffic, a few blocks from where they’d be meeting the rest of the gang. Linda cast her hazel eyes to the ground, watching her canvas-topped shoes scuff the pavement as they walked. She decided she wantd to drop the subject. ‘Nyeh. I guess.’

But Jaimie cast a sidewise glance. ‘What, so you’re really going to just… fast for the entire festival?’

They came up to a bike stand and waited there, watching the oncoming foot traffic for the familiar faces of friends. In a daydream, Linda looked up, and saw a sky mostly obscured by the flanks of dominant corporate towers.

‘It’s not exactly great to have those kinds of eating habits, you know.’ Jaimie waited, staring at Linda, waiting for her to return the gaze.

‘Exactly,’ Linda said, thinking Jaimie meant the habits of overeating.

‘No. Lindy, I mean *fasting*. It’s not a good habit.’

‘What? Why?’

But before Jaimie could explain, the rest of the uni gang appeared ahead. Baily, a stout little chick with pigtails and pride in being one of the top 10% best Genji players in the world was walking hand-in-hand with Travis, an absolute joker, one of the tallest dudes around, looking slightly stoned. Crimson-haired Patricia, the group bitch was gossipping with Billy, making indignant gestures and no doubt telling a story in which she is whining about someone’s bad glance. There was Theo, the silent-but-wise German exchange student who ironically does not drink, politely tolerating the ramblings of Sebastien, who despite the fact that he can have a good time, believes it’s mathematically certain we all live inside a simulation.

Gathering around beers on a table outside Den Gröna Ankan, discussion found itself coming round to Tjockningfest, now only eight days away.

‘So who’s ready for it?’ asked Patricia.

Theo nodded and put his hand up. ‘Ja.’

‘Actually,’ Travis scratched his head, ‘this is going to be the first year I’ve done it.’

‘Us both,’ added Baily, with a nudge in his side and a smile all affectionate-like.

‘I am,’ Jaimie put in.

‘Here,’ Billy said with a pat of his insubstantial stomach, as if saying farewell to it while he still could.

Patricia snorted. ‘Then again, who ever isn’t?’

Amidst shrugs, Jaimie glanced at Linda, but said nothing. Nobody thought to ask the oddly silent girl about her plans. That was fine– she wasn’t about to tell.

Hours later only Patricia, Jaimie left and Linda were left. Patricia went off to the girl’s room for a moment, leaving the other two alone. Linda caught Jaimie looking at her as if trying to decide on something.

‘You seriously don’t want to do Tjockningfest, do you?’ she asked.

Pressing her lips into a straight line, Linda shrugged. For all the ambiguity in her gesture, she clearly meant “no”.

‘Well if you didn’t resemble such an anglo version of Gal Gadot every day, would you feel better doing Tjockningfest like the rest of us?’

Linda narrowed her eyes. ‘What are you…?’

‘I’m saying, you sound like you’re worried you’ll lose your figure or something.’

‘Well–’

‘Well yeah– you are.’ Jaimie watched her with some kinda smirk of understanding. Though exactly what she understood, Linda had only half an idea.

Something about the look struck her the wrong way. ‘Yeah! Why wouldn’t I be worried!’

Jaimie flinched and shrugged. ‘Can you, like, give me any reason why you should be averse to it? Any reason at all, that I won’t just roll my eyes at?’

She had an answer, but it turned sour just as she was about to say it. Now she had to think. Well… that one gave her pause. Looking aside, brows faintly pressed, she sorted through all her reasons and realised that, no, for now she couldn’t say anything that wouldn’t make Jaimie roll her eyes. Was that her fault? Or was it Jaimie’s? Unable to decide, she kept quiet.

 

_________

Week One

_________

Too bad for her then, that the 8th of May ticked over while she slept– a fat load of nothing she could do about that. When she woke late morning, she emerged into the living room wearing her silk nightgown to find her roommates already up and watching TV. It was as bad as Christmas; just about every advert was about food.

Being the start of Tjockningfest, it was a public holiday, meaning nobody had to go to work. Linda had to attend uni later, but that was all. At the dinner table, which stood across from the two window-facing lounges in the living area, Milo Bergstron sat spooning sugar-loaded cereal into her mouth.

‘Where’s Prairie?’ Linda asked.

‘Getting more food.’ Milo beckoned Linda to sit. ‘Come on, eat up, Tjockningfest is today.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

Through a mouthful; ‘Yes you are. Come on.’

Standing awkward in her nightgown, she felt the impulse to draw it tighter around herself. But she sat down instead, pretending to be part of the fun. Just as she took a seat at the far end of the table, with the morning light from the window at her back, Sofia Carria, a two-hundred and ninety pound cover model with an Instagram following to match that of Tess Holliday, came in through the front door carrying multiple shopping bags. ‘Girls I’ve got goodies!’ she announced as she waddled out from hallway. She beelined for the kitchen, from where could be heard the sounds of unloaded groceries. Feeling vaguely alienated, Linda watched in silence as Milo scoffed her breakfast; her pale hair held up in a bun, dainty Scandinavian eyebrows working as she spooned more food into her mouth than she could chew.

Emerging from the kitchen was Prairie Gardner, a blonde, curtain-fringed homecoming queen with an impressively wide grin and gleeful blue eyes that seemed always to shine with erotic energy. In her arms was a fondue fountain. She brought it to the table, set it down and switched it on. Milo straightened her petite body at the sight and gave Prairie a vigorous thumbs-up. ‘Good idea,’ through a mouthful, and she loaded another spoonful of sugar onto her already unhealthy cereal.

‘Damn.’ Prairie admired her fondue. ‘Feel like I’ve put on a few just looking at it.’

Linda stayed poker-faced as she imagined the implications of the remark– suddenly extra width in Prairie’s hips, the pressure of her butt more visible against the rear of her jeans, maybe her belly sticking forward a bit, breasts gaining a size.

‘Jeez Linda,’ Sofia called, coming out of the kitchen with some blocks of chocolate.She cracked the blocks into lines and arranged them beside the fondue with bowls of strawberries, marshmallows and banana slices. ‘Stop looking so glum. What’s the deal?’

‘Huh? Nothing.’

‘You sure?’ Sofia was giving her a certain look.

They were all watching her now, concern glaring from their eyes. She imagined them thinking *What’s the matter with Linda? She sad? She anxious? Bad sleep?*

‘No I’m fine,’ she said. ‘What’s going on here, do I look sick or something?’

Milo, with her spoon held up ready to pop into her mouth, said, ‘You just seem a bit off?’

Linda said nothing.

They seemed to get it. No more questions were asked.

Prairie took a seat before her fondue tower like some shrine, her head tilted to one side, knee bobbing with delight. While Milo spooned yet more sugary cereal into her mouth and kept an eye on the news– talking heads across the room yabbering about local news on low volume. Sofia visited the kitchen to grab some drinks. When she came back they started to eat.

Sometime later Linda still hadn’t touched a thing, and now Sofia was standing behind a chair leaning with her hand atop its back, casting glances at her. Prairie was too bodily involved in consuming her fondue to realise. But Milo perceived the dynamic at play. Taking a line of chocolate, she extending her hand across the table. ‘Have some.’

Linda smiled, shook her head.

Milo’s small, fair face was deadly blank. ‘Why not…’

‘Dunno,’ Linda shrugged. ‘Don’t feel like it.’

‘Surely you do, though. It’s Tjockningfest.’

Linda was getting irritated with all this nagging. ‘No. It’s okay.’

‘Why not?’

Giving in at the last, Linda went to open her mouth. She wanted to explain herself. But she couldn’t quite do it. ‘I just, I don’t like… I’m just not… I don’t wanna take any risks. That’s all there is to it.’ She looked away to the TV.

‘Risks?’ Sofia giggled. ‘Ah, come on now.’ She put a hand on one of her mammoth hips, giving Linda a skeptical look. ‘What, you’re afraid you’ll put on a few? You’ve got a lo-o-ong way to go before you get anywhere near this.’ Just for emphasis, Sofia did a little hip-twisting dance to show off her over-exaggerated figure, hands rising and falling down her torso, hips and thighs. There was no rebuttal Linda could offer to this.

Sofia was easily around three hundred pounds. Sometimes you would hear her breathing when she made any repetitive movements. Strange thing is when you consider she used to be a bulimic anorexic. Whatever body used to be underneath had been consumed in huge globs of fat. Her body parts lunged and wobbled even as she side stepped from one side of the kitchen to the other. Strange thing was, none of her enormous rolls looked sloppy. It was as if they wanted to forget gravity, roaming outwards in smooth, exaggerated shapes of bulbousness. You’d think that underneath all that extra weight was muscle. But all she had to carry around her burden with was the bones and muscles of her once-anorexic frame.

‘Trust me; you’ll be fine.’ Sofia shrugged. ‘You have nothing to worry about.’

Last time Linda checked, her own weight had never exceeded a hundred and twenty-one pounds. ‘Fine,’ she said, slow and careful, after a long time of staring out the window and hoping the topic went away. ‘But I’ll… I’m only having a little bit, okay?’

The problem, as we understand, is that “a little bit” turned into “heaps”, and left Linda with a heavy discomfort in her stomach. It seemed like there was no way of getting rid of it. The only way to banish the feeling was by letting go of her stomach muscles. All that did– unknown to her since she never once looked down at herself –was release her belly into the balloonish shape it’d wanted to take all this time. Now she stood up and went about her day with the curious sensation of being led everywhere by her tummy. In fact she was.

But forget it. She paid no attention. Why? Only because, that night, she devised what she thought was a good plan. Truth was, it was never going to work. We understand this. But it was all she had, and so she believed in it:

Since it was Tjockningfest, people would expect her to eat *at least* something. There was nothing she could do about that. So she was going to participate. At the same time, though, she was going to keep a strict eye on her body, and the moment she caught any change in her form, she was going to pull the pin and quit. If anyone asked, she would cite “health concerns” given to her by her doctor.

Linda had no doctor.

All she had was a complex about eating.

 

***

 

So Linda let herself be dragged into the Seven Weeks of Tjockningfest, more or less happy to have junk food here and there. Never anything too severe. The moment her body showed any signs, she was out.

Problem is, things become relative. Once everyone around you starts consuming so much food that doctors prescribe laxatives and other medicines to alleviate discomfort… when an entire nation’s population overeats every single day, binging until their tummies ache… commuting home from work still bulging from their workplace’s Evening Feast party– it’s fatally easy to find yourself doing the same thing without realising it. You can overeat to a moderate degree, and still be “eating less than everyone else”. Linda wasn’t the first to fall into this trap of relativity. Nor will she be the last.

But as we’ll understand, Linda had never consumed so much food per day in her life as she did first week of Tjockningfest. It was too easy to feel relatively safe. While everybody else, each stranger she met, was going about with distended guts, eating their fifth pizza for the day, Linda was only ever on her second. Doesn’t seem like so much in comparison. But when it comes to the scientific realm, eating two pizzas injects more calories in your system then you need. By that stage, you’ve well and truly lost. Linda was never going to admit this to herself. Even as she got ready for uni on Friday morning– after a breakfast of syrupy pancakes, strawberries and cream, then some danish rolls for good measure, causing her stomach to balloon out so bad she could only suck it back into a slight mound –she knew it was only bloating. It would eventually vanish. So long as nobody saw her like this, things were gonna be okay.

 

*

 

Sunday rolled around, marking the end of inaugural week. A celebration was held every Sunday of Tjockningfest, each event based loosely on the types of foods. The event calendar pinned to the nation’s fridges, walls and doors read something like;

Week 1: Entree Fest

Week 2: Appetizer Fest

Week 3: Bakery Fest

Week 4: Mains Fest

Week 5: Savoury Fest

Week 6: Sweets Fest

Week 7: Final Fest

These happened across multiple venues; theatres, ballrooms, universities, park lawns– just about any public space big enough to cater for crowds of hungry people. Corporation executives felt their groins warming up over the prospect, just secretly, even to themselves. They sent legions of oversized trucks loaded with the most binge-worthy products you could imagine, selling them at discounts low enough to bring wallets out of pockets, but high enough to generate inequality-boosting amounts of profit. Someone was always sponsoring the event, making massive dollars off the hunched backs of underpaid workers and the expanding bellies of Södrahem’s population.

Not wanting to look like such a loser, Linda agreed to go along with Jaimie and the others to a local Entree Fest. Tonight’s event was more or less on the roam. Since so many venues were going at once, different crowds found themselves bleeding into one another. Wandering around a park venue east of the city center and browsing all the local cuisine, it didn’t take long before Linda and Jaimie became disoriented in the general throng. By the time night fell, they ended up in some dock-side bar with a view over the ocean, the place crammed with loud music, indigo lights, alcohol and calorie-rich “entree” foods, which were more like junk food disguised as entree dishes wrapped in plastic– some of which had shamefully found its way into the sea, later to clog the propeller of some poor old man’s yacht next morning.

Mousy as Jaimie’s hair was, soft and inoffensive, there was no stopping her opportunism for reckless living. Already woozy on food, the moment she strolled in, she was buying up beers and seeing each pint through to the end. Linda could only watch as more drinks were brought to their table, each time feeling more disconnected from herself. She left like she’d woken up all of a sudden, but could not rise from her dream, leaving her mired in a world between worlds

As the night drew deeper beyond midnight, a general humidity gathered along the bayside and instilled a note of serenity. The mobs began to calm, yelled a little softer, slowed their drinking, were more content simply to chat and laugh with each other while they watched the void-black sea twinkle with city light. High in sky fireworks bloomed in the shape of chicken legs, dim sims, quiches, chocolate treats and other confectionery. Linda’s upturned eyes took on a glossy, reflective shine, painting upon the orbs of her bronze eyes what bloomed above her. All this was giving her heavy vacation vibes. You know that feeling you get when you’re far away from home, someplace else– who cares where –except for the one, undeniable fact that you’ve left all the shackles of your consequences behind you. Your actions don’t matter here. You’re just a pair of eyes on legs, going here and there, absorbing experiences like some infinite sponge. Before Linda knew it, she was at the bar, ordering tall beer and a platter of thick black brownies just because she felt so free, her tongue salivating, and an emptiness ballooning in her stomach as if to make space for the treasures it sought.

Returning to their outdoor spot, a table with four stools by the rails looking over the bay, she found a newcomer sitting in a spare chair. She was chatting and laughing with Jaimie, who looked up as Linda took her seat. They saw the beers and brownies. ‘Ho- ho,’ came Jaimie, ‘What you got!’ Then, turning to the newcomer, said, ‘I want you to meet Valeria, my cousin,’ gesturing to a Spanish girl about their age with a reserved air about her, shadowy eyes and even darker hair, half on the plumper side. Linda tried being less overt about looking Valeria up and down, but why as it so hard?– the girl hid inside a green parka and dark leggings. Well fitting, but unable to make her somewhat thick frame appear slender, not by any measure. Judging by the width of her torso, and the set of her legs, her thighs must have been touching, although she was nowhere near so big as to be the size of Sofia, Linda’s roommate. Valeria was only what you’d call moderately porky. Thick boned.

‘She’s half cousin, but still cousin,’ a tipsy Jaimie went on, swaying with pride. ‘She did last year’s Tjockningfest. Guess what, put forty pounds on from it.’

Valeria seemed to find this funny, though she tried to cover her smile and shut her mouth, but only snorted.

‘Well?’ Jaimie provoked. ‘You did, didn’t you?’

With smiling eyes, Valeria gave an aloof sort of shrug. ‘Eh… e-e-eh… *maybe*?’

A memory of faint worry stabbed Linda through the chest. But it didn’t live for long– she killed the worry, because she wasn’t going to let herself become like Valeria. Not that she was making judgements or anything…

The hour turned along on its multi-directional wheels and soon enough, amidst chatting, laughter and sh1t-talking, platters and platters of food were nibbled at. They took turns to bring the food to the table. Each time Linda stood up for hers, she could feel the hug of gravity that little bit more until, returning with a batch of spiced potato fritters, she leaned over the table only to feel the edge barge into the front of her stomach.

‘Last year I watched dad put on, like, twenty,’ Valeria was saying to Jaimie.

Before Linda sat down she hoisted her jeans back up her waist. It came to bite her– she scooched up onto her stool, only to find her belt going for a strangehold around her gut. ‘Agh.’

Noticing the way Linda sat back and tugged her belt so suddenly, Valeria and Jaimie stopped to look. Feeling a prickly warmth come into her cheeks, Linda tried to suck in, but she flushed and touched her mouth– a sudden bubble of nausea was threatening to bubble up her throat. We understand that Linda had never been this full. She was getting so little air into her lungs she was beginning to wonder if this is what asthma felt like.

Which was the moment Valeria, broke out into a bit of laughter, having experience with Tjockningfest already. Jaimie caught on too, joining with a chuckle of her own. ‘What were you trying to do that for?’ nodding at Linda’s bloated midsection. ‘Look around. Everybody’s got what you’ve got.’

‘Yeah, look at me,’ added Valeria. Linda watched with an unsure face and an unsettled gut feeling as Jaimie’s cousin leaned back in her stool and rubbed her own tummy– a mound obvious even under all the padding of clothes. Jaimie added her own two cents, or pounds, depending if she’d gained anything already, leaning back with a smirk to massage her own bloated belly. Then, admiring its size, she said, ‘I wonder what the damage is,’ before lifting her shirt to show a small pair of love handles Linda never knew her friend possessed. The sight stunned her. She felt invasive, and invaded at the same time. She didn’t ask to see this. She hated the way her friend’s raw, naked little spills of flesh looked. She wanted to eliminate then, bite them off and discard them. She hated the way she wanted to put her mouth around them in the first place– the way they’d squeeze and slop under her lips and her finger tips. Seeing it made Jaimie and Valeria laugh. The only reason Linda did as well was to camouflage her residual shock, but she did it too late. The recoil had lasted a moment too long.

Then Valeria got the idea to copy Jaimie. Unzipping her parka, they saw a purple sweater full as a billowing sail. Underneath was a white tank top. She lifted this last piece. So this is was what a bloated stomach looked like after already becoming soft. Valeria displayed to them an olive-skinned, chub-coated belly with a gaping navel like an eye, and a fraction of hip-chub that there was likely more of peeking out between the sides of her gut and the limits of her waistband. Linda writhed. She wanted to burn it. There was cold fire, fear or something else, in the pit of her pelvis. Suddenly Linda had to endure a brief, horrible vision of dough-textured fat oozing forth from the center of her body, each lump competing for space until they had to rub against each other in uncontrollable rolls of flesh.

Valeria covered herself back up.

With the rite of initiation over, they looked to Linda, whose heart turned to cement.

‘Your turn,’ Jaimie said.

Her heart tried to break its freeze. ‘Oh, but I–’

Jaimie rolled her eyes so far into the back of her head she had to bend over backwards to follow their path. ‘God. Again with these ideas about limits. Don’t make me do this for you. I will intervene.’

Linda knew Jaimie’s surprise authoritarian attitudes only appeared under liquor… if she could fly under the radar this time, she could get away with it until the next. She felt her arms cross over her firm stomach by instinct and she doubled up, looking like some cowering orphan.

Jaimie adjusted her shirt and leaned a little towards Linda. ‘Don’t make me.’

‘No, don’t,’ Linda asked. Hearing herself sounding so much like a little child, she had to hold back a sudden spray of laughter that she had no idea where it came from. She didn’t want it to be seen. They’d think the wrong things about her.

Jaimie lunged forward anyway. Between a set of sudden hiccups, ticklish laughter and small cries of shock as laughing made her stomach muscles contract, Jaimie finally pried Linda’s arms away and lifted her clothes. Linda tugged it back down, but a sharp “No!” from Jaimie stopped her in her tracks. Frozen, just like that, vulnerable and confused like she hadn’t been since she heard her parents f*cking each other in their room as a child, Linda waited like a stunned puppy.

‘Now lean back, and be kind enough as to show everyone. We’ve shown ours. Don’t be so rude.’

Giving Jaimie a sardonic, I’ll-get-you-later-for-this kind of stare, which came out more as a pathetic look of submission, Linda slowly leaned back and pulled her shirt up past her ribcage. She was hatefully aware of the night air breezing across her bare skin that should never have been exposed. It belonged under clothes. ‘Fine then,’ she said flatly, hoping she sounded angry. ‘Here it is then. Are you happy?’ Not looking down at herself, she stared at them as they stared at her belly, in whatever shape it might’ve been, however big, round, or pale. Who knew. Who cared.

What Jaimie and Valeria saw was a ballooned-shaped stomach, skin tight, navel pressed flat. They nodded with appreciative smirks. ‘Thank you for showing us,’ Jaimie said, then laughed.

Linda withdrew. She tossed a half-assed sneer of contempt at Jaimie, then turned aside to brood.

The night went on.

 

*

 

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~~FAT IN SEVEN WEEKS: LINDA & THE NATIONAL CHUB-UP~~


by firewarrior121 / Some Tormented FA

_________

Week Two
_________


For Linda to be a shy grump about things wasn’t so normal. Outside of study, work and Tjockningfest, all those things which tugged at her mind, Linda was a free bird spending her time collecting so many paints she could vanish hours of your day just by explaining the differences between paints; their types, their colours, how two of the same were actually very different just because of the way they dried. You’d see a wide open energy come into a set of eyes usually dark with concentration. Her room was so packed with the materials of her passion that a stack of canvases blocked half the only window in her little room, letting in a soft, contemplative light. Sometimes she had to shift piles of paper and utensils off her bed to lay down at night. She owned ten different grades of canvas, in whatever size she needed, knew which was best for what. This included brushes. Don’t get her started on bristle length and thickness... Including what she left behind with her parents, Linda’s total collection of brushes came to eighty-seven.

But her interests had found themselves on a detour, lately. She’d wandered into the digital art realm. Half of her hobby time now saw itself spent on her laptop. Her little desk was home to two tablets, spare computer mice and scraps of paper on which were scribbled initial sketches– only a portion of them made their way into the digital phase.

Tuesday found her in this habitat. Being the middle of the semester, the uni heat had died down somewhat, leaving her obliged only to work  a shift here or there. Today she wasn’t painting on canvas. Instead she was mastering the Digital Brush technique. You’d be surprised how long it takes to learn something new. Things got repetitive at times– learning exactly what angles and pressures to apply with the pen for what effects, practicing strokes over and over, downloading and installing different brush sets just to try them, then tweaking if they weren’t up to standard. But we understand, as time went on, Linda found things were less of a grind once she brought in snacks to fill the blanks. A cup of tea here, some coffee there, an apple, a few biscuits, some of those cherry muffins Prairie left out for pickings. A bowl of ice cream nobody saw her grab.

Wednesday came and went more or less like this as well.

By Thursday she’d grown confident enough to start a new project idea.

She’d sketched a bunch of interesting things already, but there was only one idea she wanted to chase. Sipping a mug of hot chocolate with cream, maybe too much cream, she sat back and looked at her half-completed work on the screen. The kernel of her idea was ripe. She couldn’t make it real just yet. First she had to test something.

After scouting the web with the dregs of her hot chocolate, she came across the right custom-print clothing store. She was going to upload a mockup image and have it printed on a piece of clothing to see if it worked out. If things went well, she could build up a whole wardrobe of unique clothing only she’d want to wear. It would be her, all her. Linda wanted to give birth to her own aesthetic.

Most of her current wardrobe consisted of contrast-coloured outfits. She liked the look they gave her. They were all slim-fit, touching her skin only just, and hugged tight only in the right places, mimicking her slim proportions. Taking a white open-shoulder shirt off the hook, she put it on, went to the mirror and forced herself to imagine what it would look like covered in her artwork.

Unconsciously tilting her head, she ran her hands down her sides to spread the shirt out, then turned left and right. She was in her underwear. Half the window’s midday light made her thighs glow with their own shine– smooth, only vaguely olive. Honestly, she thought, her legs were only average. But perhaps that’s for the best. She had no real ass to speak of, but nobody called her a stick. She thought of all the times she walked through the city wondering, as you do, if anyone is looking. The beautiful boys she passes now and again never seem to look at her. They never look away either. She didn’t know what to think. Below the neck, she was a definitively a young woman– perhaps only that. Her body ticked all the boxes, but excelled nowhere. When she looked herself in eyes, she wondered if sometimes she looked sad. What she wanted was to look peaceful. Seeing her curved brows drawing slightly together, she blinked and forced her her forehead to relax. When she opened her eyes again she only looked numb. Handsome, but numb.

Whatever.

Shaking her head, she returned to imagining artwork on her shirt for a while.

She decided she liked her idea.

After a trip to the kitchen, she sat at her laptop with a custard tart and browsed the website for an open-shoulder top. She selected size small and uploaded her image. The first bit of art, the guinea-pig of the experiment, was an abstract fanning pattern of magenta, moss green, indigo, baby blue and streaks of ochre– the vibe of a sprawling free spirit. It would look funky. Different. That’s for sure. Only once she was happy with the positioning, the entire shirt filled, did she click to confirm.

Delivery was expected within a week.

She drummed the desk in satisfaction and went to fetch another hot chocolate.

*

Friday ended up dragging itself out to all the length of a school sermon that just won’t end. Something about the morning ground her into boredom. She had no clue why, so she filled the day with the taste of snacks on her tongue until she got a text from Baily, from uni. Last month, Baily and Travis had started living together in a small sharehouse. While the matriarchal landlord didn’t allow her walls to be painted, she did permit decorations what wouldn’t damage anything. So, after discovering Linda’s potential with a brush and, for that matter, almost any colourful medium, Baily and Travis got her to go nuts on a 4x4 blackboard in their living room. They were going for the modern Bohemian.

‘So,’ Baily told her over the phone, ‘we were thinking something like making the living room busier. I mean. To be honest, we don’t really know what we want, really. I mean, we’ve seen your stuff, you’re really talented, so we’re both sure you’ll do something great. Could you recommend anything?’

‘Um.’ Sitting at her desk, Linda took the tin foil from a bar of chocolate, balled it up and tossed it into the bin– missed. ‘Uh. Maybe. I’d have to see your room myself. Get an idea of what looks like what.’

‘Okay, well why don’t you come over sometime soon?’

‘I’d love that. I haven’t even seen your place yet, and I wanna!’

‘How about tomorrow? Saturday? You free?’

‘Free like a bird. Or tonight, even.’

‘Yeah, we’re here tonight. It’s not too late yet. Hey, let’s make a night of it.’

‘I’ll be there at, um, ten?’

‘Yeah, we’ll see ya then.’

She got ready to leave.

‘Hey, um,’ she got Prairie’s attention, who was sitting on the lounge watching TV, hunched over a bowl of pudding.

‘Ngh?’ Prairie twisted around to face her.

‘Is it alright if I borrow your car for the night again?’

Prairie chewed and swallowed. ‘Yeah sure. I don’t need it until tomorrow, so.’

Linda tried not to glance at Prairie’s middle. She didn’t want to know anything. ‘Thanks heaps.’

‘My keys should be in the hallway.’

Once she’d found some old chalk sticks, a pencil, scrap pieces of paper, a tub of left over spaghetti to eat on the way, she hopped in Prairie’s car and left.

_

Baily and Travis’ living room was sizeable enough for a sharehouse, populated by cheap satin lounges, a TV set with a modest surround sound system, a few indoor plants here and there, a coffee table draped with a embroidered cloth concealing stacks of board games stored underneath. There were already a few decorations on the walls; a large Indian mural, some pictures, so on.

‘This one here,’ Baily said, gesturing to a large, borderless chalkboard on the inside of the room’s entrance. It reached almost from floor to ceiling.

Travis and Baily waited while Linda stood back to evaluate her course of action.

‘Any preferences?’ she asked them.

Travis was happy with whatever Linda did. Baily, being in the top ten percent of Genji players world-wide, wanted a few Overwatch items on there, which she supplied references to Linda for.

Chin in hand, Linda’s eyes traced invisible lines around the blackboard. ‘Problem is,… where to put a sort of border, if you will. Maybe make it out of words, or something. Maybe up here.’ She stepped up to the black board and reached up to gesture along the top edge. Baily, being a stout, sorta chubby little girl herself, had to smirk as she glimpsed from side-on little curve of Linda’s belly as the hem of her shirt rose.

Couple hours later, she was into it, placing light shapes on the blackboard to get an idea of composition. Travis had to leave for work, saying goodbye, thanks, and ducking his head as he left out the door.

‘You sure you don’t want to do at least some illustrations of your own?’ Linda asked.

Baily chewed the inside of her cheek. ‘I’m sh1t at anything arty. Wouldn’t it ruin it?’

Eyes wide, ‘No! Course not. It would add charm. Anyway, if you don’t like it, you can always rub it out and start again. Nothing is permanent until we spray the durability coat on it.’

Linda watched as Baily’s eyes began to flit with small ideas. ‘Well, alright then.’

Soon enough, after clearing away bits of furniture, they were having a right old time chatting away with each other, creating doodles all over the blackboard and fishing from a bowl of chips on the floor between them. Retreating a little to evaluate the lines of a small contributory sketch she’d made, Baily revived an old topic. ‘So, are you saying absolutely none of your family ever do Tjockningfest?’

‘Yep.’ Linda said as she pinched another couple chips from the bowl. ‘Dad hates it.’

‘But why? It’s just something we all do.’

‘I don’t know.’ Not wanting to talk about it, she leaned closer to focus on scratching a few detailed lines.

‘Is he one of those “prissies”?’

Linda tried to sound easy. ‘Well he wasn’t really that vocal about it all, so yah, but he did rant about it to family members, like at gatherings and everything, but anyway it doesn’t matter.’

‘What does everyone think of him when he does that?’

‘When he does what, rant? Nothing interesting. They just sorta pass it off. Dad’s just dad, you know? He’s passionate about other things, too, so they just see it as a character quirk or something, I dunno. Doesn’t really matter.’’

‘Do you?’

Linda stopped drawing. ‘Don’t know. Maybe. Never thought about it before,’ she lied.

‘Uh-huh.’

Now she had to buckle. She couldn’t keep trying to worm her way out. ‘Look. If I had to answer, I wouldn’t have an answer.’ Reaching into the bowl, she felt only crumbs. ‘Oh. There’s none left.’

‘Oh that’s alright, we’ve got some more. Want any?’

‘I’ll keep drawing.’

Taking this to mean “yes”, Baily stood with a little effort that surprised her and vanished. By the time she returned with two bowls of chips, Linda, with her legs crossed, had begun to outline the feet of Genji in a shuriken-ready stance which spanned most of the board at a diagonal angle.

‘Too awesome,’ Baily grinned, placing the two bowls on the ground and standing back with hands on hips to get a good up-and-down look at the blackboard mural, and Linda sitting cross-legged on the ground. Only then did Baily notice her hips from behind… that small overspill which starts at the front of your waistline as you lean forward, and comes round to form what we know as beginner’s love handles. Baily examined Linda’s lower back. Her shirt was tucked tight into the back of her jeans. You could see the spillage of softness in her outer hips, but there was no evidence of anything like softness so far back just yet. *So,* Baily thought to herself, *Speaking of Tjockningfest…*

Sitting down beside Linda to resume drawing her own little picture, she nudged the bowls closer to Linda’s hand without being seen. Allowing herself a secret smirk, she got back into it.

*

Sunday came round. Week two of Tjockningfest was about to end. Tonight was the “Appetizers Fest”, in which appetizer foods would populate venues and street parties, clog digestive tracts and, later on, gutters. Appetizers Fest was more or less a doppelganger of the Entree Fest, since Entrees and Appetizers are more or less the same thing… But at the end of the day, who cares? Food was everywhere, for prices you wouldn’t believe and in quantities your stomach couldn’t cope with.

Though her friends were all going to one venue or another, unfortunately Linda had to stay at home with her head down in an assignment that plunged into such academic depths it was making her mind feel warped and hazy. Occasionally she’d resurface for something to eat, but it was only ever like a gasp of air before she plunged back into articles, impossible sentences, concepts that were a head-bender to formulate into her own words, and then list as citations.

A little clock bell chimed from the living room. She glanced at her computer time– saw it’d flown towards 11:00 pm. Reading and typing so much, she’d been forgetting to breathe properly. She stood up with dizzy vision and yawned so hard her jaw cracked. She looked at the pile of balled up wrappers on her desk– muesli bars, mini yoghurt tubs, chocolates, lollies –and, feeling their presence deep inside her stomach, swiped the rubbish into the bin.

Just outside her door, she performed a few stretches behind the lounges in the living area, grunting as she bent over the surprise ache of her own stomach. When she entered the kitchen, she realised she didn’t exactly know what she was doing here. She shrugged and returned to her laptop.

It only took a few minutes for her to change her mind, get up and return again with a few cookies.

Ten minutes later the front door opened to the sound of Sofia and Prairie’s voices. Linda emerged to nose around, glad for any excuse to procrastinate. ‘Thought you guys were at an Appetizers Fest?’

‘Just got back,’ Sofia said over her shoulder as she and Prairie placed various trays on the kitchen bench, several stacked atop one another containing who knows what. Linda came closer and saw it all; she saw glazed chicken wings, mini meatballs, guacamole, garlic bread, nachos n’ cheese, pizza wheels, scones, smoked salmon pieces, nine different flavours of dip, salted almonds, so many rice crackers you’d get throw up, pinwheel german cheeses, the whole shebang-a-rino and apparently more…

Prairie began making room in the fridge for some of the trays. Sofia, leaning her nearly three-hundred pound body against the kitchen bench with her massive hips swallowing the vinyl edging, explained the situation. ‘We got all these at the Gröven Garden venue– you know, down at Aveneda Beo?’

Linda nodded, admiring all the items.

Sofia saw her looking. ‘Want some? We’re about to go wild, ourselves.’

‘What?’ Prairie spun around from the fridge. ‘Again? I don’t know, I’m still feeling fat as fu-u-uck,’ pouting and catching her stomach like a basketball, letting it distend all the way out.

Sofia snickered. ‘Got nothing on me,’ patting her own gut. The sequin button shirt she had on looked dreadful clingy; there was no concealing the two-handfuls-thick belly roll that was her waist. Turning to Linda, she said, ‘Offer stands.’

‘No. Maybe later. I don’t know. I’ll just have a muesli bar or something.’ Only to find, nosing around in the cupboard, that the last box was empty. She flattened it and threw it in the recycling bin.

‘I thought you didn’t do Tjockningfest,’ said Sofia. Prairie looked over, too, tilting her head.

Linda popped an eyebrow. ‘Huh? Yeah I’m not.’

Sofia gave a knowing glance. ‘I thought that box was full this morning.’

‘Yeah?’

Prairie, seeing where this was going, giggled and looked at Linda’s stomach for any sign, but let Sofia do all the talking.

‘Did you eat them all?’ the big girl asked.

All Linda could manage was a shrug, wanting to back away and cash out of this conversation. ‘So…? I don’t do Tjockningfest. I’ve still been eating less than you guys.’

‘Doesn’t that say otherwise?’ with a pointed look at Linda’s middle.

There were small physical facts there that Linda hadn’t, and was not about to, acknowledge by looking at it. Her face turned serious. ‘What says otherwise?’ she demanded.

Neither of them told her.

Prairie changed the topic, throwing it all off before something blew up– for example Linda’s midriff, potentially. ‘You want anything?’ she asked, pointing to the trays of food.

‘No, I’m alright. Maybe later. I don’t know. Probably not. Right now I have to, um, finish an assignment.’ She wasn’t lying. For some reason she felt like she was. With that, she spun on her heel and retreated to her room, straddling some dangerously close border between noticing something was different about the way her midriff felt when she sat down, and on the other hand totally forgetting any thought about it.

Nevertheless, after the deep-heated smell of pastry found its way into the room, she ended up zipping out a short time later while nobody was in the kitchen. She brought back with her a small saucer loaded with what had at first been two pizza rolls, then turned into a greedy seven. That seven then turned into another, greedy eight.

That’s the thing about large plate sizes. Believe it or not, your brain actually interprets the sight of food on a larger plate as… less food. Too bad for Linda and her supposed disapproval of Tjockningfest; of all the plates in their share house, saucers seemed outnumbered by dinner plates at a staggering four-to-one.

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_________

Week Three
_________

Monday morning ended up being unexpectedly shite. She’d been put on one of the early shifts, making her responsible for the coffees of tired, angry old laborers. She was suffering under a spell of morning sickness, herself. She managed to fck up a coffee at one point, fumbling and spilling a bit of milk over the espresso machine’s grate. While the already irritable worker waited around with a hard squint, she had to chuck it and start again. When all was said and done, though, the guy turned out to be alright, telling her not to worry about it, and off he went back to his ute.

It lightened her prospects a little, only before the manager buzzed along to show her how to use the espresso machine as if she hadn’t already been using it one hundred times a day for nearly two years, now. She imagined the words “fck off” … felt her lips come teeteringly close to giving it the slip … then returned to her job feeling low-key resentment for the rest of the day. Then, just as she’d begun to nibble at a sausage roll, a few police officers came in to question the manager on a recent theft that’d apparently taken place a week ago. This left Linda to take on a few duties she had no idea how to do. Even after a co-worker gave her instructions, she still felt as if she’d committed some huge error without knowing what. And that sent her up stress-ways. Her teeth kept grinding with everything she did. The only thing she could do was give them food to churn instead.

By the time the police left and the manager relieved her, the remainder of the shift ground on. Coffee after coffee, ploughing her into her the drone of monotony. She felt like one sustained note among many, that had gone on for too long but could not end.

Never mind that, though. All things, whether good or bad, do come to an end.

The day did see her heading home, with a chicken roll in one hand, steering wheel in the other. All the way home her fly felt like it needed to be adjusted.

Entering the living room, she found the slimmer two of her roommates on the lounge, the TV on but ignoring it, and instead hunched over their laps, shovelling something or other into their mouths. Apparently, ever since Milo had challenged Prairie to an eating contest in which whoever could eat the most in the given time, it’d been an almost sado-masochistic race to out-perform the other. They’d just versed each other eating miniature pizza dishes from the oven. Milo won outright. According to her, “Doughnut Consumption” was next.

Keeping a close eye on the two, Linda didn’t miss the fact that both of their stomachs had been creeping towards their laps, lately. *Well,* she thought to herself, *That’s what Tjockningfest does… and that’s why I’m not doing it…*

‘Hey, Lindy,’ said an oddly well-dressed Milo, licking sauce and oil off her pale fingers as Prairie, ready for bed in her black night lace dress, lay slouched with her eyes squeezed shut, kneading a stomach that looked far too inflated to be comfortable.

Linda replied through an uncertain grin. ‘Hey…’

‘We’re seeing who can hold their food,’ Milo explained, petting her stuffed midsection as if it were her own creation, beginning to poke out from under a top that wouldn’t fit her in too long– a small starter belly was just itching to expand over her belt.

‘Think I wanna quit,’ moaned Prairie, blowing a whisker of blonde hair off her nose. Then she decided to start laughing, almost manic, as though something absurd had just done a roundabout and struck her in the head.

‘Pishhh. Quit your idea of quitting,’ said Milo. Clutching her own waist, she leaned forward, took up two plates of glazed doughnuts from the coffee table and handed one over to Prairie. Her laughter was suddenly murdered. She took the plate without looking so excited. Then, glancing at Linda; ‘Wanna join?’

‘Uh.’ Linda gave them a weird look. ‘No thanks.’

‘Whatever.’

Then, seeing the doughnuts, she had to admit her stomach was turning inside itself with desire. ‘I’ll have a few if you really want me to. But I’m not doing– that –to myself,’ as she looked pointedly at their bellies.

‘Whatever,’ said Milo, knowing Linda believed she was resisting Tjockningfest, somehow. ‘Curious. Who would you bet on, just out of us two?’

Prairie rolled her eyes.

Linda looked at both of them and simply laughed, ‘Probably you. Just look at yourself.’

‘Me?’ Milo made a small ‘o’ with her lips.

Linda couldn’t decrypt the expression. It was rather too passive. ‘Yeah, you,’ she said, and wondered if that sounded thorny.

It was for Linda to be confrontational and outright. Milo was given pause. Frowning, she looked down at herself. Seeing the ballooned state of things, she let one hand go to her middle, running her fingers along the underside curve of her ballooned stomach until its firmness retreated and she came across a layer of softness. She pouted. Then shrugged and looked up again. ‘Eh. It’s Tjockningfest, isn’t it?’

Since letting a craving for ice cream sink into her stomach and then grow worse into the late hours of the night, Linda had to get out of bed. It was labour. She’d been almost comatose with comfort, loving the way it made her feel. Shifting the laptop off her thighs, she swung her legs out of bed and folded the warm covers away from her body, exposed all of a sudden into the wide open cold. She sat there blinking, slow and serene, almost in a land of perpetual dream. An addition of softness which had recently risen around her belly button poked forward into a bit of a roll, wanting to grow forth and ghost her lap with its buttery touch. She stood up, put on some little cotton shorts and a daggy crop top, then made a brief trip into the kitchen.

Only to find Sofia there concocting a late-night pancake batch. The plus-sized model across as Linda entered. ‘Hey there.’

‘What’re you doing?’ Linda asked, suddenly second-hand self-conscious. The amount of Sofia’s skin on display gave her the feeling she’d just walked in on someone getting changed.

‘Just makin’ some pancakes. Bit late, I know.’

Sofia was doing her business a silk nightgown that was more like a shirt thanks to the girth of her body, stretched around her torso the shape of a donut so large that it forced the fabric to end just over her belly button– a frightening deep cavity –being suffocated by a beach ball’s worth of watery fat you could lose your fingers in just by grabbing, atop of which oozed two giant breasts, their bloated areola making erect impressions in the fabric. Honestly, sometimes Linda wondered how Sofia kept standing. And in spite of all this, Sofia managed not to droop. ‘Want any?’ The woman asked. Unable not to stare as Sofia whisked the mixing bowl, every part of her seemed to shake.

Linda just said, ‘Oh. I was only here for ice cream.’

Suddenly she felt intrusive. Avoiding eye contact, she slipped past and began grabbing what she needed.

Sofia went to the fridge for some more milk and stopped in front of her. ‘You sure?’ she asked.

Sofia’s size made her feel trapped. There was no way out. Linda nearly took a step back. ‘Uh. Well okay. If you insist?’

‘Sure thing, I’ll whip up some for you as well, then. How many you want?’

‘Uhm. I don’t know–’

‘How’s eight or so sound?’

Linda only smiled out of nervousness before skipping aside for Sofia, her own comparatively thin layer of softness starting to wiggle as he stepped towards the cupboard, where she crouched only to have her tummy bunch up, coming within an inch or two of grazing the top of her thighs. Not long now.

*

Tuesday afternoon had Linda in a swoon of exhaustion. All she managed to give her roommates was a half-hearted wave as she came in through the hallway and went at a head-before-feet speed towards her room. There was a great a sigh and she dropped her bag by her bed and threw the empty wrapper she was carrying in the bin. It was a strange thing that she’d been feeling bouts of exhaustion in the last week. It was new to her. When she slumped down on her study chair, she felt another new sensation; her shirt went tight around her waist. Without looking, she flicked her belt-latch open, and you would have seen her belly breathe out, playing peek-a-boo between her parted fly which had been unzipped at some point she wouldn’t be able to recall if you asked her to. Last night’s pancake binge may or may not have had something to do with it… Who knows.

Too busy with opening her laptop, she paid no attention to the weird gut-feeling she should have been inspecting. Instead she found the online store and entered the tracking code for her order. The result said her shirt was due to arrive: tomorrow.

The thought of seeing her creation in real colours, the fingerprint of her own mind, unfolding it from paper packaging and bubble wrap, rocketed her into a hundred combined moods of creativity. She felt young again. With happiness vibing all up and down her soul, she began whisking around with some more abstract ideas. After creating four and discarding three of them, she came up with another idea. She sat back and looked at it, chin in hand. It was half-plausible. A swirl of colours. It made her think of cake icing for some reason. Why was she sitting here like an idiot with nothing to eat?

Out in the kitchen she found a range of cupcakes on the bench, left out for the taking. Also in the kitchen was a seemingly 24/7 groggily stuffed Milo, waltzing in stomach-first to pour herself a third round of cereal for the afternoon. The laces in her tracksuit pants hung slack; her distended stomach, seen a layer of muscle-swallowing softness, was bending the waistband down in a depressed bow beneath its forwards swell, and the plushness of her hips let you know that, for this once meek Scandinavian girl, the growth of her shape seemed to desire sideways width. Having caught Linda glancing at it, she shrugged, ‘It’s Tjockningfest, why do you always act like this surprises you?’

Not wanting to be confrontational, Linda grimaced. ‘Sorry.’ She turned and pretended she was only getting cold water from the fridge. She didn’t want questions.

Just then she heard Milo add as an afterthought, ‘It’s not like it’s just me doing it, either.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Nothing. Just that I’m not the only one.’

‘Well yeah, I mean… lots of people do it?’ Linda said, unaware exactly *who* was the butt of Milo’s reference, here. She left the kitchen with her own fly left undone by accident and something of what we call a “starter belly” nervously nodding with each step.

*


She got an email Thursday morning letting her know a package should have been delivered. Despite being so comfortable here, she felt zapped with a rush of excitement. She knew what the parcel was. Her shirt would be waiting in the foyer mailbox downstairs

She was currently curled up on the lounge, making her way through a bag of potato chips while watching TV. Her belt had been giving her a guts-ache, so she’d undone it and ultimately threaded it out of her loopholes entirely, flinging it into the open door of her room. But she had to get up. Only now did she pay attention to the feeling of damp beneath her armpits. Pulling her jumper off to cool down, she put on a grey shirt which unfortunately let the shape of a modest potbelly show up to the eyes of anyone who glanced there. Which is what Sofia did, entering the flat pretty much just as Linda was heading out, almost colliding with each other. Linda moved out of the way of the model with hips the width of a doorframe.

Linda’s smile was flitting. ‘Just popping out to grab a package from the post office,’ she explained, and made to duck.

‘Oh cool,’ said Sofia, turning around to watch Linda step outside. ‘What is it?’

‘A shirt with my own design on it. I wanted to test one, to see what the quality’s like. If it’s good, I’ll make some more.’

‘Awesome!’ with a grin, glancing briefly at Linda’s waistline, which was beginning to take on a certain shape, localised around her navel, that was not flatness… and the pair of newcomer lovehandles that had just embarked upon what was about to be a slow journey outwards. Sofia wondered if that shirt was would last all too long in months to come.

Soon after Linda stood alone in her room, getting ready to try the shirt on. There were no mirrors to see her reflection in. Or, if you prefer objective truth to excuses: there *was* one, but it’d for a long time been hidden away, hidden by stacks of canvases, easels, boxes of paints. A general mess. In consequence, the only reflection she had of herself was above her mediocre chest. As she took the grey top off, the act alone of dancing on the spot to shimmy it over her head made the newly-cultivated fistful of chub wiggle around, just beneath her sight. If she could’ve seen the rest of herself– the way her panties were just beginning to make a distinction between her hip bones from her tiny upper lovehandles, the addition of flesh to her upper thighs –then she’d have taken a second to think before slipping her arms through the holes and tugging the shirt down. But, so much to her dismay, what else happened except that it wrapped her a little oddly? She found she had to shift it around just once or twice, instead of letting it settle around her form like it should. She swore out loud, shifting the fabric around until it sat right. But it never did. There was something, a wrinkle, a tension, that never felt right.

Cold rage boiled up through her body. Who else was to blame but the manufacturers? She ripped the shirt off, even more angry as it caught against her chin. She silently screeched and pulled harder. She pinched the tag. Sure enough it said “small”. She scoffed and flung it onto the bed. More like “extra small”. The manufacturers fcked up. She’d been wearing small tops all her life, and they never fit like that. She stood there scowling at the carelessly crumpled shirt. Sudden hate for her own design seethed in her. She hated the way the colours fanned. She wanted them to melt, spread out and vanish into the ground. The shirt was waste. She wouldn’t be buying from that site again.

Bummed out enough to stay alone in her room and brood, she let the hour drain away her emotions. She thought she’d become calm again, but she only got bored.

Unable to stand the boredom any longer, she poked her head out the door and made sure nobody was home. When she heard nothing, she beelined for the kitchen in her underwear, fat-padded little navel nodding, love handles just that size we start to wonder how long they’ve got to go until they jiggle. Then, hoarding a collection of food to tide her over until dinner time, she locked herself in her room, plopped down in her chair, opened a chocolate bar and spent the rest of the day losing herself in digital painting.

Yes; sitting in one spot for so long, eating away, the roll around her deepening belly button was slowly, only over a sequence of hours, coming forward. If it wasn’t touching the tops of her thighs yet, then she was not helping herself, snacking so often.

*

Saturday afternoon saw Sofia cooking up a feast, with Prairie chiming in to prepare dessert. The flatmates never really ate at the dinner table as such, so they took whatever seats they wanted to, whether that meant alone in their rooms, in the kitchen, on the lounge or on the go.

‘So, Lindy, are you still not doing Tjockningfest?’ Sofia asked as she brought a pair of oven mitts and a tablecloth.

Curled up on the lounge, Linda shook her head without looking away from her phone, on which she was constantly switching between tumblr, facebook and instagram. ‘Nope.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah? Why…?’

Sofia thought one thing but said another; ‘You’re missing out on so much fun, is all.’

Linda ignored the her, believing that she’d rather leave participation to the participators.

Flicking straight the tablecloth and adjusting each corner, Sofia retreated back to the kitchen where Prairie was helping out. ‘You hear that?’ Sofia asked low enough not to be overheard.

Prairie frowned, shaking the pepper bottle next to her ear to listen if it was empty. ‘Hear what?’

‘She says she still isn’t doing it. So she says, anyway.’

Prairie snorted, her already gleeful blue eyes reaching almost sinister heights in their amusement. ‘You mean she still thinks she’s holding out?’

‘Yep.’ Sofia took a sponge and began wiping the stove of grease marks. Her arms, just like always, wobbled on their frames as she rubbed the sponge back and forth. ‘I dunno what’s going to make her realise that she sort of *is* participating. You know, without realising it?’

They heard the door of her bedroom close from across the living area. Exchanging a glance with Sofia, Prairie stopped what she was doing to chat. ‘She’s isn’t exactly going *full speed ahead*, either, though…’

‘You would think she’d realise, at some stage.’

‘You’ve noticed, though? Right? You know how she’s looking a bit… a *tiny* bit…’ Prairie’s eyes widened. ‘Surely she’s noticed already?’

Sofia scoffed, shuffling her bulk to the sink where she ran the sponge under water. ‘She’s got a long way to go before she has any reason to notice changes.’

‘You think?’ Prairie did another one of her characteristic head-tilts.

Sofia lowered her voice. ‘What about Milo, though? I know she’s actually *doing* Tjockningfest, and all, but… wouldn’t you think she’s going to start noticing herself soon? My point is that she’s further along than Lind, and hasn’t made a big deal about it, so…’

Prairie gave the flatmate in question some thought. She was probably on her way home by now.

Sofia was right. Milo, that previously svelte Scandinavian girl, with some of the palest hair and skin you’d ever see, was now an undeniable ten or more pounds heavier than she before. It showed when she dressed. Her pants sat a little over-taxed around her upper thighs. Most shirts held snug around her waist, and dresses were making her seem vaguely pregnant. And let’s not forget the fact that she’d never had breasts to speak of. She was losing the body of a child and developing the figure of a woman, especially width-ways; her torso seemed to like widening. Proportionally thick but without an ass, is what they call it.

‘I guess,’ Prairie said, considering. ‘She’s definitely ahead. Maybe that’s why Lind ignores it. Compared to Milo, she hasn’t gained that much.’

‘Yeah. Plus, all three of you have to compare yourself to me all the time. You got nothing on this big old gut,’ she laughed, attempting to grab the combined mass that was her stomach and love handles, the great jiggling behaviour of which could be seen even under her maternity shirt.

Prairie didn’t know whether to laugh or be polite– she just stared worth silent, bright-eyed mirth.

Sofia sensed the hesitation. ‘Oh come on, woman, we’ve been through this. I’m a model. I’m comfortable in my own body. You don’t have to be all awkward. I got over things a lo-o-ong time ago. Almost as long as it took me to get this big. Anyway,’ she changed the topic, suddenly finding something funny. ‘Look at this here.’ She came forward and before Prairie knew it, Sofia had poked the exposed part of her unattended foodbaby. Her body part had been given the slip by her top, hiked up thanks to folded arms, allowing the bottom side of what was a little paunch touch the open air. Craning to look down, Prairie let her arms drop. When she saw it, she spread her hands over her shirt, flattening it out against her belly and gave her little layer of chub a tentative feel with her hand. She let go and shrugged. ‘It’s Tjockningfest. Can’t everyone have a good time?’ She brushed her fringe from her eyes, nibbling the inside of her lip. ‘If I put on a few? Who cares? Aren’t I just enjoying the freedom?’

Sofia’s eyes gleamed. ‘That’s exactly it.’

‘What about you?’ Prairie tested.

‘Me?’

‘Any um…’ She patted her comparatively insignificant stomach.

Sofia snorted. ‘Who’d even know. Look at me. If I put on a few, it’d be lost among everything else, you’d never even notice.’

‘Just a bit of fun.’

‘Exactly. Just a bit of fun.’

Prairie cocked her head and looked out the kitchen window. ‘It’s just… Linda doesn’t seem to get it. Why not?’

‘Milo thinks it’s got to do with her family before she came here.’

‘How does she know that?’ Prairie said with narrowed eyes.

Sofia shrugged. ‘We could ask.’

Speaking of the girl herself; who should come in through the front door, but none other than Milo herself, hanging her coat on the hook as she came past the kitchen entrance. ‘Hey guys.’

Prairie and Sofia found themselves sharing a knowing glance as they watched Milo hang her keys beside her coat. Her hips were looking wider, complete with the kind of love handles you’d soon be able to spread your hands across. Her upper arms had a slight thickness now, revealed pale and milky, sleeves drawing into her armpits as she reached up. Turning around, she revealed a stomach approaching flabby pretty damn fast, the major depository of fat having spread far enough by now to begin colonising her hips.

‘Ooo,’ Sofia joked as Milo came closer to the kitchen opening, ‘I didn’t know you were doing Tjockningfest.’

Milo halted, took a moment to process the remark. ‘What do you mean…’ She took a brief, expressionless glance down at her body. She was good at that, performing expressionless humor. Her jokes were never sugar coated. Unlike her meals. ‘O-o-oh…’ Milo pretended she suddenly understood something. ‘You mean this?’ She jabbed a finger into one lovehandle, letting it sink all the way. She looked at them in monotone, letting them share a giggle.

Then, observing the conversational stance of the two, she immediately wanted in. ‘What’s the latest?’

Sofia said nothing. Prairie looked in the direction of the living area, trying to see if Linda had appeared. Milo got the cue and came further into the kitchen.

‘We were just thinking,’ explained Sofia, ‘how Linda doesn’t want to do Tjockningfest. That’s all.’

Milo made a silent, ‘Ah,’ shape with her mouth, then seemed to think about some things. ‘Couple of weeks ago,’ she said, ‘very first morning of Tjockningfest? I kept offering her cereal, coz, you know, that’s what you do on Tjockningfest? You eat? A *lot*? Right? But she kept saying no. All she had that morning was a few things from your fondue, Prairie.’

Sofia raised her brows. ‘I keep nudging her to take Tjocknnigfest a bit lighter. But she never does.’

Milo nodded. ‘I’ve noticed.’

‘I wonder what her uni friends think. Surely someone’s asked her by now? Maybe even a debate?’ Sofia crossed her arms and cocked one huge hip, deep in thought.

‘Perhaps,’ Milo considered. ‘But she’s not that confrontational.’

‘Yeah. She avoids questions pretty fast whenever I get on her about it.’

‘I wonder if her friends do Tjockningfest. Heaps of students do it. I know that. Maybe there’s a small amount who don’t.’

‘What,’ scoffed Sofia, ‘you mean like some kind of uni subculture of non-Tjockningfesters?’

Milo nodded.

‘But why?’

With a shrug, she ran a list on her fingers; ‘Health nuts, leftists, prudes, body image issues, American body standards, you know how much their infects like every corner of the globe, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of it found its way here on the other side of the world.’

Prairie, this whole time, had been gazing out the window, and having sudden ideas. ‘Hey guys,’ she said. Sofia and Milo looked. ‘Do you think we should team up and kind of… help her along?’

Sofia frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Like.’ Prairie chewed the inside of her cheek. ‘What if we made sure she eats? Make sure she eats like it really *is* Tjockningfest, and not some, like, half-assed thing. Break her out of a spell…’

‘How would we do that?’

‘It’s not that hard is it? She doesn’t binge on purpose. But I’ve seen her eat what’s around.’ She shrugged. ‘We just have more food around.’

‘I get the sense,’ Milo contributed, ‘she doesn’t eat as much when we’re around. But she might when she’s alone. What she does is more obvious than she thinks.’

Prairie paused. ‘But… wait a minute. Let’s go back a bit. Isn’t doing this kinda mean?’

‘Not really,’ Sofia said. ‘Or maybe. But. Not really. Anyway, she needs to stop worrying. It’s better for her if she lets go for once. I’m nearly three hundred pounds, for you guys’ information, and my life isn’t falling apart. She just needs to realise that being bigger isn’t always worse.’

‘Well, I guess.’

‘If it makes you feel so bad (your own idea, by the way), then we can just keep it up for a bit and then stop.’

After a time of silence, Prairie looked at them both. ‘So. We doing this?’

Sofia shrugged.

Milo, ever observant and ever flat-humoured, said, ‘Only if you do as well. And by that I mean: pick your game up.’

Prairie gave her a question-marked frown.

Milo nodded at her. ‘Look at the size of you.’

‘Hey,’ Prairie sank back a little, ‘I’m not that big–’

‘I know.’ Milo stated.

Prairie’s face kept drawing all its features towards its centre in confusion. Then her eyes wandered off as she got it. ‘Oh…’

Then with a cheeky thumbs-up, Milo winked and left the kitchen.

Twenty minutes later, Sofia and Prairie were bringing their dinner feast out to the table in the living area. ‘Come get it,’ Sofia called.

Linda looked over from where she lay curled in the couch’s warmth, gradually sitting up and moving away from it’s comfortable aura as the smells reached her. Roast lamb, potato, buttered vegetables, bacon, turkey slices, hot meat pies, onion rings, too much gravy to be good for you… Milo came from her room and Prairie brought a few last items such as salt and pepper.

Milo went in head-first, neglecting to even pick up a knife and fork, pressing the meat pie directly to her open mouth. Linda watched as her teeth closed down on the pasty. Sofia went in next, forking a sizeable chunk of roast on to her plate, with buttered vegetables and potato, and a sea of thick gravy. Prairie, thinking of Milo’s comments, felt obliged to eat big now, filling her plate with at least one of every item on the table. Linda joined in last, reluctant as a wounded animal, and watching them eat like a small child in a new school with no idea how to behave among the bigger kids.

Not wanting to seem like a glutton, she filled her plate only as much as she would have if she was still at home under her mother and father’s eye. She sat down on the couch, made herself comfortable and brought the fork to her mouth. When the juices washed over her tongue, she forgot everything.

Hour later, all eyes were directed towards laughably low-grade movie purely on the basis of entertainment value. But having finished her food, Prairie sat slouched in her chair, staring up at the ceiling like some lost angel nobody could save as she fell from heaven, faster and faster. She groaned as if she’d been lifting weights all day. The only thing she’d been lifting was her hands, splaying her palms across her belly which was, all over again, grossly full. A gap of bare flesh kept wanting to say hi from where her lace-hemmed top wouldn’t meet her shorts. She rubbed her hand back and forth along her lump of balloon-tight skin, wondering how long it would take before Tjockningfest began transforming ‘bloat’ into ‘blubber’. Wondering about the others, she glanced at Linda.

She saw the girl hunched over her plate in her lap on the lounge across from her and Prairie knew that, if they were gonna help Linda let go, then she had to follow suit as well. Staring once more at the ceiling, she let an immense sigh rock the air. She couldn’t help but remember high school. Originally from the U.S., she’d been her town’s homecoming queen. At one point she nearly got into modelling, but decided to veer away at the last minute when she witnessed one of her role models suffer a breakdown. Now her life was one of mediocrity and easy-breezing, unpolluted by peer-pressure and expectations you never asked for. After all that childhood promise, she was about to look less like an actor and more like… she didn’t know just yet. Her future form remained a mystery, approximately larger, but wreathed in the luminous grey of the unknown.

Truth be told, picturing herself overweight low-key terrified Prairie. She tried to conceal this; but actually, she understood why Linda despised Tjockningfest. Sure, it was inevitable you’d put on some pounds. Sure, just like she’d told Sofia before, it was all “a bit of fun”. Sure. But what if you don’t lose whatever you’ve gained? Then you stay like that. You have to accept it. On the other hand, she did want to slight her roommate. Linda’s sense of self-containment annoyed Prairie. Linda seemed to be comfortable ignoring alternative views.

Prairie had to do this, even just to break Linda a little bit. It was for her own good.

Looking down, Prairie spread her palms over her swollen middle and let them float away, as if by some invisible expansion of girth. She let them come back down again, trying to visualise the size of her waist as it inevitably expanded meal by meal, pound by pound.

These thoughts, however, were only regular to just about anyone who lived in Södrahem through Tjockningfest, whether you were Spanish, Swedish, an Australian migrant, or anybody. Who and what you were didn’t matter. You had second thoughts about eating so recklessly *at least once* in your lifetime. But then, just when you least expect, some food corporation would slip in and dump a hot load of the subtlest, most cunning advertising you could ever fall under the influence of– and there you went again pigging your heart out, and your gut out, on grossly oversized orders of pizza when you least needed to.

There was a clatter as Sofia dropped her cutlery onto her empty plate, only thin smears of gravy left. Seeing the way Prairie had slumped into her chair, she contributed her own exhausted sigh. ‘Think you could go for some more?’ she joked.

Prairie scoffed and said nothing.

Milo, however, over on one of the couches, was still cramming onion rings into her mouth, barely chewing before she swallowed, causing some massive indigestion but at the same time this curious sensation that she needed to keep going – never mind the fact that she’d stuffed herself so silly it became impossible for her to sit forward without scrunching her face with an agonized wheeze.

‘Come on Prair,’ Sofia winked, ‘Milo’s laughing at us both.’

Trying not to roll her eyes, Prairie leaned forward over her uncomfortable stomach and began, without much passion, to transfer more items onto her plate. Sofia was right, after all… the agreement had to be kept.Ffrom here on out, they were to overeat so much, and so iften, that even if Linda stuffed herself stupid, it would still seem as though she’d eaten less than her roommates. Relative safety (if you could call it that) was the aim.

So far it seemed to be working.

Sofia, massively fat as she already was, could have been stuffed to any size; you’d never tell the difference between hungry and bloated in her frame. She was moaning and groaning, nevertheless, trying to raise the bar for Linda.

Prairie had eaten so much lamb roast the sides of her skull ached. She could feel the food filling her esophagus, backed up like a clogged sewage pipe. The first pangs of nausea kept threatening to rise up and poke her gag reflex.

Milo, however, had outstripped them all, eating not three, not four, nor five– but six meat pies, a huge chunk of the lamb roast, and almost half the turkey slices. Even she’d reached her limit, having no choice but to let her belly relax into a size so big, her eyes were watering.

Then there was Linda, whose waist they could all see was visibly distended, rounding the middle of her purple sweater into something like an orb.

After a time of sitting there in a post-stuffing haze, mindlessly watching the movie, Sofia gathered the last bits of her strength to lift her bulk up into a sitting position and lean forward to stand up. Releasing a soft grunt they all pretended not to hear, she lunged forward and fought with all her momentum to rise. Straightening her creaking knees, she regained a breath. Linda watched as Sofia carried her bulk to the kitchen. Not long after, she started to bring out dessert. Prairie got the cue and stood up, half nauseated. She noticed her belly stuck out even further now that she wasn’t sitting. The two overfed girls brought desserts one by one to the table – choices of ice cream, gelato, cheesecake, apple crumble, cream, red wine and an assortment of nuts. Prairie collapsed back into her chair, feeling her gut slosh like a water bag. Milo, too stuffed to move at all, lay slumped on the couch with a dismissive flick of her hand. Linda tried to look uninterested.

Amazingly enough, the biggest girl of them all remained standing, having been experience with moving excess weight around. She asked everyone what they preferred, then loaded up either a bowl or a plate so full of their preferred food that she seriously doubted anyone would finish it, bloated as they were. To Prairie she passed a bowl full of apple crumble, which Prairie accepted reluctantly. To Milo she brought a plate burdened with cheesecake, layers of cream, an assortment of nuts and a glass of wine. For herself, she took a slice of cheesecake with wine. Then she brought to Linda a bowl of ice cream and apple crumble.

All together they ate, slower this time, watching the movie came to a slow finish.

By the time the credits began to slide down the screen, it’d grown dark outside, and a rather laughable ending had gotten Milo into a satirical mood. ‘It needed more guns,’ she said, scooping another spoonful of cheesecake into her mouth with no particular rush. ‘I need more bullets, screams and death in my life. I get bored and lonely without bullets. Wouldn't have watched it if there weren’t bullets.’

Sofia nodded, attempting to rub her firmly-packed stomach, but never really found it. The bounds of her organs lay far beneath the volumes of fat which had long since engulfed her torso. She settled for giving it a hearty smack instead. The sound was a dull thud. Burping quietly, she said, ‘Anyone up for seconds?’

Prairie shook her head, her middle so round she was about to whimper, eyes watery and red. All she could feel was rock-heavy ache grinding its way across her stomach, as if the walls of her insides were about to rip apart. There was no sitting position that could make it feel any better, except to slouch unhealthily, making pained little grumbles. Finally she said what she’d been waiting so long to say. ‘I’m sorry guys, can I just– is it alright if I undo my pants? I can’t do this anymore. I just can’t.’

‘No,’ came from the ironic Milo, who herself lay so far back into the couch that she’d balanced the bowl of apple crumble atop of her belly, which was full enough to stretch her midsection’s already developing layer of flesh completely taught.

Sofia laughed, and had to wince as her abdominal muscles pained in one giant jolt. ‘Go for it,’ she said.

‘Oh God damnit, I hate I have to do this.’ Pressing her chin to her chest, Prairie seized her belt, flicked it open and unzipped. Her belly inflated as if with air, forcing the fly into an open V.

Linda, who’d been spooning mouthfuls of ice cream this whole time, was acting as if she had miles to go before reaching full capacity. But from the angle of objective truth, however, a quick calorie count would put her total consumption at a figure of around three thousand, believe it or not.

*

Sunday of the third week was Bakery Fest, the world’s largest national feast consisting of just about every and any baked good imaginable. There is no idea too wild for the occasion. The venue space was a series of large parks in the city, decorated for the festival and populated with makeshift stalls. Linda had just arrived in a long sleeved turtleneck, vintage print, baby blue jeans and a pair of white canvas flats. She was standing at a stall and scratching her head at all these baked goods. You had all your standard baked delights before the more inventive bakers came along with their own creations, whether genius, or outright abomination…  Anything from sheets of pastry layered with avocado and mince, all the way to braids of cookie dough containing diced jelly b**s and entwined fillings of custard and yoghurt.

Pretty soon Linda had a plate-sized cookie, half consumed in one hand, phone in the other, thumb-scrolling through her messages as she looked for companion, when out from the general festive throng came Jamie, barrelling towards her, doing her best to cradle a pile of frosted buns in her arms.

Linda took another bite from her plate-sized cookie and, oblivious to Jaimie’s encumberment just one moment too long, tried to embrace her friend. Jamie’s cargo tumbled out onto the ground.

Linda gaped and stepped back, holding her phone over her mouth in the shape of an O. ‘Shit! Shit! Sorry!’ She handed the half-eaten cookie to Jamie, who watched as Linda squatted and shuffled around picking up the fallen items. After a moment Linda stood up. She did her best to confer all the food back into Jamie’s arms– who’d just been looking down, laughing the whole time. For some reason she felt amused seeing her friend scampering in the dirt like some kind of servant to royalty. ‘What are you doing,’ was said amid giggles, ‘you’re such a clumz!’

All there was for Linda to do, really, was shrug with a sort of apologetic laugh that made her feel out of options more than anything else– Though… why should she be feeling this cold embarrassment in front of one of her trusted friend, who is only beaming, blue-eyed smirking, as though in almost grandmotherly love? Might it have been some sort of shame Linda was pretending to hide? A shame that had something to do with the giant cookie in her left hand and the encroaching sensation of bloatedness that she knew, deep down, she was about to surpass, until she too had to stumble round the festivalgrounds among hundreds of others led by bellies blown out like full sails?

Nope.

Not for now, anyway.

Because out went the thought, jettisoned from her prefrontal cortex like cargo off a ship as the two of them set off pretty much arm-in-arm at a walking chat towards the nearest stall.

The atmosphere was crowded with lines of fluorescent bulbs, signs. Ahead was a sign reading “Givanni’s Fluff-Treats”. They looked over the counter. Arranged on the table were all these twirly little cupcakes lined with perfect rows of chocolate beads, set not in a cup of paper, nor plastic, but psychedelic-coloured fondant. If a mirror had been nearby, Linda would have seen her eyes widen a little. She thought about how much she wanted. Though her tongue was doing the thinking here. The server, a spritely Italian man, turned to greet them. Linda dangled a finger over the counter at the cupcakes that her eyes were magnetised to. ‘Can I have seven of those, please?’

Not seven minutes later (one cupcake per sixty seconds), she popped the last one in her mouth and savoured its melting action around her tongue as she listened to Jamie’s story about some guy who’d asked her out on a date after yesterday’s lecture, only to end up being the most boring, insufferable guy she’d ever met. She saw right through it; he reckoned he woulf get heart-eyes from her by hooking her up with a poetry publisher he knew, so she could finally get some of her poetry in print.

‘But have you even got any work you’re happy with?’

‘A few poems, I guess. Not as good as they could be. Some I’ve lost faith in. But the other’s, well I don’t know. Maybe they could be ready. I can’t go on forever though. Plus, it’s Tjockningfest, time to get fat, not get published.’

‘You’re kicking yourself.’

‘No, I– I’m just not massively confident in my work.’

‘I… Well I do understand. It can’t be that different from me being poo-ey with a painting.’ Which made her think back to the shirt she’d designed, and the way it felt odd on her. A pause. She shuffled around in her seat, pulling at the bottom of her shirt just to make sure nothing was… you know. She did it very carefully, so as not to confirm anything she didn’t want to know by accidentally touching it… Then hooked her finger into her belt loop above her fly and tugged down in hopes she’d relieve some of the lower-intestinal ache she was beginning to feel down there.

Unfortunately Jamie had caught her doing it. Possibly even perceived some sort of waistline-roundness, as well, which seemed to give her pretext to get excited all of a sudden. ‘Hey, remember that time two weeks ago? We showed each other how bad we were stuffed?’

‘Um. You mean *you* did? Then you *made* me do it, too? Yeah.’

‘Whatever. Anyway, there’s this competition at like twelve o’clock. Who can get the biggest from eating the most finger buns… Wanna join?’

Linda’s face, contorted disgust-ways, could have been snapshotted in the moment of silence she held it for. It was all Jamie needed for an answer.

‘ … Kay then…’ Jaimie put the subject aside. ‘I guess we won’t.’

But it wasn’t all disgust behind Linda’s expression. Some of it was directed back at herself.

Because the moment Jamie spoke about getting big from eating the most food, Linda had felt this strange clamping sensation go down her middle, as though running along each gluttonous word, finishing just above her groin which had, for the most transient of moments, grown warm. There are not so many things that could mean. Then, rebounding as though reflected back off her genitals, came this cold disgust rising up in her stomach, losing momentum somewhere around her chest and ultimately expressing itself upon her face.

Glancing around, she saw a scene somehow different from the one she’d entered. Was it really different, or was she only noticing more? Ramshack stalls, nailed together out of timber and corrugated iron, some rickety, some crude, some straight-edged and some clearly sponsored by big money, still occupied almost every spot that was not a walkway– The general throng of people, whether slender-bloated, skinny-fat, **-bellied or outright overweight, flowed in and around tables and long benches bustling with people. It was the decadence she was seeing, now, invisible, yet underscoring the image the same way the ocean current sends each wave curling to shore. People of all ages, mouths slightly soiled with grease, frosting, crumbs and so forth. Now and again; an uproar of unapologetic belching. Food, dropped on the ground, now trodden underfoot in grotesque smears. Full bellies being massaged by their owner’s hands, embarrassingly obvious despite attempts at modesty. Nobody could keep their shirts down. What was Linda doing here?

She glanced at the food stalls. She thought of the mass-produced rows of colourful foods behind glass displays… the general bakery ambience… sugar-thick air, smelling of fresh bread as far as the heavens. This was it. Linda was here for this. The food, not the gluttony. So much for bellies, so much for competitions. There were the products of talented bakers to be tasted,. There were sensations on the tongue to be had. What time did she have for thinking about anything else? All was going to end in mere hours. So, she was going to dive into those hours. She was going to plunge into the world of tastes, of sights, of bakery inventions and companions– of everything possible within the limits.

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Week Four
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Linda woke late Monday morning. She stumbled out of bed with nothing better to do, screwing her fists against her scrunched-up eyes until the great smear of her sight became the kitchen… Only to find it cluttered with so many colourfully-baked goods to the point that there was no space left to prepare her breakfast. Then Prairie and Sofia appeared to explain the post-war ruins.

‘Oh, that–’ came Prairie with her early-morning energy, ‘that’s just leftover stuff from the place I was at last night. We’ll clean it up soon. Anything is up for grabs, if you want it?’ With a suggestive eyebrow dance.

Linda just politely shook her head no. Even as her stomach did a backflip over itself with hunger, and pleasure. Hormones erupted down her spine in all the colours of each baked treat that sat there waiting for her fingers to possess their doughy forms. ‘Uh. No thanks. Maybe later.’

‘Well shit,’ Sofia joked, ‘someone has to get fat off them!’

Not long after both of her roommates left for work, Linda was alone once again, sketching fun little things on her laptop as she snacked on a pile of toast with too much butter. Wasn’t long before she zombied back into the kitchen, swept up a few chocolate chip muffins without thinking and was taking massive bites by the time she sat back down to resume artistic experimentation:

Today her objective was to create a combinatory (almost retro) aesthetic where sunlight would fall through jagged autumn branches, seen past a layer of digital distortion to give the idea you were stuck in an internet-wide-breakdown. As time ticked along, and her foodbaby crept forwards slow as a tortoise over her sweatpants, what ended up happening was rather explosive; after ten or so scribbles, she’d created this pastiche of tree branches and streaming summer-rays divided into strips and shifted out of line with each other, overlayed by images of city skylines lit at night, all superimposed upon a background of a daydream’s crepe pink.

Happy enough with this, she launched herself out into the kitchen on a half-thought, snatched a slice of chocolate cake (or two). She had lucid idea of how many, really– Because, while her mouth was busy chewing, almost french-kissing the powerful richness of the cake’s melting action, all her thoughts were converging upon other tracks. Returning to her laptop, she wondered how else she could spin the design. Size, and dimensions? Colour density? Contrast? So on. She spent two hours tinkering, hunched over herself with her eyes never leaving the screen. She stepped back to have “lunch”. This turned out to be three extra slices of cake, which she grazed on for an hour while watching Netflix to let her head clear. Then she returned to her room with a fresh mind and an overworked tummy, making finer adjustments.

She took an image of a smock-dress, ctrl+v’d her art, lined it up and sat back. Despite the fact that such a combination should never exist, somehow it worked. Making some final edits, she sat up straight, felt her tummy and nodded to herself. She was just beginning to smile when Milo, undetected, came floating in through the front door to poke her head into Linda’s room–

To catch her fondling an embarrassing little roll on her lower belly, under her tank top, while she used her other hand to navigate the mousepad.

‘Uh, hey Lind,’ Milo tweeted, voice full of pretence.

Linda sprung in her seat, head snapping round. She sat there shocked until her hand slowly backed away from its adventure beneath her shirt. Then slowly and deliberately flattened it back down. ‘Hi,’ was said, with an effort to seem as if nothing happened.

Milo nodded and slipped back out.

Linda returned to the laptop.

Her heart thumped slow and heavy with embarrassment. Slouching, she resumed business as usual.


That night after dinner, Linda was up for doing the dishes while all three of her roommates lay about, incapacitated in various states of discomfort, from eating a massive pasta dish followed by bakery treats from the kitchen. Carting dishes back and forth for Linda to wash, the severely bloated Sofia seemed exhausted enough to forget about adjusting the hem of her crimson coloured nightshirt where it’d run up her right hip, leaving uncovered one grossly overgrown hip, almost pale as dough, and a triangular section of underbelly that Linda was getting this strange core-heavy itch to jab her finger into, just to see how far down she could poke. Since Sofia’s largeness had to’ve come about somehow, she was the only one in the room able to put as much as she had into her gut while making it seem like all she’d eaten was a feather.

Prairie, on the other hand, was in the middle of a dramatic performance about groaning, squirming in discomfort, changing positions on the lounge, stomach-cradling, and flitters of whimpering. Her fly was undone long ago. But she seemed unsure whether she wanted her stomach covered or out on display at any given time, was had since expanded enough to have thinned out the layer of softness and flattened her navel against itself. All that remained of the handful of chub she’d cultivated over the last week was in her pair of beginner’s lovehandles nudging over her waistband– and it’s true; these days she was becoming aware of a new snugness in some of her pants.

Meanwhile Milo was taking things a more like a champ, much as a crease of pain marred her brow as she lay reclined against the lounge, her stomach looking as if it’d been pumped up with air, staring dead ahead at the TV without twitching a muscle. Just like Prairie, she’d found herself suffering similar consequences in these last few days– except that she seemed to have been hit around the midsection and upper thighs, claiming not only a stomach even more distended than her roommate’s, but an almost inch-deep layer of fat that stubbornly hung around despite her fullness. There was no way for her to somehow pretend that when she finally sat up straight, she didn’t feel the faintest brushing of flesh against her thighs. As well as being bloated, her paunch had bunched up into an admirable beginner’s belly; you know, the type you can tell is one day gonna grow into a big old gut in two parts; one large, dominant, doughnut-like mound of fat with her navel as its centre, which forces into being a second, more submissive roll beneath her bra line.

Sure. Milo, Prairie and Sofia might have been in varying states of pain. But they all had their secret agreement, didn’t they, under which they had to eat so much food that even if Linda consumed less that them, she’d still find herself thickening up now and again, and probably with no fast clue why.


***


Next morning was an early start to work, which transitioned slow as a cocooned caterpillar into a late evening at uni.

Since deciding to check out the “Student Painter’s Club” this afternoon, she bought herself a bag of M&M’s and went on a hunt for the venue. The Painter’s Club was held at six-thirty every Tuesday afternoon in one of two rooms. Though she’d joined the emailing list last year, she never made an effort until now.

One of the Art School professors supervised the gig, while an elected student president organised all the events, which involved taking turns to give a short presentation on a selected artist’s work, a new way to interpret it, and then some questions on how to critique it. There was always a table supplying free snacks and drinks, leading to her taking a seat beside the food and her left hand creeping back and forth between the snacks and her mouth.

Halfway through the presentation, she realised she might’ve been eating too fast, perhaps even too loud. She locked her hands in her lap.

In the last half hour, a couple of students got up to present their own material for critique, and then it was over with that collective, half-perceived regret you feel when you wish there could have been more time– you were only just starting to have fun.

It was a minute past twilight by the time she walked out into the fresh air. She glanced up. The night air was full of nocturnal chill and promise. Full of some un-witnessed, un-criticisable freedom to think less about how you look and act, because nobody is looking at anyone. Everybody is on the move home. It wasn’t until she’d crossed into the city centre and saw the neon lights of fast food chains, shouting in demanding colour, over the thousands of swarming heads– it wasn’t until then that an opening bloomed in her stomach. It groaned around itself. It was so cold and open it was as if the night air wanted to rush in and claim home. The only thing to evict it was going to be food. Who knew how much food, either. It felt like tons.

But later on, after an hour of face-stuffing, here she was, struggling to sit straight in a booth at the back of The BergerJoint, fighting herself over whether or not to cradle her stomach. Because, deep down, she knew exactly what she’d find there. If she touched it, she’d feel it it, and she’d know. Letting her hand touch what bulged down there would tell her nothing she already suspected.

Well, she did it anyway.

Staring out the window, but seeing nothing, she felt around her midsection. Beneath the pressing of her splayed palm, she was a tender orb. Especially up there, between her ribs. She let her hand slide over the high curve and felt lower down. Intestinal bloating was just beginning its outward push, food migrating to the next stage of digestion. She pressed both hands into her belly, marveled at the overfull water-bag sensation, tapering away down to her groin– that hot radiation. She was anchored to her pelvis. She began reaching.

And stopped.

Other people existed.

Suddenly self-aware, she pulled her hand away before a stranger saw the direction her hand was travelling. Instead she sat there, feeling shame float down on her like a cold cloak over cold shoulders, gazing across the tables and out the panoramic windows.

The city was completing its last stages of metamorphosis into the night-time image of itself. Darkness had shut over everything like a lid, hiding shadows within shadows, making the city and its shop fronts, its traffic lights, its pedestrians, cars passing under chrome reflections of neon lights, making them all feel like an elaborate film set more than anything real. She was getting that urge to paint, again. She knew there was an image, here, one she wanted to take upon high, to elevate one degree further into the dimension of super-sensibility, just brushing the fibres of emotion in that special way only rain, heard on the roof above you, spattering against the window pane, can make you feel.

She’d gotten off the bus, and was back in her room, safe from the approaching midnight chill. As much as she did think it strange she should be so “hungry” again, the shift in environment skewed her mind and caused her to mistake non-hunger for hunger again.

Hovering in the kitchen, she came under a faint spell of doubt. Hesitation caught her hand outstretched.

Then she thought ‘fuck that’ and swiped a load of pop tarts onto a plate. Before long she was standing in the shower, licking her lips clean with her belly halfway distended, trying not to look at it and even harder not to let her hands touch it again. Then she dried off, put her clothes in the washing machine and slipped into her underwear, snuggling into bed where she passed into sleep.

Biologically slow, her afternoon binge distributed itself through her system throughout the night, hour by hour.


***


It’d been slow to make itself known, really– nearly three weeks as a matter of fact. But on Wednesday morning, when she stepped into a pair of acid-wash red skinny jeans, she only got them as far as upper-thigh. They halted there, unaccountably bunched up, refusing to inch any further without flaying the flesh off her legs. Not until she tore them off in anger, anyway, grabbing each side and, hoping to stretch them by force, pulled them apart until her shoulders hurt and her face went red. Catching her breath, she flicked the pants straight and tried again.

They slid up her legs this time, but with too much resistance for everything to be okay. The problems didn’t stop there, either. She knew the waistband was meant to wrap around the center of her midriff, concealing most of her lower stomach. It came just short of clasping by the merest of inches. Her fly just sat there, loose and open, grinning in a little V shape, a beginner belly threatening to show itself should she have upset it into peaking through. She was just bloated, she thought.

But this pants situation was not going to work.

She grabbed a hair tie and did a little trick she’d heard of; tie one end in the buttonhole, wrap the other end around the button and secure the fly as close as it’ll go. It worked. She fitted herself in a rose-pink blouse, stepped into a pair of leather boots and set her hair in a low bun using a crepe tie. Finally she exposed herself to the mirror, only the upper half unobstructed by clutter, and met her face.

She liked the way she looked. She felt graceful, and bronze– confident just when someone would least expect it.

Out in the kitchen she stashed a couple of snacks in her bag for the day, the first (or umpteenth) pang of hunger twirling around her stomach.

Then Sofia wandered in. ‘Morning.’ She began preparing a late breakfast.

‘Morning,’ Linda replied over her shoulder, lifting her arms to take a container from the cupboard. When she turned back around, she found Sofia making a show of examining her ass narrow-eyed. She began to turn aside, feeling cold an exposed..

‘Dayum, girl,’ was said with an appreciative pout. ‘What’s going on *there*?’

‘Where…’ Linda spun around to defend herself.

Sofia nodded with raised eyebrows at Linda’s ass. She couldn’t help but keep staring; the dark red skinny jeans gripping her hips, her thighs grown faintly larger than what those pants were designed to contain. Secretly she predicted that, no more than ten or twenty pounds away, Linda would be getting some saddlebags– especially thanks to the naturally flared hips she already had.

Linda craned her neck back to examine herself. Sofia was right; you could see the joins and seams beginning to press like wire into butter, the softer areas of her pelvis getting ready to bulge like all they wanted was bloom.

She had no intentions of saying anything. Well and truly caught out, she looked away at the wall instead.

Full of mirth, Sofia just shrugged and continued admiring Linda’s developments well past her welcome. The girl in question slowly withdrew from the conversation and reached up to close the cabinet door. Only then did Sofia catch sight of the hairtie trick, breaking into giggles at the pleasant surprise. She knew there was only one reason anybody would need to resort to *those* sorts of tactics (and it doesn’t involve laundry shrinkage, much as you wish it did.)

‘Nice going,’ she smirked.

‘What,’ Linda began, but saw where this was headed, and decided to come shooting out the gates– ‘What, this?’ She lifted her blouse a fraction and gestured at the hairtie connecting the two sides of her unzipped fly. She covered herself again. ‘Something happened with my clothes. I think my fly’s broken, I had to hold it with a hairtie. It’ll be alright so long as I keep my shirt over it.’

‘Yeah, su-u-ure…’ Sofia said with a raise of her head. ‘Just don’t eat too much or you’ll break the hairtie as well.’

With no idea how to respond to this, since Linda wasn’t sure whether she was being called fat even though she was anything but, she turned to head out the door. But, mid-step, something hot and heavy came over her instead. ‘Wait, are– are you calling me fat? I am not fat! As a matter of fact, I’ve got to be the only one in this entire flat who–’

‘What, the skinniest?’ Sofia held up a finger, seeing an opportunity. ‘Yeah I know. You aren’t, like, even *half* way there. Don’t worry, girl, I mean… look at this big mumma right here.’ She clapped her gut on both sides so it quaked under the loose old shirt she wore around the apartment on her days off. ‘This is what *fat* is. I do this for a living– kinda –so I should know. Here, feel this.’ She scooped up the giant ball of weight that was her stomach and made a sort of offering motion to Linda, who only cringed back politely and froze as she watched it all fall out from underneath her shirt. It all came into view; Sofia’s scarily deep belly button, and all the blubber surrounding it, dropped into sight with a kind of pendulous wobble that took shockingly long to settle. Linda couldn’t move. She’d never seen so much naked fat in her life. Imagine that, she thought, Imagine having such a fat stomach that it moves on its own terms…

Sofia erupted, genuine laughter filling the kitchen at Linda’s discomfort. She covered herself up again, trying to stifle her giggles. ‘Don’t worry,’ she slowly recovered, ‘I’d never actually do that to you.’ And broke into more giggles.

With an awkward goodbye, Linda was straight out the door.


***


Thursday kicked off with a gooey eyed six-in-the-morning start to work. The hours scraped on until two in the evening. A full eight hour shift. It proved to be shite, again, just like every shift, except that this time she had even less to do once the bulk of tradesmen and women had passed through. All she had to fill the time was snack on spare food items– a toasted sandwich here, a chocolate bar there, a packet of M&M’s stashed out back. The closer to evening it drew, the more a chill, uncharacteristic to southern-hemisphere summer, had decided to take residence. She was forced to draw her jacket around herself, and bloody Ernst Snabbsen wouldn’t turn off the facility’s overpowered air conditioner.

Feeling safe within the cushioned concealment of her jacket, she ended up walking around with her abdominal muscles accidentally relaxed. Her belly kept getting filled up, hidden and unseen. She mistook the relaxing buzz in her stomach as being hunger, again. So, when Maja came from out back holding an open packet of chips and offered them to Linda, before anyone knew it there were three bag’s worth of potato chips emptied into a huge bowl.

‘Hey, you doing Tjockningfest this year?’ Maja asked out of nowhere in a dead hour.

Linda took a moment to respond. ‘No. Why’s that?’

Maja was a pretty enough, but not exactly hot, girl of twenty-five with ashen brown hair usually tied in a ponytail and gleeful brown eyes gazing calmly from below dainty brows and low cheekbones. ‘Just asking,’ she said, taking another ship from the bowl and performing  a vanishing act with her open mouth. ‘I’m doing Tjockning this year,’ she explained. ‘It’s been fun so far. I’ve never done it before… thought I’d try it this year? It’s good to just let go for once, even if it’s only seven weeks– ’ Then she laughed almost spitefuly and added, ‘Even if all this eating is catching up with me so fast.’ She looked down as though at a newborn child, opened her jacket and spread her palms across the bump of her tummy. ‘See what I mean?’ She ran her hands in circles then closed the jacket again.

Linda never returned the gesture. She only laughed in a way she hoped would seem easy, un-awkward, not at all like she was tensing up in a high little spot between her shoulder blades.

After work she’d become infected with thoughts, and they would not seem to grow exhausted… Thoughts of what it’d be like to just “let go”, as Maja had put it. Even if it was only for seven weeks. It’s strange, really; it was as if the only way to stop thinking about it, was to stop thinking *against* it.

So that night, after dinner, alone in her room, without understanding what she was doing, she’d slipped into this accidental mission to consume snacks, one after the other, back-to-back. There was no time for the last bite to settle before the next one was underway, forgetting with each mouthful that she was participating in Tjoickningfest.

Well past midnight, since shutting her eyes and listening to a podcast by a panel of painters, she fell asleep in her underwear, sheets half off, curled semi-foetal around an open bag of pretzels and one of those pleasant half-smiles you know means easy sleep. There may or may not have been something close to a ** belly let loose upon the mattress, weighed down to one side with the slosh of all the food held inside.


***


Friday was a day off for Linda. The morning was spent doing exercises in painting and experiments with canvas composition. Nothing really went anywhere, so before long she was resorting to the desperate tactic of redirecting her creeping sense of failure by laying in bed, surfing the net and thieving from an endless supply of food until her belly had risen high enough for it to irritate her. She hid her shame by sitting the laptop on top of her stomach, which had to be balanced somewhat as it kept getting pushed higher and higher.

Well, feeding her face for the entire day had left her riding a sustained, low-frequency band of relaxation which eventually evolved, once the afternoon had crept up and turned to dusk, into more of a brain-fog. She only emerged once it struck her she’d missed dinner. Sofia was still out at work, and the other girls were feeling too lazy to do anything, so it was everyone for themselves tonight. Linda hauled herself up with a moan, feeling her stomach squeal at all the pressure she’d put on it, and came out into the living room. She passed behind the lounge where Prairie was watching a show on Netflix. Getting a flux of that bystander’s curiosity, she lingered for a moment to watch generic actress#1 shout at generic actress#2 while unconventional male actor #1 and #2 tried to intervene. Then her eyelids drooped to notice Prairie’s belly. It looked flabbier than she remembered. She had to sort of gawk, half in admiration, half disgust. Its soft lower-half was out from underneath Prairie’s tight-fitting grey shirt and, resting just inside her belly button, was the tip of her forefinger, making these small circular movements.

Linda moved along. She rummaged in the pantry for a packet of soup, prepared it in a bowl and set it in the microwave. She crossed her arms for three-minutes-forty and eavesdropped on the TV show from across the room. It was just then that the door latch clunked and all three-hundred pounds of Sofia’s body came past the kitchen bearing her work bag and keys. ‘Hey guys.’

‘Hey,’ came a disjointed chorus of three voices, all in different levels of distraction.

Sofia hung her keys on the wall hook. ‘All enthusiastic tonight, are we?’

‘I feel fucking gross!’ Prairie cried half-hearted from the lounge where she still had her finger hooked in her navel, staring down at it, head tilted in curiosity.

Milo was sitting at the dinner table writing in a card for a friend. She glanced up at Sofia, without saying anything, levelling on her some sort of aloof stare you’d expect to see a Russian give newcomer at the gambling table.

The microwave beeped for Linda. She took her soup to the table and sat across from Milo with a view of the TV, but became distracted in no time by a generous side-view of Prairie’s paunch– she couldn’t tell if she was bloated or just chubby. Maybe both. It wasn’t long before Prairie looked over and caught Linda staring. There was a pause. Then Prairie took her finger out her belly button. ‘Staring is rude,’ was said with the beginnings of chin-jutting pout.

Linda put her hands up, ‘Hey it’s not like I’m judging or anything…’ She scooped a spoonful of soup, blew gently on it and inserted it in her mouth. ‘I just don’t do Tjockningfest.’

Sofia almost laughed. Prairie showed irritation more than anything. Milo closed the card she was writing in and sat up scratching her nose. ‘What are we judging?’

Linda shrugged, sipping another spoonful. ‘Nothing.’

‘You mean which one of us is showing Tjockningfest the most?’ Milo suggested.

Sofia stood on one leg and tossed her hand in the air. ‘Well I’ve been “showing” for so long now you wouldn’t tell the difference, so count me out.’

‘Aw. Gawd,’ lamented Prairie, ‘I think it might be me– I mean it *will* be if I don’t start being careful. I’m gonna get so big.’

‘You sure it’s you?’ Milo tested as if about to provide counter evidence.

‘Look!’ finger-jabbing the softest point of her moderate paunch.

‘Well,’ Milo said as dryly as ever. ‘Jeez. It’s definitely not me, I look too skinny for it to be me. You guys think so?’ as she stood for all to see, squeezing between her hands a bit-more-than-modest paunch of her own. Linda sat caught in shock.

Milo used to be such a slender fairy-like girl. Now her hips had flared, her thighs had taken on some width, her breasts were starting to look like actual breasts, and her waistline had thickened enough that her tank top was clinging. You could even perceive the shadow of a navel in the material. That, thought Linda, is the moment you know you’re getting into serious trouble. Then Milo lifted her tank top. She spread her arms like wings and performed a few twirls, pale muffintop rotating bouncily like some product on display. Her tank top had slipped back down again, so she folded the bottom up and pinched a handful of fat either side, kneading it. ‘Think it’s kind of funny. Should I keep it?’

Just secretly, before anyone saw, Linda glanced down at herself, anxious  that she looked anything even remotely similar. Problem is; the silent, invisible streak of her intentions had caused half of this gut-deep anxiety to begin with, by sucking in her poor binge-beaten stomach until it ached. Linda saw nothing down there. Her guts hurt, but she checked out. She looked up again just in time to see Sofia offer Milo’s tummy a brief rub, on her way past, with the same affection you’d give a puppy. ‘Long road before you can think about challenging me though,’ she joked, and waddled off to her room.

Milo sat back down and began neatly arranging the birthday card atop the present like nobody had said anything. Then regarded Linda. ‘Stop looking down at yourself like a paranoid. You’re not even close to being like us… Like you said, you aren’t doing Tjockningfest.’

‘I know… I…’

‘So then why are you worried?’

Linda thought, then shrugged. ‘I dunno.’

Milo stuck some tape to the edge of the card, and stood up so deliberately her muffintop went into a bounce. ‘Just eat like normal, you’ll be fine.’

‘Yeah I know.’ Linda took up the spoon again and, reassured as easily as a directionless child, began sucking hot soup into her already full stomach.

*

Saturday afternoon saw her in the burger ** near the university again, sitting in the same seat as last time with a view she intended to paint. After setting up her laptop and digital tablet, she sketched the shapes and outlines of the scene while she waited for twilight, which would make way for that exact moment she’d felt stronger than a dream last time she was here. Erasing and re-drawing one of the final outlines, she watched it finally grow dim outside. The light was becoming absent. Then it struck her– something else was absent: something to eat. She got up, kept one eye on her gear, another on the menu, and took not even six seconds of scanning to give into her first impulse by which she ordered the biggest burger on the menu.

Returning to her seat, she fiddled around with the first base colours which she could already guess at, laying them out ready to be sampled and applied the moment they were needed. A waiter brought a wide plate loaded with a tall burger called “The Heap”. This was fairly accurate. Beside her laptop, it looked more like a pyramid than anything else– layers of beef patties, chicken, six different cheeses, two types of mayo, sour sauce, onions, tomato, lettuce, ham sliced too thick and so much grease it seemed to sweat. Linda felt fatigue just looking at it.

But she didn’t act like it, because not a minute later she’d somehow carved it all into a pile of forkfuls and was caught in a fork-to-mouth cycle with one hand, digital pen in the other, and her eyes looking between the scene and her laptop as she copied the scene outside the window. Nor did she seem exhausted after the plate was clear and half the colours blotched in their respective shapes and forms on the screen. If you looked long enough, an image was beginning to emerge. You didn’t have to look long to perceive what else was emerging– her belly, although hidden under her sweater, had swollen to an almost child-bearing shape. Too distracted, all she did was jam her thumb in her waistband and wrestle it down as far as it could go, paying no attention a surprising softness in her underbelly that sought to cushion her knuckle… Gazing out the window, she went on painting.

Half an hour on, she sat back, took a deep breath and stood up to stretch, belly blooming out in front. Late night city folk were standing in line for food for the commute home. She watched burgers in paper wrapping, fries, drinks and snacks pass over the counter, and felt the desire to be one of those people standing in line. Watching her gear, she wandered over to the back of the queue again, this time ordering a chicken wrap, wedges and soft drink combo. When it was brought round, she was already hunched over the tablet wriggling her wrist to make colours.

She fed on the wrap, first, annoyed by the squirming sensation in her lower intestines. She interpreted it as indigestion– but it was only her waistband in too small a loop for what was trying to overcome it. The only direction anything had to go was over the nearest available edge, and that’s exactly where it was creeping, right now. Because in spite of much misconception, small amounts of adipose tissue *can* in fact appear in just under four hours…

Too bad Linda was hammering her metabolism, then. Not long, either, until she’d be finding parts of her she never knew she had.


***


Finally, the island nation of Södrahem had collectively arrived at Mains Fest. This was the biggest and most important Sunday of them all, known for being public enemy #1 to slim waistlines and thighs. It was about now that you noticed your local news presenter’s body was beginning to take up more screen space. Seen celebrities would lose definition, while a couple perhaps grew outright plump. Handsome sports captains would glimpse the flesh of a lovehandle, even a beer belly, when the wind blew their jersey the wrong way up, and you know that pretty young bartender you noticed every week? She was about to look magnitudes softer around her waist as people’s gym attendance hit annual lows, so on and so forth.

The Henriks-Snabmanns Mill was an old industrial sugar processing plant, turned functions venue. The place accommodated upwards of 100,000 people. Linda had arrived with a wheely-case containing a portable easel and a bunch of painting utensils. Her aim was to find a point of view interesting enough to paint.

She’d come here with Jamie, who she noticed had already gained some weight since last week. Either out of blissful ignorance, or just apathy, Jaimie insisted that she wore what used to be a modest crop top. Now it was just an insufficient fit, unable to cover a deeper, darker belly button that Linda couldn’t take her eyes off of, as it stared back at her from within a soft, quivering little paunch. This wasn’t so bad, though,compared to what had really shown up– Jamie’s hips had decided to blow up for no reason, spilling over the sides of her belt enough to jiggle faintly, even though lovehandle fat is usually some of the firmest to form on your waist. It hadn’t even been a week since they’d last seen each other. What had Jaimie been doing? Linda badly wanted to ask how it felt– how it felt to have actual fat attached to your body. Was she embarrassed? Did she realise? Was she okay with it?

Before Linda got the confidence to ask such a thing, Jamie had to leave. After all, she’d only agreed to hang around for an hour or so before shooting off to another venue across town where she was to meet with her cousin again– Valeria, the same one she’d met almost four weeks ago. Apparently they were going to see whether they could defeat the infamous “Duo Punch-Packer” between to two of them.

‘Oh my god yuck. What’s in that?’ Linda asked, suddenly turned off and prodding the bucket of fries they’d been sharing.

‘Um,’ Jaimie counted on her fingers. ‘Six buttered buns, four 2-kilogram chicken schnitzels, with gravy, a dish of Shepherd's pie, then raspberry pie and two tubs of ice cream with bananas, cherries and topping.’

‘ … Yuck.’

Jaimie checked her phone for the time. ‘I gotta go.’

‘Aw okay.’

‘Sorry.’ She made a sad face and stood from the stall they’d been sitting sat at and discarded the empty bucket of fries.

The friends said goodbye.

Thanks to a useful trick called “cognitive dissonance”. Two thoughts were doing circles around each other in her mind; the thought of Jamie’s growing hips, and how much she wanted to eat right now. She wandered around the festival by herself and her wheelie-case, just to enjoy the atmosphere for a spell. A lazy breeze came up to brush the underside of her belly and was gone again. She never checked why she was able to feel wind on her stomach begin with.

A wailing reached her ears. It was the tail-end of a riff bouncing off old brick walls, guiding her to a live music set. She gravitated slowly towards the source until she was standing at the back of a general crowd before a large elevated stage which contained a band performing shoegaze ballads under low purple light.

She was already getting looks by the time she’d set up shop away in one corner to paint the crowd of heads, baseball caps, beanies, obscene costume hats, contemporary hairstyles of all hues, presided over by the magnificently smoking stage and its almost godlike inhabitants with their instruments, only half real, as though, since emerging from their own plane, they were here to grace us for just one mortal evening. She felt a twisting in her empty stomach. The closer she peered, the clearer she observed a certain shape of waist in the male and female lead singers, obviously the fault of Tjockningfest– especially when the female lead knelt to pick up a tambourine from the floor, offering a side-profile glimpse of a lower roll rounding out under her silver sequin dress.

Above them all spanned a sweeping zone of dusk receding from flamed oranges and purples into a dim southern-hemisphere blue. Eventually the first stars began to show. Passerbys, **, and/or high, saw what she was doing and were so impressed they took it upon themselves to slur compliments and wander away promising to shout her some food. They all stumbled back one after the other bearing gifts as if to a queen. This queen sat on a stool before her miniature easel, a small artist’s smock concealing the severe dimensions her stomach had blown out to, carrying so much food she kept slumping forward without meaning to.

Just now, Linda was coming across a new situation. It had all the potential of being a lesson. But on the other hand, she felt as if she’d come up against the solid concrete wall of… what… disgust? Maybe not disgust, she wondered, Maybe just apprehension.

Everywhere she looked there were waists, some carrying a smidge of extra flab, a vast amount of food b**s crossing paths, potbellies that were hidden and those that had failed to hide, and some full-blown spare tires, whether singular or multiply stacked atop one another, each trying to out-jiggle its neighbour. Like it or not, if her artistic integrity was worth anything, she had to zero in on these, she had to examine them, stare at all the exposed fatness until she’d ** in each unique tummy, each of their shapes, each line, each curve and bulge, and bring them to life on her canvas.

Feeding her face from the stockpile of food she’d been gifted, Linda took some time to watch and learn. Didn’t take her long to become fascinated that it was possible to distinguish between different bellies. Everyone had their own shape, unique as a fingerprint. There were bellies divided in two, some at the navel, some above it. There were waistlines that were more hips than belly, (like Jaimie, thought Linda). Bellies whose fat had distributed so that most of the flab gathered on their upper stomach, or their lower stomach, the latter kind sometimes seen in tops too small to hide it all at once. Some protruded in perfect sphericality like a ball. Others in an evenly distributed layer of softness prone to spill over any restrictive surface in the way. Others almost lumpy, like they’d not lost the shape of the six-pack they’s grown from. There were tummies, if left exposed, shaped like smooth eggs, while some showed the undulations of various stages of cellulite. Any torso large enough to warrant it had formed rolls running from hips around to backs, some few, some numerous. A few girls with chests large enough had rolls pressed into existence beneath each breast, reminding Linda of what’d Milo had looked like when she’d stood up a few nights ago to show off her stomach. One guy, who was always around with his group of friends by a beer stand, she could identify just by the way his belly and lovehandles seemed to have formed so distinctly from each other instead of blending. She noticed one of his other friends had a smaller but squishier navel indent in comparison, but when he sat down his belly somehow expanded into more of a gut, as if magically two times its size while standing up.

As her left hand slotted food into her mouth, pushing the capacity of her stomach further and further towards its improving limits– her right hand traced the curves, emboldened the shadows, splotched the colours here and there depending on the variety of bellies and the way the light fell on each one. She was coming to know them at a visual level so intimate, so microscopic, that by the time she was travelling home on the bus late at night with a sore middle, all she could see behind closed eyes were muffintops, distended waistlines, near and far, jiggling against the backs of her eyelids like the afterimage of the sun. She’d been staring for too long.

Soon enough she’d be staring at herself.

At home, after finishing a bowl of jelly beans while she read a book, she’d snuggled into bed, and more or less fallen asleep thanks to the brain-fog brought on by an afternoon of constant eating, and a food baby so severe she wasn’t able to ignore it. Now she laid motionless, passed out in the middle of massaging her lower gut, and just before passing out, she’d noticed how it behaved the same way a hot-water bottle does when it sloshes.

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_________
Week Five
_________


Linda rose late from bed. She fit herself into the nearest shirt and emerged from her room. Sofia was already awake on the lounge watching TV. The rotund girl twisted around to look when she heard Linda’s door creak open.

‘Morning.’

‘Morning.’

On the way to the bathroom, when Linda glanced back, she caught sight of the peculiar way Sofia’s oversized shirt navigated the shape of her breasts, each the size of a watermelon, resting proud upon the top of her gut. They wanted to droop to either side of that massive stomach, oozing onto thighs as wide as Linda’s waist. The lounge cushions had caved in, depressed under all her weight.

Trying to forget what she’d just seen, Linda moved on.

When she came back into the kitchen, Prairie had materialised out of nowhen to prepare some cereal, dressed in grey sweatpants and a thin turtleneck sweater ridden up her belly so badly it looked deliberate. With a faint static shock, Linda saw how obvious the blonde-haired girl’s tummy had become all of a sudden, especially when seen from the side– since not even three days ago it’d only looked that way after she’d stuffed herself. Now a smooth pair of lovehandles had joined the team, quivering as she stepped around the kitchen barefoot. Since when did her body behave that way?

‘Yeah I know okay,’ Prairie confessed without looking, as if she’d tuned into Linda’s thoughts. Though she laughed, there was something of a hope-robbed slouch in her words. ‘It’s really obvious, isn’t it? I’m getting flabby, aren’t I. Aw god, it’s finally catching up.’ She fell silent under a brief thought, head cocked to the side. Then realised something. ‘But who cares? I don’t care. I won’t care. I… *Should* I care anymore?’ testing Linda’s attitude towards it.

Soon as Linda realised she was being asked directly, she had no ready answer. After a stuttering pause, all she could manage was, ‘Well I guess not if you don’t want to… Why care what others think anyway…’ thinking she had to comfort her roommate…

But then Prairie turned back to her cereal and changed the subject out of nowhere. ‘So what did you get up to last night?’ She spooned a stupid amount of sugar into her bowl while she listened out for anything to do with food.

‘I just went to, wait what’s it called, the Henriks-Snabmann Mill? One of my uni friends went with me for an hour, but then they had to leave.’

‘What!, you were all alone?!’

‘Oh, no, I just went around looking for anything cool to paint a picture of;’ with a shrug, ‘I’ve got a portable set I take around with me sometimes, so I looked for something to paint.’ She said nothing about the quantity of food she’d had to herself. All that free food inside her bulging gut. ‘I did a painting of a live music tent they had set up. It was actually cool, it was a pretty scene, I thought–’

‘Ooo! can I see it?’

Linda shrugged, assuming some of that typical artist’s modesty. ‘If you want…’ Truth be told ,Linda hated people seeing her work. She knocked the topic off balance. ‘What about you? What’d you do last night?’

Holding the cereal bowl up to her mouth, Prairie crossed her ankles and leaned back against the kitchen  counter, potbelly assuming space in front of her. She began spooning cereal into her mouth between sentences as she spoke. ‘I was at the dockside– you know East Bay? Lots of rich people and yachts in the water all the time. We had all this amazing food, o-mi-god, you have no idea, there was stuff I hadn’t even heard of before. “We”, I mean, like, me and my friends? one of them has the richest girlfriend I’ve ever met; so she invited us to the function and shouted us all our meals. Then this really cute waiter served the table but, you know, by the time we’d had all the food, I was like, out here–’ She held her arms out and puffed her cheeks, ‘–blugh, I couldn’t even move, so there was no way he noticed me. Then we hopped to another bar across town in an Uber?, got shouted some more pub meals? I said I was too full to eat, but she ordered them anyway and I had to eat it, so by the end I’m still out here,’ holding her hand out in front of her stomach, ‘even though it’s been, like, at *least* two hours since we hopped over. After that we went back to the docks and watched some fireworks. And then, know what the worst thing was?’ She narrated through a mouthful of cereal, ‘We had even more food because of all the stalls along the walkway– when we were done I actually felt ready to throw up and no matter what I did I couldn’t make my jeans fit anymore. That’s why I’m not wearing them this morning. I literally cannot.’ Holding her bowl out of the way, she craned to look down with her head tilted, and rubbed the spot her belt where would have been. Instead, there was the elastic band of grey sweatpants. Linda’s eyes were tracing the depression of the waistband as it wrapped under the dome of her lower belly. ‘What about you? You eat anything much?’ With a five-millisecond scan down Linda’s body, Prairie opened her mouth for another spoonful.

Linda looked away. ‘Not much,’ she lied. ‘Just a few things here and there. I was too busy painting.’

When she returned from work that evening, only Prairie and Milo were home. Relaxing on the lounge with a chocolate bar and a cup of tea to wind herself down, she actually witnessed Prairie become so uncharacteristically reckless as to show off the changes to her hips and ass in front of Milo, the ultimate whip of sarcasm. Linda watched out the corner of her eyes as things quickly devolved into a general comparison between them. Prairie, more out of character than she’d ever seen, insisted that Milo poke her belly, then poke her own and judge whose “chub” was deepest, a she put it. Gone was this week-old Prairie who cried out in despair every time the subject came up, and here was this doppleganger clone who was first to give her buttery stomach an affectionate pat as she made eye contact with Linda, followed by one of those giggles in a toothy, blue-eyed grin, as though it was all a happy joke.

It followed her all evening, through into the afternoon, down into the underworld of midnight, where it’s just you and yourself. She couldn’t stop it. The only thoughts that came to Linda were of Prairie’s belly. Laying down in bed to shut her eyes, she kept seeing it in front of her. Then Milo’s muffin top came to visit her. She saw Sofia’s enormous spare tire, wondered how the huge girl managed to stay so pretty despite being three times the size of anyone else. She thought of her own waistline but didn’t take a peek at it– not yet. Maybe one day.

For now, her attention, better spent on herself, was stuck spinning around the gravity of others… Other people with their deep, fingerable belly buttons, cushioned in fat, all soft and jiggly, oozing over fabric edges depending on how much chub is there to seek its freedom. Truth be told, she was letting herself learn the exact visual nuances of each possible shape. Each spill, rach protrusion. Without knowing it she was becoming a visual expert on how much chub sat exactly which way. How deep each area, of each tummy, dictated how rapidly and for how long it could jiggle.

It wasn’t enough to just see it. There was a need. Her fingertips and their corresponding motor-cortex pathways itched, like epidermal throbs, to explore softness, to squish and probe each inch of blubber. For some reason she had to feel it.


***

It was Tuesday morning. When she woke up the spell was still there.

She articulated the contours of her anxiety, her need, and from there summoned up something like the courage to propose an idea to Prairie by noon. Sofia and Milo were out of the house.

‘So, what I’m asking is–,’ Linda was fumbling over her words, ‘Is it alright if I painted a picture of your–’

‘My what…?’ Imploring with those wide, agreeable blue eyes, and that tilt of her head.

It took a mighty stretch of effort, but Linda said it:

‘…your tummy…?’

It sounded strange on the air waves. Strange and perverted.

Eyes widening even further, a smirk began to overtake the brief shock in Prairie’s face as she snatched an opportunity to help The Secret Plan. ‘Well,’ she said, with a failure to hide the flattery and excitement she was beginning to feel, ‘Okay? I guess? But what for?’ she tested.

Caught out, Linda just shrugged. She looked for something to say. ‘I dunno. Just practice I guess? You know, like, exercises?’ She was struggling to keep her eyes from snapping like magnets to her roommate’s puffy abdomen.

‘You don’t mean physical exercise, do you?’

‘...’

‘Alright, alri-i-ight! I’ll stop making you get awkward.’ She kept grinning with all her teeth, apparently amused to infinity by Linda’s struggle.

Something burst inside her, provoked to trip over a wire she hadn’t seen. ‘I swear I’m not being weird okay!, I’m just curious, it’s what artists do– all the best artists learn how to draw everything they can, and–’

Prairie was laughing at the outburst, but it was too late. Linda had painted herself an angry fool. She uncurled her fists, let her shoulders relax and sat back.

‘So… do you mind, then? It won’t be a full portrait, or anything. Just a study of your body, if you get what–’

‘Sure thing, Lind,’ said all sweet and smiling. ‘Why don’t we do that later while we have lunch? We’ll get something ready, I’m starving. Want some pizza?’

Within the next hour, two pizza boxes were delivered at the door. Prairie collected and brought them steaming to the coffee table where she plopped down on the lounge. Linda was already sitting there with a set of pencils and pad paper, but seeing the pizza, felt a vacuous space open in her stomach. She set the pencils aside to laze around with her roommate and watch TV. Prairie made a comment about the TV show and soon enough chatter had taken over the dynamic, the flow broken only to feed themselves another bite of pizza.

Linda was reaching for another slice when she suddenly came up short. ‘Oh shit, I should get sketching before I forget.’ Wiping her hands on her shorts, she grabbed the drawing pad and rested it on her lap, swivelled round to face Prairie and hovered the pencil above the page.

Without further ado, Prairie tucked her shirt up under her breasts and kept eating, eyes on the TV and chatting as though nothing was happening, as if Linda hadn’t gone strangely silent, examining every curve of Prairie’s midsection and reproducing the lines on paper. Prairie’s belly was one of those which seem to appear mostly as a singular paunchy mass, spilling over her waistband at what she guessed to be three or more inches, sides diminishing a tiny bit where it smooths out on either side, then rising back into lovehandles which have taken it second best, a hint of stretchmarks threatening to appear sometime soon down the track. Above the hips there is less softness until a roll pokes out from under the bra-line seeking to clinch it. Upper belly is mostly one indistinct layer of sponge until once again it comes up against the bra-line and forms a roll. Prairie’s belly button was of moderate size. However, whenever she leaned forward, the surrounding chub squashed it flat and somehow made it appear bigger– unless it was just a trick of the light. Then was the other thing– last Sunday at Henrik-Snabmanns Mill, Linda noticed that not only were there different shapes, but also different textures of fat. Different surfaces. Prairie’s was of that silky quality, her skin tone not pasty, but halfway between white and a light warmth.

It took a few tries, but once she’d gotten a basic outline, she decorated it with a few extra lines, light enough to be guides but thick enough to indicate a bulge here, a slope there. Then she began shading certain areas. The sketched began to gain depth. Once she’d used an eraser to create highlights where the light fell brightest on Prairie’s belly, the illustration suddenly popped. Linda brushed the page, blew the last shavings away, scratched a few finishing touches to finalise the depth and nodded to herself. She flipped the clipboard around and held it up for Prairie to see.

There was a short moment where Prairie seemed to register nothing. Then her eyes widened a little. ‘Oh wow.’ She tilted her head, brows arched up. ‘Do I really look *that*…?’

‘Um. Oh. I didn’t…’ Linda’s faltering arms let the clipboard fall a little. She began to shrivel back into herself. This was awful. ‘I didn’t mean to make you–’

Then Prairie laughed, head thrown all the way back, shoulders rising. She froze, watched Linda out the corners of her still laughing eyes, then started up again. ‘Aw Lindy,’ she managed. ‘It’s okay, I know what I look like.’ She pat-drummed her belly, watching it shimmer, then tucked it under her shirt once more. Looking her in the eyes with a consoling smile, ‘It’s great Lindy, I really like it. You’re so good at what you do– I don’t know anyone who could just sit there and make that in… how long did it take?’

‘I dunno,’ said with an embarrassed shrug. ‘Thirty minutes?’

‘I mean– wow!’

Though Prairie had an authentic ease about the situation, Linda couldn’t help but come away from the sketch study feeling odd, straight down to the pit of her stomach, skewed sideways as if she was walking just outside of her body instead of in it…

Whenever she tried focusing on reading, on painting, or even browsing the web, her headspace kept sliding sideways just enough for her to notice. All she could do to keep her mind off it was eat. Only once the sharehouse was silent and lightless did she sneak out barefoot and plunder the remaining half a pizza, and a bag of cookies, cradling them back to the safety of her room where the only source of light was her laptop screen. In bed once again, body hidden under the covers even from herself, she fed her face. When too much food stressed the limits of her stomach, she kept feeding. If you looked close enough, you even could notice, even under the obscurity of blankets, an undisciplined bulge in the area her stomach would be.


***


Linda’s skewed feeling didn’t last forever. In fact, it seemed to have almost vanished by Wednesday.

Ripped out of a half-understood dream at 6.00 am for work, she sighed at her alarm’s condescending ditty tune. It was too chimey, too clear for anyone waking up at this time to go “yeah, I really like this tune”.

As she crawled out from underneath her covers and prepared to sit up, she noticed something. On top of the usual early-morning slump in her soul, something about her body felt weird. The black high-waist jeans she usually wore to work felt weird going up her thighs, and when her whole rear finally sat snug inside, the seam was cutting up the crack of her butt. She pulled and shifted, but it didn’t want to come back out. She kept dressing .Then the fly wouldn’t close up above her belly button. Fright made her heart freeze over. It was becoming clearer what all this meant. But there was no time for this

Eyes fixed on the clock instead of her tummy, she reached for the nearest hairtie, hooked the sides of the fly together in a V and let it be. She pulled her grey work shirt down over her head, chuckeda short trench coat over the top, then flustered around the kitchen to steal some snacks as quietly as she could before vanishing out the door.

For some reason the rush to the bus put her in a mild sweat. Fuckin’ weird, the way the air nipped at her skin, and she had to button her coat tighter against a wind she hoped would to die down. Once on the bus, she found a spot at the back where nobody was around and sat down reclaiming deep breaths, her heart making itself audible as it pumped blood through her ears. The bus groaned to life and she sat there absolutely certain that what she was feeling were her panties having slid right up in between her cheeks. She rolled her ass side to side to try and dislodge the wedge, but it only drove in further. She felt itchy. The wire-thin touch of her panties was a static shock.

Making sure nobody had eyes on her, she tilted her hips up to get one hand under her butt and felt around, trying to dig the offending item out, but found there was no loose fabric to grab. Her jeans were too plastered. She gave up and thought to distract herself with Facebook instead, pretending to herself it wasn’t her hand creeping closer and closer to her ass, so that she could touch it, and just barely grope herself, marvelling at what it felt like for there to be more of her.

But wait, there couldn’t be. She wasn't doing Tjockningfest.

Her spine dropped through the floor. Her stomach lurched, but at the same time, there came this surge through her, wrapping round her waist and making her thighs clench together. She sat straight with a faint gasp. She writhed, sighed, then sat back. Before anything happened, she shackled herself. She wasn’t going to chase this any further. She didn’t know what this was– or wasn’t ready to admit it. No time for that.

So she looked back down at her phone instead, the same way you do when you accidentally make eye contact with somebody you wish you hadn’t.

She came home to find Sofia in the kitchen, waddling her bulk from one corner to the other as she prepared a dinner feast. ‘Hey Lind.’

‘Hi.’

Prairie was out for the night partying with friends, but Milo was on the lounge feeding herself from a bowl of icecream, never mind it being only half-hour until dinner, making sure that muffintop of hers kept creeping out until it became too big to conceal. What was she thinking?

Linda stood by the kitchen doorway and looked in. Her eyes widened at the overkill; the longer she stared at all the food, the more there seemed to be. Three seasoned chicken roasts. A frying pan full of garlic and mushroom gravy. Mashed spuds, glazed hams. A dish of quiche. Dim Sims. Turkey slices and eggs. Linda had to lean against the kitchen opening as she caught herself slumping from a pressure in her pre-stuffed gut. She wondered if eating any more was possible.

Sofia glanced at her. ‘You alright?’

‘Yeah,’ with an effort to stand straight, ‘I’m just bloa–’

And stopped herself right there.

All day at work she’d been making use of her employee’s advantages; when a chicken roll didn’t kill her hunger, a second roll failed as well, and so she’d gobbled a doughnut, a potato pie and a lemon cake. By the time she recklessly chose to finish up with a cream bun, her brain caught up on the amount of food already inside her. She had to force-feed herself the rest of the bun. To be honest, the bus ride home was painful, in a shockingly arousing way, in the most sickening way, and right now Linda was the embodiment of so many emotions that she’d gained a shining aura of thoughtlessness about her, unable to decide how to feel that all she needed right now was to stuff her face with food, wait for it to bloat her up, and fall into trance, massaging her belly with little circles until she worked down, down to her groin, and–

Now there was more to eat. She wanted to vomit and eat it all at the same time.

Sofia re-materialised in front of Linda. ‘Pardon?’ asked the heavy girl. ‘You’re what? You’re “bla”…?’

‘Um. I said, I meant, I’m just bleugh. Like, I feel “blugh”. Heh, long day at work.’

Sofia suppressed a giggle. She knew what this was. Who’s to say she hadn’t been there once before? She was gonna give Linda some extra large tonight, for sure.

And so she did.

By dusk everybody in the room had stuffed themselves into pain. Such scenes were becoming something common in this sharehouse. Except that, this time round, Linda was part of it as well. Sofia was the only one about to stand up, being well versed in this sort of thing. Shifting the overspill of her gut away from the table’s edge, she slid the chair back with a grunt and lumbered up. She took a breath and blew air through pressed lips. ‘FNobody I feel fat,’ clapping both sides of her enormous gut.

‘You already were,’ came Milo, who was thoroughly incapacitated in one corner of the lounge, eyes on the TV. Despite the crease of pain in her brow and her belly looking full as a sail, she demanded someone bring her another bowl of icecream like some totalitarian queen. When Sofia wobbled her way back in to hand Milo, like a royal gift, an almost overflowing bowl of icecream, she began force feeding herself, spoon-to-mouth, even as she made expressions that told of deep surges of nausea now and again.

Linda thanked Sofia for the meal and retired to her room. Her work shirt had slipped up a few centimeters over her navel which, if she’d have looked, was getting more defined these days.

Couple hours later her bloat had diminished, leaving her with a relaxed sensation, all warm across her abdomen. She once again mistook this for hunger. Out she went, passing the lounge where Sofia sat reading a book. Milo was in the kitchen washing dishes.

‘Oh boy,’ Milo said as Linda entered the kitchen, ‘I can’t hold it in, can you?’

Linda’s silence lasted a beat. ‘What do you mean.’

Milo placed a cup upside down to dry and turned around to face Linda, bringing into view her pregnant-looking muffintop. She rested her hands on her hip bones, stuck her elbows out like a 50’s model and popped her hip out, causing a faint wiggle in her paunch. Then said, deadpan, in an imitation slur, ‘Oh I ain’t got nuthin goin on here, girl, don’t know whatchu talkin’ bout. Lookit me, good as ever was,’ while bouncing herself on her heels, aggravating her flabby midsection into a nodding dance until her shirt’s hemline shunted up and over her belly button, whose shape had grown wider than it had deep. But being comparatively shallow meant nothing where the depth of her flab was concerned, because if Linda had to make a guess, she’d say you could poke around two or more inches worth of forefinger into that tummy before you felt anything like muscle down there. If “muscle” even existed any longer.

Linda couldn’t think of anything to say.

Only once she’d snatched a packet of chips and a soft drink, then vanished back into her room, did she realise the massive heat she was feeling. The raw, uncalled-for charge of fuzziness, all up and down her stomach, pooling as if gravitating at the base of her crotch, aching to be massaged and released… It wasn’t long until she’d lost hours to the internet and snacking her belly to the height of her breasts, and that stupid, gasp-inducing clamping sensation in her thighs, full of sex, became too much.

Now the house was quiet. Prairie still hadn’t come home. Sofia and Milo had gone to their rooms. The house was dark outside her door. Secretly as she could, fighting the little telltale sounds rising from her throat, she pushed the computer off her lap, shut her eyes against the ceiling, reached for her zipper… she found it already undone… even her clothes were prepared, ready, their fibres open with need. One hand holding the waistband aside, the other hand seeking its way down. Her palm bumped the naked, distended surface of her lower gut as it slid past. A jolt bounced through her body. Her core tensed, discomfort flaring from sudden stomach-pain before twisting into a surge of need that almost got her to moan. All she wanted to do was eat. And fuck. Something, anything. All she wanted to feel was her stomach balloon, uncontrolled. All she wanted to feel were the circular little motions across, over, all around the zero-point apex of her clitoris; dirty word, “clit-or-us”, she hated it, loved to hate it, clenching her thighs– thought instead about her midsection being a mound of fat; dirty word, “fat”, she hated it, loved to hate it, loved its power to make her gasp like she was in love.

What would it be like to get fat?


***


She dreamed from someplace high, at a loft’s altitude. She watched an apocalyptic mass of people push and pull on collective currents towards their daily destinations. Each time she switched point of view, they seemed imperceptibly larger in their waists, until the sky was a calendar spanning seven weeks. She was in a park. Food hung heavy, fruitlike, from trees. Someone similar to her was walking through the park in the company of friends, passing trees, and looking thicker with each procession. Then they were in the city centre, choosing platefuls of absurd meals, and eating and eating, getting bigger, and she felt herself ascending towards the sky, higher the more her lookalike ate, until there was a blackout. Just as if it had never happened, it was morning again. Same as ever. Except that, this time, she felt none of that same low fog, that muddy disentangling of her thoughts from dreams the way she usually had to.

Instead the sun, in gentle gaze, had sent a starfield of golden particles to visit her, floating their way down through the morning-lit window. The shadows of her room felt soft enough to bear her along to anywhere, even upwards. She felt deeply warm. Something smooth and fuzzy had started in her chest and spread into her legs, which swung out from underneath the covers the moment she thought to do so. It was easy to sit up that morning. But… something about the way she could feel her underbelly and upper thighs brush each other seemed to put everything in its right place again.

When she was out in the kitchen with scrambled eggs in her mind, walking high-chinned and straight-backed, she could feel the fabric of her shirt shaking against her tummy each time she took a step. Not only that, but when she sat down to eat and scroll her phone, the way the fabric settled across her middle was strangely noticeable. Once or twice she pretended it was mere accident that she brushed her hand, only the back of it, across her tummy– sure enough to find it resting further out than usual.

Surely not.

But she wasn’t going to give herself too much to think about too quickly. Or too much, what… pleasure? Was that it?

Or could it have been something a little more like anxiety, mistaken for a certain sensation, down below?…

No. Nothing meant anything. Last night never happened.

It was about time to leave for uni. She put her hair under a cute white headband, slipped into a black mini skirt underneath a beige drape-top, and went for the bus.

The sky was saturated with colour, with a happy crowd of puffy clouds wandering past clear and healthy white. Shadows were blue and the light golden. Sparrows swooped from the power lines, fanning up again towards the sky where they departed in twos and threes. She stood for a moment listening to the city traffic down the far end of the street. Leaves whispering. Someone’s lawn mower from over roofs and fences. From the moment her heels hit the pavers, she hadn’t gone ten steps before something was not so much weighing her down as giving her a tad more momentum than usual– a weightier stride. There was hardly anything in her bag. She’d taken an empty drink bottle, left her books in her room, and her laptop weighed next to nothing. And she had no food, either, and…

From around a far corner she heard the diesel moan of a laboring engine, dropping gears. There it was, the “102H” route bus, the only one for another thirty minutes. She leaned forward into a run. Man, she flew. So did her body parts. For some reason she could feel her chest moving, and there was a jolt in her thighs every time her heels hit the ground. Her sprint devolved into a jog and she adjusted the bag on her back, trying to run lighter. She wanted to stop moving around all over, but her ankles were burning, and then she heard herself starting to pant loud as a steam train. Her lungs fell out of sync with her legs. She saw the yellow colour of the bus stop, beyond untrimmed bushes. But the glassy square face of the bus was bearing down on her destination faster than she was. Her face felt hot even as the wind brushed it. Her knees radiated heat. What was she, thirty meters from the stop? Her bag was slapping against her back in laughter as she tried to gauge the slowly diminishing distance through severely jolted vision. Jesus, did the bus see her? What was the driver doing? What were they thinking?

She couldn’t be sure, but the nearer she got the slower the bus seemed to be. Or maybe that was her. The glass windshield came up behind the sign post. Then, over her own panting, she heard metal on metal. The big old rectangle-on-wheels leaned angled towards the curb and grunted to a stop. Feeling bile rise in her stomach, Linda went limp, ankles more or less flopping like flippers at this stage, and tried to look normal as she approached the door, hissing open. Her legs were sucked of life. She grabbed the nearest handrail and stepped on. The driver, looking miserable, glanced at her briefly the same way lightning is there in one flash and gone the next. The door wheezed shut. Breathing obnoxiously loud in the closed space, she constrained her breaths and tried to smile at the driver, lungs fighting to break free and suck air. She rummaged in her bag for her transport card, swiped it and moved up the aisle with her bag held in front of her. Her lungs hurt. She saw a vacant spot up the back, the usual zone. Avoiding an already averted gaze or two, she swung into the seat and plopped down hard. Raising a hand to her forehead, she found a thin band of sweat had formed just beneath her hairline. She wiped it and frowned at herself, a little sneer of disgust coming into existence.

The bus moaned into motion, shunting her back into her seat. When she turned to the side and nestled her bag into the seat beside her, she felt her forearm brush against her tummy, rising and falling, and knew it didn’t feel as firm as it had before.

She sat back and tried to pant as quietly as possible.


***


‘Oh my gawd,’ Prairie declared next morning as she shuffled out from her room all bleary eyed, ‘Am I the only one out of breath lately?’

Linda watched Prairie yawn and rub her eyes, elbows stuck out like wings, all the way to the fridge where she bent over to study its contents forcing the back of her shirt to come untucked and slip over her squishable hips, their definition pretty much vanished.

Filling a water bottle at the sink, Sofia glanced over one pillowy shoulder. ‘Look, let me tell you, Prairie, I have been there,’ she admitted with a wavering gaiety in her voice close to self-demeaning laughter. Sofia was preparing to go out, and had just forced her oversized body into an outfit, looking surprisingly stunning for how grossly tight they were– a mid-waist checkered pencil skirt, and a black longsleeved crop sweater concealing her trunk-sized upper belly, which in any other case would have been visible in all its tire-like majesty, long hair let down. She was wearing it all like a queen of fashion, even though all you noticed about her body from behind was her wreckingball of an ass. ‘I’ve been there, and it’s nothing.’

Which passed the ball on to Milo at the table, where she practically had her face down in a plate stacked one foot high with pancakes and cream and five different syrups. She put her hand on her hipbone and pressed sideways, shifting the bulk of her muffintop in the other direction. ‘Nope,’ as she stifled a burp. ‘I’m fine. I’d legit race any one of you and win outright.’ She used both hands to massage her waist. ‘Then I’ll take a big fat seat on your panting ass and you’ll be sorry you ever asked–’

‘Okay, let’s go then.’ Prairie turned around to face Milo with this militant stance of defiance through the opening between the kitchen and living room, her own potbelly made obvious by the way her grey shirt, that she for whatever reason chose to wear, hugged her body as if it was no shirt at all, letting light and shadow fall across its teardrop shape. She tilted her head at Milo, grinning all toothy, happy-voiced. ‘Come o-o-on! I’m totally serious, let’s race each other!’

Milo sat bolt upright and broadcasted a stare like she’d just been caught doing something. Eyes wide, she slowly scanned to the left, then right.

Prairie pleaded, ‘Come on, Mile-e-ey? Won’t you race?’

A dead shrug from Milo. ‘Oh, I’d just hate to see you get yourself winded, is all. I’d be fine. It’s just you I’m worried about. Hate to see you fall and hurt yourself or something.’

General banter, subtextually snarky remarks, lowkey mean antics disguised as jokes, and so on, all morning long. Linda said nothing about being winded and out of breath. She could feel herself slide more and more into bodily sloppiness, but she was not ready to make it known. Nobody asked her anything either. She just sat there on the couch, snacking on a bag of imported Hershey’s Kisses and subconsciously stroking a soft portion of her tummy flesh since her mind had been stolen by the TV out through her eyes.

After a lunch feast of homemade burgers prepared by Prairie and Milo, Linda retreated to her room, bloated to infinity since Sofia hadn’t been there to finish off what remained. Eyes drooped, she checked her emails and got a fright so bad her heart struggled to reclaim its rhythm. Then it resumed beating, faster than ever, pumping loads of burger-made triglycerides through her body.

She had to read the email again:


*Via Blogssez.com PM service*

Hi Nobody,

We are a band called Ö Regna. We saw a piece you uploaded a few days ago; the one of the outdoor gig at a festival. We loved it. It had a vibe we think matches what we are musically. We have a new album coming up and we wonder if we could ask for rights to use it for album artwork? Write to us back if you would like to, and we can exchange emails to talk more.

Cool stuff, and many thanks,
- Ö Regna

None of that could have been real, could it. Either she’d dreamed it, or it was a scam aimed at hopeful young artists like her. Who the hell were “Ö Regna” anyway? Wouldn’t be surprising if they didn’t exist.

A quick Google search yielded enough results; a psychedelic/shoegaze band from Sweden. Agnes D’Benito on keyboard and vocals, Hugo Christer Henning on guitar and synth, Bo Åkesson on drums. One EP, a single, and two studio albums up their belt.

Well then colour her colourless.

Not wanting to respond too soon, but busting with an energy that made her feel like she could do anything she wanted, she squealed, bolted out her seat and cannonballed out her room, doing pirouettes across the carpet as she shouted it to the world, with a stupid, wide grin bunching her cheeks and lighting her laugh lines. Milo looked out from the kitchen, frowning, and then Prairie emerged from her room down the hallway to see what the noise was.

When Linda was done venting, and something a little like embarrassment was starting to creep up from behind thanks to the fact she had to readjust her shirt every time she felt it slip up her bloated belly during her crazy performance, she leaned against the back of the lounge to catch her breath and explain things properly.

They were all eyes and ears. Once she’d spilled the beans, they were all grins and congratulations.

Prairie got the idea this called for a celebration. Pudding. Linda was about to wave her hands no, but Milo was already dashing for the oven and taking a box out the freezer. ‘Hey, it’s like dessert for lunch, who cares!’ was the justification given.

Not an hour later they were spoon-to-mouth over bowls of too much chocolate pudding and icecream and berries, too busy to chat, feeding their faces sick with rich mush, under the excuse that Linda deserved it for her hard work. When the spoons rung against the empty bowls like bells, only residue left, they sat back cradling swollen abdomens at various stages of softening. Some were more obvious than others.

Linda watched them like an imposter among unwitting enemies. The other two were happy rubbing their swollen middles. Milo had her eyes cast somewhat lovingly down at hers, each hand moving around its shape with all the care you’d give to a womb. Prairie was pressing her palms deep down into her gut as if the trick was to try and hurt yourself before the pain went away, head resting on the back of the chair, eyes shut to the sight of the ceiling. Linda tried not to be too overt about her own discomfort. Too bad that a ripping stomach ache triumphed in the end– feeling sickness threatening to rise up her throat, she stopped sucking in. Her belly puffed up to its full size. She sat there staring at it. She didn’t touch it, didn’t even undo her belt. She thought if she felt it, she’d know it was all true, all physical, more real than it looked.

‘I’m feeling less and less sick these days,’ said Prairie, still pressing into herself with her eyes closed, voice slow and satisfied. ‘I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.’

Apparently this gave Milo the idea to look at the bowl, lean forward with a wince and pick it up again, examining it like some intriguing artifact. ‘Me too. Bet you can’t do this, though.’ Then put the bowl over her face and dedicated herself to licking the inside clean.

Prairie ignored her. Looking about to fall asleep, Prairie said, ‘Damn Lind, if they use your artwork… I’ll be so happy for you I’ll literally, like, buy you two weeks’ of chocolate or something.’

Linda sputtered a nervous laugh, unaware Prairie actually meant what she’d just said, serious as she was about the secret agenda.

‘Then again,’ she added, ‘you’d have to look out. I’d probably eat it all if you weren’t careful.’

‘I’d steal all your work and re-sell it,’ came Milo softly. ‘Identity theft is easier than you think.’

Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at Milo.

It took her some time to notice. She looked up, wide-eyed. ‘What.’

Prairie had a disbelieving half smile. ‘“Identity theft”.’

Milo shrugged. ‘I’m not serious, but it is true.’

‘Wait what?’

‘Just saying.’

‘How do you even know that?’

‘Not that hard to figure out.’

Prairie and Linda shared a glance.

Milo stopped making rolls out of her belly fat and held her hands up. ‘Not saying I’ve ever done it…’

‘So… you just… *heard* it from a friend, or something.’

‘The internet.’

‘Trusting the internet…’ Linda said quietly.

Milo shrugged.

‘You *are* full of weird surprises, aren’t you.’ Prairie cocked her head the other direction.

‘No, just full of food.’

‘Same.’

‘Yeah I can tell.’

Prairie’s head went bolt upright, jaw beginning to jut. ‘You’re saying–’

Milo’s eyes wandered back down, and she resumed making rolls with her belly. ‘Not saying anything,’

‘You just said I look fat.’

Milo shrugged. ‘Me, more than either of you, more like.’

Behind Linda’s back. neither Prairie nor Milo were one-hundred percent sure the other had caught onto this opportunity to push the secret agenda. Prairie thought she was. Milo thought she was. But was the other? The result was this strange ambience of hesitation in the room. If only Sofia was here to provide the centre-weight.

Linda sat there, too busy observing the dialogue from an outside perspective to think about the way her forefinger, on its own accord, was creeping towards the underside of her belly, where her first roll was spilling over her waistband, a spot of softness.

‘You?’ Prairie raised her brows at Milo. ‘More than me? We’ll have to see, won’t we.’ Biting her lip as if to say yep, you heard me alright.

‘Huh? You sure about that? Wanna compare or something? I’m ahead.’

‘No I’m saying I’ll just probably end up worse than you.’

‘Really? At the rate I’m going at?’

‘What about it?’ Prairie tilted her head again.

‘What for?’ Milo tested.

‘Why not? It’s just Tjockningfest…’ said with a sneaky sidewise glance at Linda.

Milo stared into the table with all the intensity of someone scouring for a detail in the grain of the wood she could draw a clue from. Then shrugged with her eyebrows. ‘Guess it is,’ with a glance of her own, not *at* Linda, but in her general direction. She said it slow and deliberate: ‘“Tjockningfest”.’

‘Yeah. Hey, it’s only seven weeks– you just binge, binge, binge. Eat all you want. Binge some more. Then bam, it’s over.’

‘And then you lose it.’ Milo nodded, eyes sort of aglimmer.

‘And then you lose it,’ agreed Prairie.

At 4pm Linda took the bus into the city and walked to the university library, a vast underground space of many levels, silent the way a cathedral is– you feel guilty for hearing yourself breathe, and you think everyone who looks at you hates you. She was here on the hunt for books on a few lesser known impressionist artists from the 40’s, and anything to do with the first digital art so she could prepare a presentation for the Student Painter’s club next Tuesday. The bus ride had been uncomfortable on her upper thighs. Presently she stood alone in an aisle flipping through a book with her head down– dressed in a black turtleneck crop top, only slightly overlapped at by an overly tight camel skirt, which felt like it was trying to clamp the life out of her intestines. The skirt came to just above her knees, squashing her thighs into each other. The skirt was held together by six silver snap buttons in a line up the front, and she’d found herself wondering how it would feel to let the top one loose. But with nothing to cover the gap with, she spent an hour sucking in, wishing something would distract her from the ache. Eventually her legs were getting fatigued. She had to move.

Leaving the three books she’d found on a reserve table and memorise the location, she went upstairs to find something to eat. With no good options up top, she ended up in the city in one of the food malls. She stood in line for a cup of hot chips and a milkshake, catching her breath and wishing she’d worn a longer top so she could undo the top button of the skirt. Alas, she had to deal with the sensation of her stomach inflating a fraction at a time inside the prison of her skirt with every mouthful of fries and shake. She gobbled them in record time on her walk back to uni, down into the library again, until she reached the lower floor and found herself feeling the torture of bloatedness all over again. Her legs were sore. She could hear herself breathing harder than she wanted to. There was that religious silence to the place, an absence of noise, making her lungs sound like bellows. Passing by a bin and throwing away her trash, she sucked in hard until she felt a stomach ache hit her like a bowlingbowl and, after relocating the books, walked under an air vent. Gentle air blew over her. It was then she felt how flushed her cheeks were. The nearest place to rest was a row of study booths along the windows, with students sitting here and there, staring at books, laptops, out windows, or blankly up at the ceiling without a whisper of a thought on their face.

She found down at a vacant desk, wiggled uncomfortably in her skirt which was clutching her torso like a psychotic fiend, and began lowering herself onto the seat. Restrictiveness immediately coiled around her stomach. She stood up for a second, shifted the top of her skirt around and sat down again. She could feel the rigid material pressing her tummy like never before. It was unbelievable. Her backside landed on the seat and– thup! –something broke across her belly. She looked down. Thup! once more. Two of the six buttons up the front of her skirt, which had jurisdiction over her navel and upper waist respectively, had just popped open. Her cheeks went molten. Now, thanks to the two sides peeling slightly open, half her belly button was visible and most of her upper midriff was left on display.

She didn’t look up. She wouldn’t acknowledge the stares of anybody who had surely heard, and was now watching her, all sneered-up and thinking ‘wardrobe malfunction’. There was a lump starting in her throat. Doing her best not to glance up, she scooted the chair further under the table in hopes it’d conceal her accident. She tried to act casual about the way she grabbed each button and fought to connect them again. She was sure her cheeks were red, the same way metal lights up once its hot enough. Her lower button wasn’t going to close without grunts and other ugly sounds. She got the top one buttoned instead, but only just. This would have to be good enough for now.

So she left things as they were and went back to reading.

She didn’t see it; the view you’d get, if you were among the one or two people who copped sight. Her own spillage through the diamond-shaped gap between strained buttons, and her navel, which had a squishy look these days, like the centerpiece of it all. Like you could creep up and poke it, watch your finger go down, swallowed into the sucking softness of the surrounding fat. Not to ignore her upper waist’s half-muffintop, caused by the choker of a waistband you’d think was fit for a child, not a skinny-fat young adult such as her.

She ended up leaving well into the evening. It took a long time for the area to become vacant enough for her to find a moment in privacy and set about fixing her embarrassment. It took little grunts, sighs, brief glimpses of pudge spill-overs that denied denial itself, and some painful sucking in before she got the button to click in. There was no exhaling, this time. Only the breathless tensing of abdominal muscles as she stood up, checked the library books out, hurried up the stairs only to find herself fatigued again, along the busy city streets and onto a bus so crowded she had to hold her bag close to her tummy to hide her gut. She shuffled up the aisle and sat down beside a sleeping Asian woman, going wide-eyed when she felt two buttons break open against her stomach, all over again.

Back home, she just strode in through the front door without holding anything back. Guts out, who cared. She was tired of it. There was no reason to try anymore.

In the privacy of the falling dark, she had disembarked and stopped pm the path where she tried to button herself up again. Only after some wrestling did she reconnect both buttons. She slung her bag over her back. A book came flopped out, crashing open and creased on the pavement. ‘You stupid idiot,’ she told herself, bent down to pick it back up, and– Pop!– Thup!– again the buttons. Her throat clamped. She wanted to roar.

She’d just called it quits, right there, and cursed her way home, stomach rounded out from her undone skirt, a relatively thin, but very soft, layer of bellyfat jiggling semi-free thanks to genetics that’d given her that peculiar type of extra-soft flab which has more wiggle n’ jiggle than it really should for its thickness.

Milo watched her pass through, eyes skipping down to the yes-I-know-it’s-obvious belly, then away again, a slight satisfaction warming her chest.

After pulling the clothes off her body, Linda sat in her underwear on the edge of her bed brooding– not even on her laptop, just frowning at the wall. It wasn’t long before she was comparing herself to people. She thought of Prairie, of her ** belly. She looked down at her own and thought man, if she wasn’t careful soon she’d be standing 1:1  in proportions, and wouldn’t that be a fucking shock. Disgusting. She thought of Milo, and her more or less even distribution of weight, if not a little more in a sloppy-looking muffintop. She looked at herself again, judged the proportions of her body, thinking she came somewhere close to a 2:3 ratio in comparison with that fair-haired Swede. And to Sofia? Never in her lifetime would she become *that* big; which made her feel better. Lighter, in some sense.

Lighter was the word.

Later on, anyway. In what, two, three weeks. When this whole dumb festival died off.

She’d just shed it all after.


***


She was scrubbing the dishes after dinner Saturday night, and kept nudging her shirt down. It didn’t want to stay down forever. She didn’t want to believe she knew what she thought about it, either. Yes, she, Linda, was having this problem. She was edging closer and closer to the utterly sexual, goosebumped truth of it with each cognitive see-saw, and all the open-fielded freedom of what it meant. All because Sofia had baked them some mac n’ cheese of a quality which none of recalled tasting elsewhere, and then on top of that Milo thought it was a neat idea to order pizza for “dessert”– four boxes of it –and then for Prairie to reveal that “dessert” actually meant apple crumble with dollop cream.

Comparatively her guts felt better, now… but only an hour ago she’d been slumped on the lounge in pain, half-watching filler movies on Netflix and trying to keep the nausea from swelling up. Prairie had gone off to her room, but Milo and Sofia were on the other lounge. They were still there now, as Linda shuffled side to side at the sink, feeling her tummy bump against it, over-inflated pouting. She rearranged dishes here and there, opened cupboards and shut drawers. She was in grey yoga pants and a plain black tank top which wasn’t too happy going down any further than under her navel, leaving the curved underside of her belly vulnerable to eyes which might spy it quivering now and again whenever she walked.

Leaning down to put a saucer away, she stood again and felt her pants ride down. She began to shimmy them back up– but stopped, mid action. She let it be.

And right then, Milo had to wander in, didn’t she, with a ‘Got some dishes for you.’

Linda shifted aside to make room as Milo slipped a plate and spoon into the sink, suddenly self-aware and ashamed. She wanted to cover herself.

She took one quick side glance at the scraped-bare plate, and at Milo’s soon-to-be stretch marked lovehandles splaying pale and fleshy from the sides of her pants…

‘I’m not even full yet,’ Milo claimed, stepping back.

Linda half turned to face her. She wished Milo would just leave the room so she could conceal what she knew was there. ‘What, seriously?’

Which got a plaintive shrug. Then Milo stepped back and seemed notice something. ‘Hang on,’ she said. ‘I thought you weren’t doing Tjockningfest.’

Pausing, cutlery and cloth in hand, Linda looked at the wall. Anywhere but Milo’s judgement-soaked eyes. ‘But I’m not,’ despite knowing the hem of her shirt had long since separated from her waistband, and that it was being shown to Milo right this second.

Milo just shrugged and said, ‘Pull your shirt down then.’ And with that, turned around to leave.

Linda stood there, hands lowering as a mild disbelief rose up in her, like a slow, hot tar, turning molten until out of nowhere her whole face was smoldering hot. She couldn’t stop her own mouth from speaking. ‘I’m just bloated, okay?’ She sucked in. ‘Maybe look at yourself. We just had a stupid massive dinner,’ her voice came in weak, angry bursts, ‘and I mean stupid massive. I don’t know what’s going on, okay? I can’t be in control, of what my body looks like, one hundred percent, of every, passing, minute, okay?’

Milo grimaced and slowly backed out, no apology offered except for what was expressed on her face.

Linda turned back to the dishes. The kitchen was silent.

Now it came. Sinking into the post-fury slump of guilt, the type you get for losing your shit at someone, her own voice came back to her over and again, sounding stupid, rushed, like a child about to cry or something. She slowly straighted her spine, feeling stupid at the same time for trying to look dignified. How could she even *be* dignified right now, since losing her cool, falling for such obvious bait. As if someone like her needed to consume anything like bait, right now, given she stood there with an obscene foodbaby, so that whenever she glanced down it was the first thing she saw, not even bothering to hide it. Because who’s to say she didn’t know exactly what was going on, here? And that, maybe, for some reason, she couldn’t stop touching herself later that night, one hand working her groin, the other grabbling the light rolls of her softening middle and oozing them between her fingers, almost prideful for having cultivated something of substance, of her own body, real and touchable, soft and pure.

She was witnessing something develop in the same way you plant a tree and you let it wrap around your pride, lifting it to new heights as it grows– and you realise that new life, new possibilities, have been there all along.

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It was Sunday morning. The first two things on her mind were the facts that, today was Savoury Fest, and that she had to get into correspondence with that band Ö Regna, who wanted her artwork. Plenty of time, she thought. No work, no uni. She could just lie here and watch the sunlight in the window. The sun’s angle sent a square of illumination across the carpet. She watched it, thinking nothing much, and noticed how its position would shift almost imperceptibly further… which got her thinking of her own slow, almost imperceptible change. You never really pay much attention when it’s your own body. You have to see it happen in snippets, like the square of light migrating across the carpet. She wondered how much she’d widened from her slender past-self, if she could see it in snippets. What would it look like? She didn’t want to think about it. But she did. Didn’t want to. She liked the feeling it gave her… The feeling of there being more flesh than skin. She could lightly squeeze it in her hands. Funny how the change seemed so obvious in others, like Prairie and Milo, but not herself. She could probably get snippets of herself, somehow. See it, not see it, see it again later and get a rude shock. Just like comparison photographs, the way people trying to lose weight do. Why doesn’t she do that? Why couldn’t she lose weight?

Well it wasn’t just Tjockningfest…

It felt like sex to thread her fingers in and out of her belly button. Could she get a whole finger in? You’d have to be very fat to do that. Could Sofia do it? Would she, Linda, do it one day? How fast was she growing? She could test it, do a small experiment.

Soon Linda had fabricated this fantastical little scenario she wanted to play out… Honestly she couldn’t believe she was thinking this. Her heart stammered, bewildered.

Starting today, she wanted to perform a thorough examination of herself, including a photo, then completely ignore looking at her body for a while. Say, at least a few days, that should do it. Until next Tuesday she’d do her best to ignore her body. Once the time was up, she’d examine herself again to see if there were any changes.

Her groin was throbbing with beat. She felt warm.

Suddenly she imagined a week instead. Yes, she’d wait for an entire week. Next Saturday, she’d see if there was any change. She’d feel if there was any more of her.

Linda wanted to grow.

Soon she was taking a photo of her body, with shaky uncertain hands, making sure the pictures were saved in a folder other people using her phone wouldn’t accidentally stumble upon.

She took photos from all angles, making sure they could be replicated later. She stood in certain ways, certain positions, standing up, sideways, sitting down, twisting at her hips…

She was shaking with energy. She had to masturbate soon, or she’d lose her mind… She couldn’t shake this strange inspiration from her mind. It was special. She wanted to cherish it the same way you try to hold onto a fading dream. It was the unrelenting thought of smaller, and larger. Two things, but the same. Her teeth were grinding. She couldn't look at herself anymore.

Two hours later, over a post-lunch snack, she stood before the easel in her room with yet another grand idea. She was surrounded for the first time in months by gouache and watercolour paints, and newspaper covered the carpet. She wasn’t wearing a smock, only an oversized red tee she kept for messy situations. On a pin-up board were an arrangement of reference images: bodies rakishly thin, slender, fit, curvy, chubby, fat, and outright obese, whether in colour or greyscale, photographed or in other mediums, and a series of colour palettes she was still stewing over. Sketching the form came first.

Here Linda was, starting a new piece, or even a new phase of inner being; she felt accelerated by something indescribable, hardly expressible. Something sexual.

She stood there feeling electric. The outlet of the current was her hand. She picked up a pencil and, taking a bite out of a muffin, began laying down approximate lines.

This was going to be something slightly experimental. Impressionistic, but smooth. An assault of colours, while at the same time gently curved. It had to be sensual. It had to express the beauty of the real physical form– something like a feminine body encased in the goddess-like smoothness of thick flesh, its form accentuating what lay beneath, latent in the character of each belly, hip and breast-shaped curve from which it all came.

It was the slender female body, accentuated to its soft outer limits.

Savoury Festival, Sunday, fifth week of Tjockningfest. One of the most dangerous times for cardiac systems, glucose levels. It was controversial to most doctors and physicians– even those who found themselves slipping into the great binge. People got ** on calories, sometimes seeking out forms of pure-concentrated carbohydrates just to dump down it their throats, get the head-spins, and then they’d go eat some more. Yes, hospitals have had increases in certain patients this time of year, but light moderation, with an air of sensibility, has kept anything *too* drastic from happening.

Jaimie called Linda in the morning. ‘What venue you going to tonight?’

‘Don’t know,’ through a spoonful of yoghurt. ‘Wasn’t planning on anywhere.’

‘I wasn’t either, but Travis just asked if we were going with the gang, over to the venue at uni?’

‘Eh?’

Jamie swung by in her car and drove them to town. Forced to park some distance away from campus, they had to walk and talk for several blocks, and by the end of it Linda was getting puffed. It took her a while to realise, but she noticed that Jamie was showing the same flushed-faced look. Her words coming out slightly breathless.

As they waited in a spell of silence at the intersection lights, she snuck a look at Jamie’s body, and had to do a double-take. It was hard to tell, concealed under a pair of black jeans and a sweater that actually fit well… It was hard to tell, but even so… Linda thought she spied something extra. What looked like additional hip fat. More than she’d seen on Jaimie, last week, anyway.

Then for some new and undefined reason, she felt a little wish boiling up inside her heart. It almost escaped out her mouth: she hoped Jamie wasn’t getting fatter.

Which made her frown, waiting there at the lights. She was aware of every objection you could come up with to… what, her disgust? She was disgusted at Jamie? Digust that Jamie could be gaining weight? And how it was any business of Linda’s? But still, she felt repulsed. It just happened. She didn’t chose this. Was it fear? Or was it something else, coming alive in the base of her stomach, and down there between her legs?

She tried not to be so obvious about her inspection-between-glances of Jaimie’s waist as they kept walking. She swore she could tell Jaimie’s hips were fatter. The fuck?

They arrived soon after: a large space shared between the trio of the Feria, Ragstrom, Absen-Marto public halls. A triangular courtyard connected everything. Lights coloured the place like all the variations of potato chip flavours. There were deep purples, happy greens, the plain blues of just about any plain packaging out there, a pervading honey glow, so on and so forth. The idea was to create hunger, and hunger was what Linda was dealing with right now.

She entered the scene looking somewhat out of place for the carefree spirit of the season– deliberately dressed in a baggy but stylish outfit, a loose grey tee, a longform black-and-white cardigan set in an abstract pattern, and a pair of jeggings. She dressed like this to hide her from herself, since vowing to ignore her appearance until next week.

How crazy is that, she began to think, half-listening to Jamie’s voice telling her something about a poet’s ideas. The depths of her daydream were rising, drowning everything else out. She was pulled out by a chorus of voices: “Hey guys over here”, from over the head of students lazing on the public lawns.

Bailey, Travis, Patricia, Billy, Theo and Sebastien were all sitting in classmate joviality at a picnic bench. Everybody shared greetings and began to chat. Food was already out. Packets of chips, boxes of Arnott’s shapes torn at the opening, even though Travis was eyeing off a nearby oven-pizza stall.

Linda started eating from the moment her backside hit timber. She talked and clutched thick handfuls of chips, tipping her head back to pour them into her mouth, transporting biscuits from the box to her lips before she’d finished the first. It was going to stay like this, for a long time, before she felt any waistband digging in, sitting in stretchy jeggings as she was.  Only once her internal organs reached their natural, unconstrained limits, would she feel the pain of bloatedness. And then the fat storage would begin, slow, secret and invisible.

It was past dark, by then. The festival lights were blaring full force and her stomach feeling bruised with too much sudden enlargement. If this was self-abuse, then at least she liked the way it felt. Nobody could see what lay beneath. Not even she could. With her baby-bump camouflaged under the rumples of her long cardigan, she lurked at the edges of conversation, observing, and rarely participating. She visually examined each of her friends while they weren’t looking.

Billy thumped the table top. ‘Truth or dare!’

‘Mmmm... nyeeeh...’ came Jaimie’s uncertainty.

Patricia’s eyes were on her phone, blue light blooming on her crimson-haired face. ‘What are we, twelve?’

‘Only because you’d have secrets to keep,’ Billy tested. Which got a few laughs.

‘Um. No?’

‘You love it.’

Patricia stared him down.

Linda couldn’t figure out if Patricia’s physique had changed. Billy’s had. Slightly, but certainly. His lower face looked smoother, and there was something of an angle connecting his neck with his jaw that hadn’t been there before. She reached forward, suppressing an pained grunt, and took another slice from the pizza boxes they’d ordered. Then her attention was caught. Was that– that there –could that have been a visual warp of the light? Was that a new width in his entire torso? Maybe Billy had put on some weight.

Two empty potato chip bags went sliding across the table with a gust of wind. Travis caught one before it went over the edge. He sat there flopped it absent-mindedly side to side, looking a little dismayed. ‘Another round of munchies?’ with a glance around the table. Linda thought his face didn’t look any different. But when she looked lower, she saw promises, but decided to wait for him to stand before calling out any changes.

‘Got the munchies again, Travis?’ poked Sebastien.

Who only shrugged.

‘I’ve got a few dollars,’ the little Bailey said. She began reaching down into her back pocket, leaning to one side and revealing herself to be substantially porkier. Linda looked again. The pig-tailed girl had already been short and bubble-shaped, but it was as if the magnitude of that bubble-shape had increased. Her semi-punk black clothes were tighter, and if she kept wiggling around like that to fish out a few coins, her shirt would probably find its way up. Linda guessed that underneath her shirt, you’d find that tender, almost un-jiggly sort of belly and get when everything has to pack onto such a small frame.

Travis nodded. ‘Cool. Are my eyes red, Seb?’

‘I can contribute a few as well,’ said Theo.

‘Cool.’ Travis began collecting the coins. ‘So what if I have the munchies, Seb, you wish you did.’

‘I mean, you aren’t exactly wrong.’

Linda turned her eyes on Sebastien. He looked no different– not much anyway. Not *yet*, more like. He was opening his wallet to throw a few coins onto the table. For a full-time uni student, the guy was fit, his musculature defined; modestly corded forearms, thick shoulders, a strong back…

Travis counted the coins on the table.

‘Hear what happened in the downstairs kitchen area last week?’ Billy asked.

Jamie fished a few coins from her purse and put them in the pile, then said to Travis. ‘I kinda feel like sweet and sour chilli. Or. Something with sourdough. Or…’

Theo shook his head in response to Billy. ‘No. I wasn’t here last week. What happened?’ Theo showed no solid signs of having gained anything. Then again, he was a foreigner. Maybe Germans took longer.

‘Or…’ Jamie thought out loud to Travis, ‘Nachos! Or, um…’

‘Pinwheels?’ Bailey contributed.

Billy sat forward to tell his story. ‘Some guy just came in, straight up and puked on the microwaves.’

Everyone’s faces went sour.

‘What from?’ Sebastien asked.

‘I’m serious. Apparently he ate too much or something, happened on Friday.’

‘Might have been too keen for his Sunday.’

‘But he could eat more on Sunday if he goes harder two days before. Think about it.’

‘Yeah, but then he spews because of it. Hey Trav, get us some more chips as well?’

‘How big is this list now?’ Tavis stood up. Linda scanned his body and saw what she was looking for: a modest deposit of flab across his stomach.

‘Possibly might need more money,’ he muttered.

‘Was the guy big?’ Patricia asked Billy.

‘What, the list?’ said Billy.

‘No idiot. Was the guy big. Like–’

‘Sorta. Not really.’

Sebastien wa skeptical. ‘Nobody big enough would puke from eating too much.

Travis took a few dollar bills from Bailey’s hand went off to get the food, never mind the three pizzas still on the table. Linda picked up a slice, feeling grease smear her fingers.

‘Wouldn’t you spew, too?’ Jaimie asked.

Billy shrugged.

‘Why,’ Sebastien re-iterated, ‘would someone big puke from eating a lot?’

‘I don’t know, maybe a bad day. Depends how much he ate.’

Patricia scrolled her phone. ‘They’d have to eat a lot to get big to begin with.’

‘Exactly. So no one big vomits from eating too much.’

Billy wanted to go on with the story. ‘What does it matter? Thing is–’

‘Surely someone big can vomit.’

‘What is “big”, though?’

‘Big enough to not need more food, like we’re getting,’ Patricia reckoned.

‘No, we don’t need philosophy here.’

‘Uh,’ came Baily, ‘but guys? It’s Tjockningfest?’

Patricia finally looked up. ‘And that’s why apparently we need more food.’

‘Pat’s right,’ Sebastien said.

‘No I was being–’

‘What does it matter?’ Billy interrupted. ‘As I was saying, the guy came in, he puked and it was all food. Not even wet, just mush.’

Patricia’s face screwed. ‘Fucking shut up, I don’t want to hear about that!’

‘How much do you think he ate to do that?’ Theo asked.

‘No idea. Just happened.’

‘Clearly not that much if he wasn’t a big guy,’ Jaimie agreed. ‘You’d be able to eat a lot and not puke if you were big.’

‘I don’t know. I mean, how much have we all eaten this Tjockningfest?’

‘It’s about to be too much,’ muttered Patricia.

Jamie shrugged. ‘Don’t know. Lost track.’

‘Same,’ came Sebastien.

Looking sheepishly aside, Bailey said, ‘Honestly Travis and I lost track as well.’
‘Why keep track though?’ Theo suggested.

‘Why indeed,’ Billy repeated.

Sebastien made a flippant hand gesture.

‘So no one knows…’

Travis came back with three packets of chips, a platter of pinwheels, a tube of cookie dough, muffins and a bag of marshmallows. Everyone began grazing in addition to what was left of the pizza. Everyone except for Patricia. But eventually, once her eyes slipped away from the phone, even she dropped her mood, and seemed to fall into the collective hunger that was circulating the premises tonight, like some great invisible beast the shape of gas, finding its way into stomachs and forcing them to expand slowly but surely.

Well into the night, conversation had slowed to a comfortably vague comment here and there, as each of them sat back in varying stages of distension. Feeling all yummy and warm in her tummy, Linda scanned the table.

Patricia looking full but not exactly bloated, said, ‘Think I’ve had enough.’

Billy was squirming in his seat trying not to look too stuffed. ‘You barely had anything.’

Travis, red-eyed from what was likely a brownie eaten earlier and then tons of junk food on top.

Bailey laying back against Travis’ shoulder, and an arm over her puffed-up stomach which kept sneaking out the bottom of her shirt to flash a grin.

‘Yeah what do you mean “had enough”?’ Patricia sneered.

Theo doubled over as if to hide his midsection. He looked somewhat shy.

Sebastien sat there without a care in the world that his gut was bloated enough to be showing its true form. Linda tried not to betray her surprise. Sebastien’s stomach had in fact transformed into a roll or two during these last five weeks. It seemed he didn’t care that much.

Linda sensed Jaimie stand up beside her. When she glanced, her eyes zeroed straight in on her friend’s waist, as if sucked into a black hole. She just about melted into her seat.

Jaimie had only stood up to grab back of her jeans and set about jostling them up past the jiggly spill of her twin lovehandles, which were faintly stretchmarked, and would not let the waistband pass. When Jaimie looked down to locate the source of the blockade, all she saw was distension, and she turned to a cherry-cheeked colour that Linda had ever seen. ‘Well,’ she said as a matter of fact, abandoning her task and tugging her sweater down as far as it would go. ‘That’s sort of embarrassing.’

Travis snorted. ‘We’re all a bit like that right now, don’t worry.’

‘It’s true. Look at me,’ mused Bailey, slightly ** on bloatedness. She flipped the front of her waist-tight shirt up and let them all see. ‘I swear I’m not usually like this, okay, but just look at this belly.’ It was true. Linda stared at the flesh-sphere. It was one of those bellies packed so densely with chub that it had more plush than jiggle.

Jaimie sat back down. She glanced around with a sly, terrible twinkle creeping into her eye.

‘Wonder who ate the most,’ Billy thought aloud.

Jaimie went in for the kill while she still had the change. ‘There’s only one way to find out. Bailey went first, so… we’ll go clockwise? Travis you’re next.’

There were a few sighs, a few giggles interwoven. But they all knew they had to oblige. It was lame to get embarrassed.

Travis was giggling too hard to do it, but eventually he lifted his shirt. All they got was a brief glimpse of a moderately bloated stomach, sporting a somewhat feminine distribution of pudge, before he had to laugh again, and his stomach muscles contracted inwards.

Theo hesitated before going splotchy pink. As if cornered, he lifted his shirt, looking aside with a humiliated little smirk tugging at his face. He wanted to smile and laugh, but something was stopping him. Linda had to admire it; his bloatedness was disproportionate. Although nothing grand, compared to Tjockningfest natives, on his rakish frame his belly resembled a balloon on a pole.

Next up, Sebastien scratched the back of his head. He thought about something, then shrugged. He slid back from the table, and already Linda could see he’d been hiding something. Undoing the lower three buttons of his shirt, he pulled back the curtains to a chubby little ball of a belly. Damn. The guy was so fit, his jaw, shoulders and arms still so defined, but his stomach had just melted into nothing. His midsection had morphed into a cushion of wiggly, jiggly fat. Linda tried to imagine its development; she saw it cultivate around his belly button, soft but insignificant, then spreading out, swelling forward, until here it sat, bubbling over his belt and just begging to be proked. This glance was all they got; he covered himself and reclasped the buttons quicker than you’d count to three.

Patricia straight up shook her head no.

‘Aw come on,’ Jaimie grated. ‘What’s possibly going to happen?’

She couldn’t answer.

‘There’s seriously nothing to be embarrassed about, or even worried about.’

‘Yes there is.’

‘And what’s that? Being a little overfed? Who cares. There’s way worse people here, seriously, just look around.’

Linda’s eyes wandered past Patricia to where a hundred different bodies in a hundred different shapes formed the population, some sitting, some standing, some moving with the currents of the crowd. A chubby guy sat down on a bench with a gym-fit girl in spandex, where they shared a platter of muffins. A group of skinny friends passed by. An overweight girl, ** on both wine and too much savoury food, stumbled past, supported by embarrassed companions, her arms over their shoulders so that her shirt let her belly hang low and jiggle freely, and– holy shit, one enormous tit was even coming close to slipping from a too-small bra. Linda thought of Sofia and wondered. A near morbidly obese couple, who were in public dressed in outfits they obviously intended to provoke with just how much blubber they’d neglected to conceal, were waddling hand-in hand, ice cream cones in the other, up the path. Linda could hardly look away. She exchanged eyes with Jaimie, who used her head to draw attention to their obscene stomachs hanging like low, udder-heavy aprons of fat. Jaimie turned to Patricia. ‘See, what about them? What are you compared to them?’

Everyone tried not to stare as the obese couple came past. Tension overcame Patricia’s face as she blatantly watched. When they were gone she turned back and thought for a moment. With a look of absent-minded disgust still making its way off her face, she shrugged, muttered, ‘Fine, you’re right, whatever,’ and rolled her white sweater up. To be honest, her bloat was kind of underwhelming. But, in spite of all, Linda thought she saw something of a smoothness to the texture of her stomach. A certain kind of smoothness. It was hard to tell. Patricia was leaning back as far as she could to prevent anything that might be there, anything soft and doughy, from bunching up. Then the sweater went down again.

Now it was Billy’s turn. ‘Okay,’ he preluded, ‘okay, I admit it, I might’ve put on a few, but whatever. Judge away. It’ll be gone after Tjockningfest.’ Parting his coat and lifting his shirt, he showed them a chunked-up torso, and a wide beer belly. If only twenty more pounds, Linda suspected his waist would be trying to spill out in just about every direction available; forwards, outwards, up, even down. He gave it a gentle tap to show it did, in fact, wiggle slightly. Linda realised she’d been building up heat between her legs.

God, why now?

Suddenly Jaimie sat back, looked down at herself and (Linda could swear) proudly pulled her entire shirt up. This was uncalled for. Linda’s thighs clamped. She couldn’t look away even if a thermonuclear bomb lit the sky.

She could see all the bulge of Jaimie’s food baby. She’d done it deliberately, as if to expose not only her a pregnant appearance, but the feature she seemed most proud of: her lovehandles. They seemed big enough to fit in Linda’s outstretched hand, if she only splayed her palm against one and pressed, feeling it cushion her down to bone. Two bold, pink stretchmarks, accompanied by three or four very faint lines, showed the stress in her flanks of a growth far too sudden. Jaimie arched forwards to get a better look at herself. She splayed one hand on top and one underneath her food baby, nursing it for a moment. The rest of her hadn’t grown nearly as much; her chest was still small, her face regular, and her shoulders narrow. She was all chubby upper thighs, fat hips and little paunch. Then she flipped her shirt back down, but only half-heartedly, leaving it skewed so a sliver was still exposed. She looked across at Linda.

The corners of her eyes creased. ‘Your turn.’

Suddenly the whole world was against her.

It’s not like Linda thought it wasn’t coming. For some reason she didn’t expect it would come, either. Until now, she had sat safe and sound, observing everybody else’s physiques without facing her impending turn. Fear zapped the warmth from her limbs, going tingly-cold, and redistributed it all between her legs. She writhed a little, caught between arousal and the paralysis, stage fright, suddenly aware just how bloated she was. Her head was caught in a cloud. She could hardly breathe– food was packed into her gut so hard it pushed against her lungs.

‘Come on, Lindy,’ came Jaimie with an easier tone than she’d used on Patricia.

Her cheeks were cold. She sat what felt like forever. But then she just did it.

It was easier than it should have been. She simply moved her limbs before her thoughts had time to catch up with her. She stood up with a jolt that she knew her tummy was jouncing in response to, drew her cardigan aside and lifted her loose grey tee. She didn’t look down at herself. She had to wait. For now, her heart skipped to the rhythm of her thoughts, doing little loops. She felt like she was running out of air. The looks on their faces was so loud. All eyes were either on her midsection, or were trying not to look too long. She nearly sucked in by reflex, full of regret, more than food, when Sebastien spoke up. ‘Impressive.’ His eyes were wide, brows raised in appreciation.

Jaimie leaned forward to get a better look up at Linda’s showpiece. ‘Hol-ey mol-ey. Way to go Linda!’

‘Guess we have a winner?’ Billy guessed.

And that was it. After she sat back down, the night continued through a note of dizziness, hazy laughter and all these crazy ideas she kept getting. All these ideas about what she looked like from another’s eyes. What she *could* look like. Maybe someday in the future. What she’d feel like with each new consecutive pound. Whether she’d jiggle more, or feel heavier, or fit into less clothes. How fast? How slow?

At one stage, throbbing with a charge so loud as to cause her to excuse herself to the restroom, she stood up, adjusted to the pressure in her stomach and waddled off. Safe inside the cubicle and with nobody outside, she came shakingly close to rubbing herself raw, but saved it for later. She nearly snuck a look at her belly, but forced her eyes instead to the ceiling, where she held them prisoner.

She came out and returned to the table. Having sat down, she continued to eat more food– who cares how gorged she already was –as if starving, even though she was the furthest thing from knowing what hunger was like. She ate as though she was testing her luck, just to make sure that when she examines herself next week, there really will be a change.

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Week Six
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It was the strangest thing to become so alert to the experience of bodily changes. She’d turned so hyper-aware of each minute change in her figure that she discovered herself doing things to accelerate her growth on purpose, at times unconsciously.

Just this Monday morning she was emailing to finish her talks with Ö-Regna for her artwork, while snacking on two sugar-drenched muesli bars at the same time. One in each side of her mouth, she bit down as she typed the finishing touches. The sugar was melting away onto her tongue. She proof-read and sent the email with a final chomp of triumph, but the muesli bars had disappeared.

Later on in the kitchen she stole away an entire box of salted crackers to the narrow-eyed looks of both Sofia and Milo, then stood alone in her room contemplating her painting project from a distance. She looked at her work, then looked at the pinboard of references; the graphite renderings of bodies, instagram models, plus-size instagram models, medical images of slender women set beside overweight women… She loved the way the graphite sketches swept across the page in dark whimful strokes. The sitting female form, elongating, stretching, twisting– Compared with the way the light fell so soft on buttery flesh; smooth creases dividing upper back from hip, the orb-smooth spill of tummies both multi-rolled and singular, the gentle curvature where thigh becomes ass, no matter how fat.

Snacking in on a block of chocolate, she set a pad of scribble paper against the easel. Then she put charcoal against paper and began sketching thumbnail forms, imitating the reference pictures, waiting to feel in her arm the movement of one’s eyes down the curves of the female form.

She wanted to paint someone who was skinny in the lines which you would paint the obese, and she wanted to paint someone who was fat in the lines which you paint the skinny. She wanted to contradict them with each other, so she could see it, feel it. She wanted to feel like that. She wanted to feel real. She wanted to make her own body a work of art. Here, Linda was going to display in colour her own goals.

Some time later, her arm sore and eyes strained, she stood back to survey her practice.

Wherever she was onto something, she realised that the difference between how to draw a chubby, folded leg, and a skinny one, turned out to have the same implicit principles of movement, the same sexual charge, full of strength. The only difference was one seemed closer, more immanent… Wherever she got it wrong, she realised she’d placed a line, or ended of a curve, either too far to one side or too bold. Looking back and forth between her sketches and the reference images, she pretended to have no idea her hand was fondling the squish of her lower roll, moving in a circle around her navel underneath her clothes… She began to wonder about a snack.

***

Late Tuesday morning she swung out of bed highly energised, despite going to bed thick-headed and stiff with bloatedness. Breakfast got her tummy full again, even though she needed more. She’d come back later…

Halfway through doing preparatory work for the presentation she was going to give at the Painter’s Club at uni this evening, the refrigerator called for her soul. Out in the kitchen she saw the backs of Milo and Sofia. The larger one was watching Milo leaning with her elbows on the bench, writing something down, then counting on her fingers, then writing again. Seen from behind, Milo’s torso looked thick. Not more than a month ago, Linda wouldn’t have recognised her flatmate from this angle…

Sofia saw Linda, waved her over. ‘Uh-oh.’ She said, eyes bulging comically.

‘What’re you writing?’ Linda glanced at the paper, but Milo wasn’t about to look up.

‘Equations,’ Milo muttered.

Sofia nodded at the little maths equations being done on the paper, one hand splayed against the huge chunk of her left hip.

And then Linda got lost with her eyes scanning down the flesh-globe of Sofia’s heavy stomach which, if it didn’t bulge out defying gravity the way it did, would otherwise droop into an apron. Usually Linda conceived of people’s gut and lovehandles as being separate things, but something about the form 0f Sofia’s midsection had grown so overcrowded with thick, wobbling fat as to blur the borders between all creases and lines. It was as though, wherever there was backfat, there was upper belly… wherever there were love saddlebags, there were side rolls… wherever there was the massive spillage of gut, there were lovehandles. Linda tried not to look at Sofia’s face too long. Sofia’s pretty, determined face. It was all too impossible– thoroughly unreal. How someone could so proportionately fat as Sofia and still look like an angel seemed answerless. Which was why, after all, Sofia was a model, plus sized everywhere; in her chest, arms, stomach and hips, all the way down her thighs to her knees. Linda forced herself to look at the equation sheet. The stare had gone on too long.

‘What are the equations for?’ Her voice came small and quiet.

‘We’re double-checking this month’s food expenses.’

Milo peered over her shoulder with the superbly acted, down-the-nose stare of an aristocrat bothered by some bootlicker seeking to climb ranks. ‘We have…’ came a slow Welsh gentleman’s accent, ‘encowntered sum measure of an ISSUE…’

‘???’

Milo held the sheet up and explained. ‘Look what we spent on food this month. On average, we usually spend this much.’ She pointed. ‘Look what our combined shopping is for this month.’ She pointed again. ‘We’ve been forking out extra coin for food.’

Linda examined the sheet. She was stunned. They were three times over their usual sending. Her first instinct was to avoid blame. ‘Oh no, look how much Prairie spent last week! That’s the biggest one!’

‘Should ask her about that. Because I don’t remember seeing much of what was on last week’s list. Where did that all go? Who, I might ask, ate it all?’

They all stared at each other, hoping any accusation would be deflected by giving it back. They cancelled each other out within four seconds.

Feeling accused, Linda said, ‘It’s Tjockningfest though.’

‘Oh!’ Sofia giggled, her breasts quaking. ‘It is now?’ Sofia and Milo appeared to share some kind of glance.

Linda frowned. ‘Um. Yeah?’

‘Since when was it Tjockningfest?’ Milo said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, we thought you weren’t doing Tjockningfest.’

Caught out, Linda stalled for a millisecond too long, gone cold in her chest. She felt exposed, and fat, somehow, as if bullies were standing around and threatening to poke her unless she offered up information. ‘But… I’m not.’ So she stuck to her old lie.

Milo just looked at her without the faintest shift in expression.

‘Anyway,’ Sofia diverted, feeling low-key guilty for being malicious, ‘where’s Prairie?’

‘At work, I think?’

‘Okay, so, which was the next biggest shopping trip then?’

Milo scanned the page. ‘Oh fuck. That would be me.’

Sofia snickered.

Which got Milo speaking deadpan all of a sudden. ‘Yeah, well, what’s “bigger”; me or you?’

Sofia sized her roommate up. With her hands splaying across the front of her stomach, she told her, ‘I could suffocate you if I wanted.’

Linda wanted to be outside the radius of this social explosion. She slid away to peek in the fridge.

‘Don’t you go anywhere,’ said Milo, putting the paper down on the bench. ‘This week you and Sofia start your shopping rounds.’

Linda paused. She’d completely forgotten. ‘Yeah, I’m looking now for anything we need from the shops,’ she lied, bent over into the fridge and rummaged around the bottom shelf for ice cream. She felt cold air on her the back of her hips and stood up immediately. Hoping they weren’t looking, she pulled her shirt back down her ass and closed the door. When she turned around, she could have sworn she caught them in the act of glancing away.

‘Why not write on the list like usual?’ Milo wanted to know.

‘Oh yeah,’ Linda pretended to remember. She scooted out the kitchen before her self-dug hole deepened any further. Food would have to wait.

At two in the evening she gathered her presentation materials and walked to the bus. By the time she stepped on board, her jeans had trapped her thighs, and her heart was in a heavy rhythm. She sat down, squirming as the waistband attacked her tummy the moment she bent forward.

Half hour later she was navigating the campus, snacking on one of the chocolate bars she’d stashed in her bag to replenish energy. She had less of this lately. Maybe she wasn’t sleeping enough.

There were people at the Painter’s Club she liked, already, having attended enough times to had evaluated the characteristics of each member. Joanna, the host, was a stately woman of some upper-class background, with antique knowledge to justify it, but with none of the glamour to vilify her. There was Penny. There was “Moonie”, the Chinese expat who professed to paint exclusively in purples. There was George. There was Samuel, a rich-kid collector of rich people’s artwork. Something about the look of evaluation he gave people told her to be wary. There was Nina, who was an experimental artist, which Linda could respect, although she probably stared at Linda the way she did because she liked to swagger around uni in sportswear and had used the gym daily to carve her body all the way down to its barest cords… And others, who preferred to show up at intervals.

She wished Jaimie could be here. Even Jaimie  she wasn’t a painter, it would be fun to have her across the room. They’d take turns to pick snacks from the catering table, and make eye contact with each other, now and again. Linda’s mind drifted to one corner of the room as she wondered about Jaimie’s hips, how she caught glimpses of them here and there, how she was shocked each time, how they were smooth and globular, proud under their own weight.

‘ … and, Linda, I believe you’ve got things to share with us?’ came the toll of Joanna’s voice.

Caught with a biscuit half in her mouth, she sat upright. ‘Ah–’ She collected her materials, pushed her chair back and made her way to the front of the room where she stood by the projector screen. She set up her presentation to a growing mumble of chatter as they all waited. She stood there, with her head directed at the computer screen, oblivious that she might be causing something of a second-hand embarrassment that nobody was ready to confess… While the thickness of her body was nothing to laugh at, on its own, the excusability of its softness was challenged by the statement her waist made. Bare skin could be glimpsed in a thin shaving above her navel, where her shirt met the high waisted jeans, which carried the presence of her lower stomach like a little sail. There were no mirrors in the room for her to see it. Far as she was concerned, all she felt was the snug comfort of her belly against fabric.

She gave her speech, like that, outlining her idea on how to rethink impressionist art from a digital approach… Her hand kept sneaking without permission towards her hip, now and again, to sit upon one plush hip, whereupon feeling a surprising amount of spring, she didn’t to let her words falter. Then she took her hand away, placing it, as if for the last time, on some cold hard object far away from her body. It happened again, and over again. There was no helping it.

She almost shared her current project, but ran out of time.

Thinking about it later, as she sat jostling around on the bus with a chocolate in her hand, she was glad she hadn’t said anything. Her big project was hers. If she spoke about it, then she would have murdered it with her words. She would have described the life out of it. Stripped it of the padding that gave it meaning, like fat encasing a body, and it would have been no more.


***


Next morning wasn’t quite as sunny as the last. The light was coming in through the window a few shades too gloomily, the sunlight throttled by overcast. It was making her soul feel sort of flat… Right now she was placing an order for another custom shirt, with one of her designs on it, one size larger than the first attempt, and she was loving to hate the way it made her feel all tingly and warm in her stomach whenever she remembered how the first one didn’t fit right. She hated that she loved it. She loved that she hated it. She almost got up to try on the old shirt again, just so she could feel it struggle with her body, and so she could fight it back. But she was too irritated to move. Instead she remained seated to finalise the order, with a spoon and a bowl of honey-bombed yogurt, waiting for the sensation of fullness to hit from the inside out. But it never came– not until later.

With the path well and truly paved to another bout of overeating, she was led to the kitchen on an invisible leash. She returned bearing a huge bowl of leftover spaghetti. She sat alone in her room and scarfed it down just in time to catch the bus.

On her way outside, something caught her notice: in the kitchen, Sofia, Prairie and Milo were muttering together. As she passed, making the briefest eye contact with Sofia, everyone shut up immediately.

For now, Linda thought nothing about it. She left through the door.

_

There was a two hour gap between lectures. She waited near the campus gym, watching people pass by with the flame of exercise in their eyes. People of all manners and sizes. The more she looked, the more breathless she felt, suddenly tired, and with each tick-tick of her mind, she was heavier… as though some catastrophic weight were boxing in around her, and wouldn’t let go. She felt it whenever someone looked at her. It was in the accusation of their eyes. Whenever the thought of food came waltzing along, her stomach churned in on itself, unable to decide whether this was hunger or something worse. She wanted to relocate to another spot, away from people. But Jaimie expected her to be here. So Linda looked at the trees instead, at the flat sky, at the paving stones– anywhere but faces.

She’d arrived in an large khaki sweater over a white formal top, its adorable little collar sticking out the top like flower petals. Woollen leggings kept her thighs warm, and she looked beautifully brave in those mid-calf leather boots. Her gaze was brooding, dark– best seen in winter weather, when the gentle grey light comes down to paint her like an angel in disguise, silently concerned about everything she saw in a little soft-lipped pout. She sat there in her elastic-banded clothing, unfeeling of the spread of her thighs, and her ass, which was getting noticeable, if you’d just take another glance there. Nor did she acutely feel the waistband being overstepped by the underside of her pooch, which, without the obscuring crumple of her sweater, would have been the obvious package in her buttoned shirt.

So much for gym-goers; people went by across the campus grounds in quantities of hundreds-per-minute, and a lot of them didn’t so much as know the gym existed. You could see six weeks of Tjockningfest had done something. Linda sat there feeling caught in a nation-wide situation. She wondered what it all meant, that she’d once been so afraid of it. Now, whenever she glimpsed naked fat, she kept imagining how it would feel on her body, to be encased in it. Here, your average person was walking around, having cultivated varying amounts of fat around their waistlines and hips, thanks to nearly forty-two consecutive days of eating, of indulgence, of celebrating the idea of “excess” in all its effects.

One of those people were Jaimie– emerging from the foot traffic was her face, followed by her overfed hips and upper thighs. ‘Hey!’ she called out.

Linda stood and hurried across the path. When they embraced, all grinning and giggly, she sucked in for some reason, afraid she’d brush tummies with her friend. Jaimie was dressed in ever-tightening jeans, and a hoodie that seemed somewhat thin. She knew the bulge of Jaimie’s lovehandles would be obvious, but she tried not to look. For some reason she was desperate her friend’s size would stop creeping up. It seemed like too much to deal with.

Soon they were walking and talking. The autumn sun had assumed its full distance from the world, by now, and with winter bringing fresh waves of cold, the sky was beginning to look permanently bleary. Despite clear skies, there was a chill they both felt sneaking under their clothes. On another note: even under her sweater, Linda kept being reminded, down to the millimetre, that her body could jiggle in various places and various amounts, as she paced along the pavement with her friend. More demanding, though, was the bubbly churning in her empty stomach. It was warping around itself in hunger.

‘Are you feeling hungry?’ she asked, unable to stand it any more.

‘Yeah. You wanna go somewhere?’

They found the underground Food Mall in the city centre, where they sat down at a booth with red, faux-leather seats. They panted together, cheeks all flushed, hot and tingly from the walk. Looking around, they experienced that peculiar anxiety of indecision… You’re in no poverty; you just have so many options you don’t know what to choose.

Over the far side of the mall, a stand had been set up in an open space, and it looked like they were selling some interesting stuff.

‘What’s that?’ Linda pointed.

When Jaimie twisted around to see, Linda stole a cheat-glance at her hips, but couldn’t make out any distinct form thanks to a green parka that concealed her body from the weather and, thankfully, Linda’s eyes. She sort of didn’t want to know her friend was getting wider. She hated the idea.

‘Don’t know,’ Jaimie said about the stall. ‘Haven’t seen it around here before. Should we check it out?’

Standing in line, they read the menu pinned above the cashiers. It seemed like this was a stall specialised in selling takeaway lunch items and “lunch desserts”, whatever that meant.

Linda’s stomach hollowed out into a huge cold cavity as she watched sweet steam rise from cups of potato chips, buckets of chicken wings, hot dogs brimming with sauces, yiros stuffed to the brim, sugary buns, packets of heavy looking doughnuts, soft drinks, passing across the counter into waiting hands. They gave off a thorough, vibrant scent she’d never smelled in her life. Whatever it was, there was a deep void waiting inside her. She was going to fill it.

A few minutes later they slid back into their stool, Linda having purchased a pie, Jaimie a bucket of potato chips, and a box of doughnuts neither of them had been able to resist for “dessert”. They fed their mouths as if famined, felt their stomachs bloat out, hardly caring to conceal them. With the pie inside her, Linda could feel the waistband of her jeggings snuggling into her upper waist. Jaimie fanned her face, face screwed up all achey. ‘Fuck, I fell too warm.’ With that, she twisted uncomfortably as she wrestled her parka off, dumped it besider her, and sat there in her thin blue hoodie.

Cracking open the box of doughnuts, Linda saw the way Jaimie’s hips bulged, and were joined by another bulge: that of her lower stomach. Out of nowhere she felt, once again, that same desperation her friend was not putting on weight, and she didn’t know what for. Regardless, she eyed the doughnuts, and then an urgent need came out of nowhere: she had to minimise Jaimie’s rations.

Dragging the box towards herself, a few lines of small red text on the ingredients sticker snagged her attention. She leaned in closer and inspected the, frankly, psychedelic detail someone had put into this box. Murals of white, grey, and orange twisted around each other in hypnotising fractal swirls, across every surface, a new tapestry of shapes emerging in or out of another. The branding on the box was orange, against grey. Bold letters read: KREEM&MORE™ GLAYZ’D© … Then a chart of ingredients … Hidden away on the side was the small red text: “Property of InsuliNation inc., all rights reserved”. Then below it, some kind of consumer disclaimer:

(!Warning! Attention! Achtung! Waarschuwing! Avvertimento! Výstraha! Προειδοποίηση! 警告! Chemical side-effects may occur in the following forms: nausea, dizziness, bodily irritation, excessive indigestion and/or serious damage to metabolism. Side-effects may occur 48 to 96 hours prior to ingestion. If negative side effects persist, consult doctor. InsuliNation inc. does not hold liability for disclosed effects.)

If Linda or Jaimie were law students, they would have been giving each other looks. But, being part of another faculty meant they just flicked the box open and dug in.

Linda’s first bite sent a shock down the back of her jaws, with sugar-bombed ecstasy. For some reason it went down her throat like soft lead.

‘Auygh,’ Linda stuck out her tongue, ‘oh my god that’s rich. And… heavy.’

Jaimie was currently swallowing a bite of her own, gawking as it hit her. ‘Uff. Wow.’ She blinked hard, working her jaw. ‘You’re right.’

They looked at their doughnuts, half-bitten. Then looked at each other, revelling in some sort of telepathy, where they both understood the desperate hunger they each suffered. ‘But it’s so good,’ said Linda.

‘I kno-o-ow, wha’the fu…?’

Linda opened her mouth and made way for the doughnut again. When it touched her waiting tongue, some vibrant ghost rolled down the back of her tongue, sinking all the way to her stomach, then turned back and beckoned the food to follow. Which it did. She chewed and chewed. She fed her face with what seemed to be an infinite supply of dough, every mouthful like swallowing a dense lump of gorgeous mush, until one pitiful little piece remained between her thumb and forefinger. Nevertheless, she jammed it in her mouth and, despite all her senses being hogged by the pressure in her stomach, she reached for another. It may have taken her over five minutes to eat the second doughnut. Possibly even ten. But there was no real telling, because the effort required to simply consume these doughnuts stole her perception of time away.

Swallowing the last lump of lard, Linda realised Jaimie was only just finishing her first. Linda sat still, immobilised, catastrophically bloated. But over her discomfort, there was some animal instinct at work– one of protection. For reasons unknown, she knew she had to take the last doughnut before Jaimie did. It was for her own good.

Jaimie caught Linda staring, and must have noticed some sort of imploring expression… because she struggled against a mouthful of food and said, ‘You go ahead, I’m struggling too much.’ She screwed up her face, still chewing, and pressed the ball of her wrist into the side of her stomach. ‘M-m-ngh,’ she groaned, ‘what is in these? I feel way too huge. This cannot be possible.’

Linda took the last doughnut and reclined, gasping as she felt her insides warp, giving birth to a blob of gas, rising up her throat. She put her teeth against the thick mush of the doughnut.

‘What in the hell, Lind? It only took one, ugh, I feel like I’ve got five kids inside me, how the hell are you doing that?’

But Linda was no longer here. Her eyes had gone marbly, glazed under total sensory consumption, and she sunk into a kind of slouch. She sat there with her shoulders slack and her neck slumped forward, mouth always open– either to put food past her teeth or gawk at empty space. Across from her, a furrow-browed Jaimie had closed her eyes and leaned back, arms folded over her bloatedness, squeezing herself in hopes that everything inside her might shift into a nicer arrangement. It never did. Both girls could feel it inside them, an unmovable presence forcing itself up against their lungs. Each time she swallowed, it got worse, until she had to take deep breaths. Even then, she was finding it hard to get enough air into her lungs.

‘My god. Lind. Are you doing okay?’

Chewing the final bit with all the drowsiness of a tortoise, she gulped, filled her lungs with air, and collapsed limp as a ragdoll. She was victorious.

For a moment, Linda let herself merely exist. She took small, quick breaths. Like a statue she stared at whatever was in front of her, seeing nothing. She kept trying to expand her diaphragm, but there was no room. She felt squashed in her chest. Her heart was making huge, heavy thumps. She wriggled around to find room for all the food inside her, but all she could do was lean back against cheap hard plastic and arch her lower spine so her gut stuck out, then wonder whether she should be regretting the massive presence of her stomach. It looked so loud. Demanded you see it.

Jaimie looked up and saw the damage with her own eyes. Linda was all upper stomach. Just half an hour before, thick woolen folds had allowed her midriff to disappear, but now it seemed as if that same material held a balloon. All there was to do was look at it. She could just… lean over, her own stomach throbbing with nausea… her balance caught off, so that she had to rest on her elbow, and then… just touch it with the tip of her finger like a pin, and…

Jamie pulled finger came away in surprise. ‘Oh wow.’

Delayed by years, Linda moved one arm to brush away Jaimie’s finger, already retracted. For some reason she felt defensive. ‘What’s “wow”?’ she slurred.

Jaimie’s core muscles tightened as she lowered herself back down. Her stuffed belly choked itself, and pain ripped down her middle. Then a tiny polite burp bubbled out her mouth. ‘Oo, sorry. Fuck.’  She settled, making sure her body was slack. ‘I thought it was just balloon under there,’ she nodded at Linda’s waist, ‘thought it was going to pop.’

‘I think it is.’ Linda quietly grunted.

‘It’s not just a balloon, though.’

‘Wut?’

‘Well, you know. You’ve probably notice you’ve beefed up over the last few weeks…? Just a bit–’

‘What?’ Linda sat forward, shoulders tensing.

‘I’m not saying that–’

‘Have you seen yourself?!’ Linda’s cheeks prickled.

For just a moment, shock wiped Jaimie’s face blank. Eventually her eyes twinkled and she smirked. ‘Yeah?’ A shrug. ‘And so what?’

But in spite of all, it was as if darker thoughts lay hidden– you could see in Jaimie’s eyes that she was only maintaining a carefree act.

Linda changed the topic. ‘What the hell was in those, anyway?’

All Jaimie could do was shake her head. ‘I don’t know if they were the best or the worst doughnuts I ever had in my life.’

‘I think– urm…’ Linda suppressed a burp from coming out. ‘… I don’t know. I just wanna know where the hell you get them.’

‘I’ve never seen them in my life. Perhaps a new brand?’

Together they examined the packaging. They agreed to make a special note of their name, where and when they found them: Kreem&More Glayz’s doughnuts, found around 2:40 pm, in the City Cross food mall.

Hours later, back at uni, she sat through an incredibly uncomfortable lecture by herself. Then she rode home on the bus, got jostled around with her stomach still sore and abused. She was sure damage had been done, somehow. But whatever those doughnuts were, and whatever they contained, Linda was still felt empty. Hunger remained.


***


It was Thursday, and it was her turn to do the shopping run. So far the morning had been consumed by three things: a vague itchiness now and again all over her skin, the unanswered question of the doughnuts, and the recurring desire to swallow food. She was always back and forth from the kitchen, feeling the eyes of her roommates as they followed her passage in and out.

She left for the shops just before midday, borrowing Sofia’s car. But just as she set her foot inside the cab, she thought of chocolate, and it was all downhill from there. Her tongue remembered its taste, and she was yearning for sugary warmth down her throat, down to her stomach, clamping with desire. One foot in the car, one foot out, she swallowed the wateriness in her mouth and wished it was chocolate instead.

She locked the car and went back up.

At the door she paused. She had no good reason to be back here other than food she didn’t need, and she wasn’t about to confess. So, inserting the key, click by soft click, she held her breath and turned the lock by millimeters until she felt the latch slide away. The door opened with the silence of a sigh. She slithered halfway in. Voices from the kitchen made her pause. Milo’s tone caught her ear.

‘No, sorry, I don’t,’ came Milo’s low-register voice, ‘I don’t really see anything there. You’re gonna have to tell me out loud.’

A moment of silence.

Then one of Sofia’s diplomatic interventions. ‘Look, guys, whatever, okay? We all have?’

Milo again. ‘Exactly. For example, I have what is commonly called: a belly, hips, and thighs. So, Prair, what about you?’

‘… fine,’ came Prairie’s high-throated voice. ‘…a belly. I have a tubbly-wubbly tummy. That’s what it is. Have I passed your test?’

‘I mean, that could only be *half* the story–’

Sofia again; ‘Guys, come on, stop poking about it.’

‘Ah-hmm… Exactly,’ from Prairie.

Milo: ‘What are you implying…’

‘Sort it out yourselves.’ Sofia sounded somewhat resigned. ‘Look. It hardly needs saying; we’ve all put on a little too much. So what.’ Then she began chuckling. ‘Hey, look, how about this, you wouldn’t believe it… but I got the on scales this morning, and even I’ve put on some weight. Hard to believe. So what. Either way, maybe we’ve all put on a few too much, you can agree if you want, or not, I don’t care, either way… We had our fun with her. So that means… well, you know what.’

‘I’m bored, just tell me,’ Milo tested.

‘Well, you think what you wanna think, Milo. I for one will keep eating what I want, but I’m just saying–’

‘That we can stop the act,’ Prairie interrupted.

‘Yes.’

‘Cool,’ said Milo. ‘I guess it just ends, then, doesn’t it. Two weeks before the end of Tjockningfest. Cool.’

A moment’s silence.

Then Prairie said, ‘So it’s time to call off all this stupid over eating?’

Sofia lowered her voice on instinct, but Linda still heard her, and what she said seared her memory, burning a hole that she’d never forget: ‘So that includes, you know, Linda too.’

Linda’s eyelids palpitated. Her chest felt cold. She stayed and listened.

‘So yes,’ Sofia said, ‘we did it. We got her to gain something. Showed her it wasn’t so bad. Time to stop now, I guess.’

Milo could barely be heard. ‘To be honest I … almost regret it?’

‘I do too,’ Prairie added. ‘It’s good she finally opened up, but we shouldn’t be, like, forcing her?’

A round of agreement.

‘To be honest,’ she added, ‘I’m not so sure she’s even *that* open to it, still.’

Milo, shocked; ‘What? Are you serious? She’s always–’

‘It’s probably true,’ Sophia interrupted. ‘I know, but that’s only because of us… she still says she isn’t doing Tjockningfest. She’s adamant about it. If she wasn’t around us, she wouldn’t be participating. Sure, she might have rounded out a tiny bit? But that’s because of us, remember.’

Linda’s heart ran cold. And it all crashed together. A prolonged silence froze the entire world. She couldn’t hear the traffic outside. She was cold. She was boiling at the same time. Her jaw had clenched tight. She wanted to burst in and scream. She didn’t even listen to what they said afterwards. She just backed away, let the door latch with an assassin’s finesse, and fled.

She was at the shopping centre half hour later.

Angry, and nervous from rare driving practice, she had buckled up so tight she’d almost suffocated, driven five kilometers under the speed limit, and kept one foot over the brake at all times. Her hands jittered now and then, knuckles pale. When would she get over this old fear of the road? Or was today particularly bad, after what she’d just heard? She felt the naked force of disappointment every time she caught her reflection washing past reflective surfaces, wishing the blurred image could have been her own. But it was stolen. It no longer belonged to her. It belonged to her roommates.

The side of her that indulged, that reached for food, was an imposter. She was an intruder in her own body, and that new body had intruded upon her. She had no idea how to think about this. Which direction was straight thinking?

She found herself sticking close to the walls. She had to fly under the radar. Even now, she noticed bodily jiggles where she never had any. Or did she? Or more. Was that the flesh of her upper back actually moving? The insides of her legs touching? Her butt cheeks taking turns to jiggle…? The nodding motion of her belly…? Were these sensations hers, or was she caught inside something external, imposed upon her real body? She didn’t know what to think anymore.

Then she passed a cafeteria and saw something inside.

Her head spinning, she saw herself in the reflection of her own desire, her own real self.

Among the general bustle of heads, the only things to register was a dating couple. A skinny-fat woman of Iranian appearance sat across from an overweight version of Cristiano Ronaldo if he wasn’t a football legend, absurd as that sounds, both of them with obscene grins. She was leaning across to spoon lemon cake into his mouth. His effeminate hips were a uniform bulge, the shape of his belly’s huge singular fold had nowhere to go but out across his bubble-shaped thighs.

Without asking for it, Linda perceived herself. It was her sitting there. She was fat. The man’s overinflated hips, the fold of his belly’s girth over itself, lunging across his thighs, were her. The dense flesh was all her… Hers to touch, her to own, hers to grip between her fingers and violently knead until it went red-raw. Even now she could feel the weight hugging her, calling her downwards. In that moment, as her heart grew heavy with need, and the warmth of desire came spreading through her, she knew that she wanted it. Want. Want was the only word she could think of. She heard herself think it.

So the moment flashed...

And was gone.

She walked.

Stunned, she entered the supermarket in a ghostlike drift over reflective linoleum tiles. Then there came that strange tingling sensation, again. It’d been growing more aggressive all day, webbing across her skin just when she’d forgotten about it. Once it passed, it left her body feeling different, somehow. With mild colours of anxiety mixing polluting the image of the couple she’d just seen, all of it sent flopping back and forth like a negative image as the echo of her roommates’ voices talked about her… she grabbed a basket, acting as normal as she could. She wove up and down aisles on airt feet. She wanted to sit down and cry. It could’ve been fury, or just giddy excitement. Harder to tell these last few weeks. All she knew was how to reach up and pull items off the shelves. She was addicted to their colours. She wanted to rest a brush against the packages, swipe their brilliant paints and eat it. She wanted to splash it all over her soul. Unfortunately, she had no good idea exactly where her soul was, right now. She might have accidentally swallowed it, for all she knew. Certainly felt like it… But hunger’s teeth had sunk themselves into her stomach, again, and she kept imagining herself immobilised under the greatest belly-ache she’d ever experienced, her stomach so massive she couldn’t get up.

She dumped the fourth consecutive bag of barbeque-flavoured chips into her basket. It tittered uneasy atop of the pile of junk food before slipping off. It smacked onto the floor. As she bent down to pick it up, she felt her knees turn stiff with acute pain. Then a warm presence surprised her by snuggling against the top of her thighs. Her throat tightened. She stood up, cheeks hot and flushed, not entirely from the physical effort. She bit her lip and sucked it. Looked down. Her basket was far too full. She thought, *I wish I was that full, right now.*

But there were groceries to purchase.

She returned to the front of the store to acquire a shopping trolley. Dumping the basketful of junkfood into its new prison, the hairs on the back of her neck fanned with excitement. How fat she was going to get. For a just second, that old friendly buzz come back to life, between her thighs, then she felt… watched. The phantasmal image of her roommates stood behind her, scrutinising her bad choices. People were around her in the market. She felt their presences too close. Eyes cast down, she pushed the trolley to the fruit aisle. Soon enough, boredom snapped her brain away from the task. Looking at all the trees of broccoli, a jiggling belly was the last thing she imagined. But it’s what she suspected was attached to her, right there, beneath her jumper, waiting to be cared for. Or was she imagining it? Was she just fantasizing about a ham-like gut, a wobbly ass, fantasizing so brilliantly that she’d convinced herself she actually had these things? She couldn’t look down. Better not. Not yet.

She still couldn’t inspect her body, not for a few days yet…

Half hour later she stood in line wondering how to get away with this, with so many suspicious items… Pay in cash for junkfood, pay on card for groceries! She loaded groceries onto the counter and daydreamed. Imagined being alone in her room tonight, how bloated and dumb she was going to get. She swiped her card. Avoiding eye contact with anyone, the junkfood came out. Shivers ran up and down her sternum; there was so much junkfood, almost as much as there were groceries. Going weak with guilt, she risked a glance at the checkout worker… but he was simply scanning them through, one by one, labouring away with a bored, dead-eyed stare. She wished he wasn’t there. She wished she could play with her belly. He turned to her and asked how she wanted to pay.

Before she could respond, a shock surge of pins-and-needles rushed in like a bucket of water had been thrown at her. For a moment she felt like a walking blob of TV static. Then the sensation died down, losing momentum as quickly at it came on, vanishing from her arms, legs and head, then lingered elsewhere as if trying to find a home.

Then all that remained was a dull, purring tingle around her waist. The cashier asked again.

Linda blinked and licked her lips. ‘C-cash please…’

‘Kay. Hundred-and-thirty dollars sixty-five, thank you.’

She fumbled a one hundred dollar bill up and out from her purse, was asked for the correct change, fumbled for another note and stood waiting. She took it her change, stashed it, seized the trolley by the handlebar and scooted out of sight.

Back home, she had no idea how to greet her roommates. It had to happen, somehow. When she opened the door, there was nobody home.

She sighed so hard she could have started a hurricane. A suffocating weight she hadn’t even realised was there melted away from her soul, and she breathed again. The air felt vibrant and light. She could fly if she wanted to. She nearly did; zipping with a happy little sing-song attitude, straight to her room, where she dumped six over-stuffed bags of junkfood on her bed. She performed a little pirouette, found herself off-balance, then zipped out into the kitchen to pack away all the household groceries. Vegetables, fruit, bags of flour, detergent, zip-lock bags… Nothing that makes you grow bigger.

When she finished, she stood in the entrance to the kitchen staring at the front door, imagining her roommates coming through. She held in her mind each one by turn. Who even did she resent the most, anymore? The fat mammoth? The rude, previously dainty Swede turned frumpy-bodied bitch? Or the ex-homecoming American birdie turned **-bellied loser? All the way home, she’d been toying with her own tummy under the seatbelt, playing with its buttery squishing sensation, until her skin was raw… while at the same time knowing that each one of her roommates somehow tricked her doing exactly this…

But what Linda felt was real. She knew that. She needed this.

If so, how did her roommates figure into this? Had they turned her into someone else, or had this always been within her, latent as adult teeth? All that pain, just for the next better thing? Why couldn’t she have just known how good it felt to fondle her own blubber, long, long ago, before all this?

Footsteps came from outside the door– her heart twitched. She scampered to her room and stood listening for the door to open. Nothing moved. It did not open.

With an exaggerated sigh, she plopped onto the edge of her bed. She bounced on the springs and looked at her current project. So far a hint of an outline was taking shape. A new batch of samples had been pinned to the study board; images of bodies at various weights, lined up in some vague order, allowing her to study the rate of growth in each part of the body. Which are the zones that smooth out? Which are the parts whose shape becomes exaggerated? Which areas take on entirely new curves? And by how much? The more she thought about it, the lower her eyes started to drift. She kept having to lifting them up, as if a weight was attached to her chin, dragging her gaze downwards. She wanted to see herself so badly. She could hardly remember how she looked a few days ago… Had she gained enough to notice anything? Did anyone see her differently? Her groin flared. Her hand kept creeping down where her eyes wanted to go…  Then again, what if she’d gained nothing? The prospect of failed expectations was enough to smother the heat building inside her. The disappointment was like putting on damp socks on a cold day.

She looked back up at her project. It was time to get cracking. When she stood up in an enthusiastic hurry, she sensed unauthorised movement in her rear, and wondered whether it was wishful thinking.

What wasn’t wishful thinking was her need to eat. She desired food on her tongue. She wanted it on her tongue as she worked. She wanted food to be funnelled into her body, then more food, and more, until it was all too much, and all the food she ate hammered her liver and began turning her body into a larger version of itself. Opening a chocolate bar from her stash and taking up her sketch pencils, she stood before the easel imagining all the food she swallowed depositing in her bowels like trash out the back end of a truck, then doing something… magical… she didn’t know what, precisely, but it was something. Anything. Something fantastical, something hidden, unseen, the causal paths of which you cannot witness, but only find manifested in your flesh grown thick and swollen, fiercely erotic in the way it squished at the barest prod. She knew that’s what was happening now. It had to be. Whatever layer of softness that already laid claim to her body had to be thickening, growing heavy with more of its own substance, until it grew so wobbly you could clutch it and shake it around.

Oh, fuck. She wanted to fall onto the bed and screw herself.

But then a that tingling began again, just around her back, fanning out down her legs, up through her stomach, where it rose in a slow, numb wave up her torso. It evaporated out her arms.

Her heart was thudding. She closed her eyes, trying to scare off the image of a doctor sitting before her in a sterile white chair, asking if she’d ingested anything dangerous lately, or encountered any unclean surfaces, or…

She thought about her breathing instead. She stood there, controlling the way her lungs hoarded and expelled air.

It took some time. But her heart calmed. When she opened her eyes, the world seemed solid, reliable. Everything was in its right place.

She got to work. The tingling came in quiet waves after that, every so often. Less and less. With junkfood always nearby, she found she didn’t have to think about it so much. By dinner time, she’d emptied a bag of chips, worked through two finger buns and cleaned out an entire block of chocolate.

And when they home, she did not exchange a single word with Sofia, Milo or Prairie


***


Friday’s morning shift forced her up earlier than usual, cracking 6:30 am. The only thing to elevate her from damp-hearted misery, from eyes that seemed unable to blink since she’d turned into an automaton, was a thermos of strong, sugar-bombed tea and a handful of biscuits as she sat on the bus wishing she could be under her blankets.

She returned home at midday snacking on a packet of cookies, with the occasional pins and needles sweeping across her skin. Today the problem was only faint as a cloud passing over the sun. If it was gone by tomorrow, she’d stop worrying. Her efforts to study over a bowl of soup kept veering far off track. Despite all the open books and papers, her academic thoughts kept mutating into dreamlike images of Sofia, Milo and Prairie, and she kept picturing them out there beyond her door, only a room or two away, hearing their muffled voices come and go. She thought about everything she’d overhead. She divided. She separated. She dissected and analysed each multi-layered phrase. Then sat upright and squinted out the window. A frown came on with a realisation.

For one thing, it seemed they wanted to stop gaining weight… For another, it seemed they’d done something to trick her. Precisely what magic they wove, she did not know. Her frown relaxed, then redoubled.

So what if they’d awoken something in her? The richness of her life had been increased. What did matter was… well… perhaps it might not be so bad to return the gesture?

A torn-open packet of jam tarts contained yet a few last biscuits. Taking the last few, she put the idea aside for later labour and caught the bus into town.
_

Linda was down in the library when it happened. The silence was so thick it was like she was wearing a space helmet, rendered deaf to the world except for her stupid, cyclic panting. The volume of each breath was obvious to the point of shame, reminding her of a time along ago in preschool when a girl had been teased for failing to run three laps around the field– because of something she now shared in common, but had yet to admit to. Up until now she’d stayed dutifully averted, looking ahead, always ahead.

Hour or so later she stood quietly munching on a protein bar as she flipped through the index of a book in search of specific words. She’d come to uni in a dark red diamond-quilted jacket, zipped up over a striped tee, navy jeggings and chelsea boots– but the snug extra layer was trapping unwanted heat since a warm change had just come through. Feeling damp under her arms, she returned to her study booth, navigating labyrinthine book shelves and open spaces. Unzipping her jacket, dhe put her shoulders back and let it fall down her arms, feeling her shirt shift up along her midriff as it got dragged along. She tugged it back down and wondered what other people saw. The more she wondered, the more her hips swayed as she walked. She couldn’t help it. Oh… fuck. Was this really her now? Was her name still Linda Ellikopa?

Passing a tinted window, she kept her reflection out of sight and sat down in the study booth. It was good to be all alone, in the company only of her headphones, keyboard and the occasional reach for an open container of chocolate drops.

Over the course of time, pressure collected its fury in her pelvis, which she yet again almost mistook for other things. Only once she was absolutely busting to pee did she get up for the restroom. Isolated in her toilet cubicle, she made sure the seat was clean, then turned around, stuck her bum out and popped the button on her jeggings. She felt warmth, soft against the backs of her knuckles as she put her thumbs down the front of her waistband and slid her pants down. When she sat, the width of toilet seat felt different. She could have sworn the sides of her ass came nearer the edge of the seat? Or was the porcelain just cold?

All she wanted to do was look down at herself. Like a good girl, however, she obeyed her self-command to forget about her body, and stared at the door. It was dull grey, plastered with student promotions, events, numbers, memes, the odd sexist remark etched into dull enamel.

The act of pulling her pants up nearly made her squirm; the way the back of the waistband caught under the fold of her ass for a second, because there was only one thing that could have meant.

Emerging from the cubicle, she washed her hands and stared into the sink with too much bottled energy. All she could think of was the band of static around her midriff, the pressure, the way her midriff trembled uneasily when she stepped hard. She shuffled on her heels, just to play with fire. What really killed her, though, was the other green-haired lady in the room. She stood at the entrance on her tippy-toes to pin a poster for some student-run music gig up on the door. When she saw Linda, she politely scooted aside, then made a little ‘o’ with her mouth. ‘Excuse me,’ covering her mouth with two fingers, ‘don’t leave with your fly undone.’

When Linda looked down, her pupils dilated.

Whenever she thinks back on it, the memory returns in dreamlike, suspiciously arranged segments, the only order being a few details that have never faded.

To start with, she saw everything from above. Her belly was fat. Slightly tan, it stuck out proud beneath her breasts. For a moment she thought she was only bloated. The end-tabs of her waistband peaked out, waiting to be united, kept apart by the obnoxious dome of blubber her stomach had become. Her abdominal muscles used to be faintly visible under the right light– they may as well never have existed, now. Her paunch seemed to prefer taking the spotlight by resembling a depressed orb, hogging the available blubber, forcing the rest of her waistline to work around its demands. Right at its centre sank the hypnotising whirl of a belly button, dark, menacingly deep, the only force strong enough to deny the arrogance of bulging chub, which had no choice but to swell around her navel and leaving it behind like a lodestone marking where her midriff used to be.

The sight was too much. Her legs went weak, and a cold fire rushed up into her pelvis. She was anchored to the spot.

Did she say anything? Or did she just blurt a pathetic, ‘Oh…’ ?

She still can’t remember so well.

But she remembers how the girl jutted her lower lip, made a weird sound, then spun around, either unwilling to deal with the awkward situation or just embarrassed.

All Linda could do was run back into the cubicle and fight with herself in private. She had to get the fuck out of here, but her hands kept doing their own thing. Each time she pulled the waistband’s ends together, the back of her thumbs would pinch into the side of her belly, trying to meet  each other, only to squish the blubber between them, and… oh… fuck. There was nothing in the world like the texture of fat. It was too smooth to deal with, and her groin kept clenching, each acute squirt dampening the bottom of her panties. Someone came in. She breathed quickly, silent;y. At last the intruder left, door banging shut. All was silent. She latched the cubicle door and stood there hunched over her pooch, jiggling the package of blubber attached to her belly until drool started creeping down the side of her tongue, as if she wasn’t already damp enough. Never before could she make her belly jiggle just by jamming her finger inside her navel and wiggling it around.

For those who are still skinny and don’t know what it’s like to have your tummy, or any part of you, move on its own accord; just imagine finding your midriff’s layer of skin more or less as it is, except now it’s all pushy, and there’s way more of it, behaving as if it were its own thing, separate from your own body. But strangely enough, it is your body. It’s always been your body. At first it’s as if the real, muscle-and-bones you has been taken over by a foreign organism. But the moment your fingertips come pricking into your new squish, you are suddenly united, forever inseparable, with this strangely smooth, blubbery substance that has come into being. Which is why, when it bounces, you feel that queer little tug as its weight bounces up and down, sometimes side to side. The load clings to you, because it is you.

It took a long time for Linda to get over herself. Her groin was too hot. She was anchored by the pelvis, and didn’t want to leave this safe space, ever. She’d die happy just standing there playing with her weight, hating it, loving it, pushing it back and forth until the world ended, even as she lay there with her hands splayed over her new paunch, flesh oozing up from the gaps between each finger. She was a weirdo. A queer. A female pervert loser, alone in the library toilet room, fiddling with her blubbery gut until she fainted from weariness.

Eventually time must have run out– she can’t remember how long she was in there for. But, even as she snuck out, acting hopelessly casual, she had to fight herself to walk with her hands down at her sides.

She tried to study. It was never going to happen. All she knew was that her tummy had transformed. She could feel it all there, pushing against her clothes. Between collecting her things and the bus ride home, the only memory she has of is one prolonged smear of tension. Although she was in public, never more than one seat away from fellow commuters at any given time, she sat there charged with sex, waiting to get home.

Her left heel was first to hit the pavement, and the shock up her leg sent her thighs wiggling, her abdomen jouncing. When she reached her bedroom, she slammed the door and fell onto her bed in a fury of self-hating masturbation because nobody was home to hear it, making small yelps as she squirmed out of her clothes. Tweaking her painfully stiff nipples, she told herself she was fat, she was lazy, and greedy, and that she was a sad little girl who ate too much all the time. She screwed herself with one hand, and with the other violated every part of her belly and flabby ass that she could find, until her skin was hot, covered in scratches, and rubbed raw.

She ate dinner without speaking, while her roommates sat on the lounge chatting among themselves. She was too full of murder, self-loathing and pleasure, all at once. Her arms were folded over her stomach, closed around the load of food in her stomach like a protective barrier. She ate like she had to reclaim herself from her roommates. In fact, she ate so fast she almost choked on a poorly-swallowed mouthful of mashed spud, to the tight-lipped side glances of her roommates, who were secretly wondering whether they’d taken things too far. Linda recovered and went on scoffing. They’d stolen her from herself, and now she was showing them they’d never really stolen anything at all– only woken something from silent, genital slumber.

All into the night, she tried doing things to stay busy, but kept returning to her body, running her palms up and down every surface, navigating her body’s changes, pushing and prodding every lump, running her fingers through every crease.

You’d think she couldn’t make herself climax for the fourth time, but she did it.


***

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On Saturday morning she opened bleary eyes to have immediate ideas about her body. She rolled over and lifted the covers away, just to be sure. There it was. Her heart jolted. Her belly, swelling up to greet the world, just the way she remembered it, happy and soft. When she sat up, she swore her belly button actually winked at her. Dirty of her, totally filthy, that the first thing to come to mind was masturbation.

Dressing for the day was a slow task; she kept stopping to touch herself, reassuring herself that every bit of flab was still there, evidence of all the times she’d overfed. Thinking back on food, on last night, shame rained down on her soul– eating like that was reckless and obnoxious. Really, she should have been eating like a normal fucking human being. From now on, that’s what she’d have to do, otherwise everyone would know something was up. She didn’t want to give her roommates the satisfaction of knowing they’d well and truly ruined her, and sparked her into new life, all at the same time.

It seemed nobody was home– or were at least hidden in their rooms.

After breakfast she stripped to her underwear and used her phone camera to take photos of herself, comparing them to the old set. Breathing heavily through her nose, she sat on her bed weak-legged. Oh, fuck. Not again. She crossed her legs and traced lines up and down her groin as she flicked through the photos. Seen from the side, the orb of her belly was an outwards bulge, its furthest point, beneath her belly button, reaching just as far as her breasts which looked to have snuck up one size. Further down, she noticed a fold under her ass cheeks where they met the back of her thighs that hadn’t been there before. With no existing muscle to really hold up their shape, they managed to stick out well despite the sag.

The next photoset was from front on. From this point of view she saw what she otherwise couldn’t from above. Sure, just about her entire midriff was hogged by her belly’s spherical shape. Sure, her lovehandles were relatively minimal. Everything her ass lacked in depth was to be found in its width. It was like someone had isolated her thighs and the sides of her ass, then used a bicycle pump to inflate them.

She flicked to the next set of images showing her ass, and sure enough, if you followed the crease of her cheeks from where they traveled out from between her thighs, they pointed like compass needles to a pair of swollen saddlebags. It was strange how smooth they looked. There was not much cellulite to be seen, as if someone had taken her into photoshop and airbrushed dimples out of existence. Leaning to the side and twisting her hips, she looked at her right hip; upon closer inspection there was a faint whisper of cellulite, but she guessed it would vanish the moment she stood up. She grabbed her hip and clutched enough fat to fill her hand, shifting it back and forth, running her hand up and down her thigh. Pupils severely dilated, she sat there in awe of how alien this all felt. Only a week ago she couldn’t do any of this. She used to be slim.

Sofia was the first to show her face, around midday. Linda was in the kitchen hoping nobody would walk in on her pilfering an oversized bowl of yoghurt topped with too much honey, but in she came, huge and domineering. Feeling caught, Linda pretended the yoghurt was nothing but a midday lunch, like any other human being  in the world would be doing. This almost made her feel better, except that it was anything other than lunch, and she was in a way living a lie. If it was “lunch”, then it was lunch on top of a hot chocolate, scrambled eggs, two muffins, a packet of cookies and a bag of Maltesers, eaten in secret.

‘Hi,’ from Sofia, as if nothing was the matter.

‘Morning,’ from Linda, to whom everything was the matter.

Spoon and bowl in hand, she scurried out the kitchen, tail-between-legs, keeping the food close to her as if to conceal it from the pair of eyes she knew was following her out.

She’d hardly sat down to eat her yoghurt before she was out the door again. An email had just informed her that the custom shirt she ordered had been delivered by a weekend courier. Locating the delivery in the foyer downstairs, she returned with the package, and passed Sofia who loafed on the lounge like some whalish chunk of excess weight. The big girl had some difficulty twisting her body around to see what all the movement was. ‘Ooo. That a package?’

‘Yeah,’ Linda said, not wanting much to do with her roommate right now.

‘What is it?’

‘Just a shirt,’ avoiding eye contact and trying to edge towards her bedroom door.

‘Oh cool, one of those custom ones?’

A wordless nod.

Sofia was doing some quick calculations; she knew a few weeks ago Linda got one of those customised shirts, but hadn’t seen it being worn around the place. Either Linda hated how the order turned out, had lied, or… discovered it didn’t fit. With a brief glance at Linda’s body, as of today, she suspected this second piece of clothing might run into the same problems. Then she saw it for the first time. Linda actually had a fully-qualified ** belly now. A purple flowy shirt distorted most of her shape under drapes and folds, but there was no helping the impression of her navel, accompanied by the shallow outline of a bulge eliminating creases as it sought to push forward from the shirt encasing it. And… did was Linda holding her breath in? If so, Sofia thought she knew why.

Eyes going all sly, she turned back round to face the TV.

Linda took the chance. She snuck into her room, shut the door and let her stomach pop back out with a sigh. The bowl of yoghurt still sat by her laptop. She looked down at the package in her arms, then lifted it away to stare down at the top of her belly. She looked back at the yoghurt. Then back at the package. She knew the shirt might not fit again. Only this time, she hoped it wouldn’t, and wondered how to do the most damage. If she slurped all her yoghurt, it’d push her belly out further than it already was. No way it’d fit, then.

Half hour later she was about to vomit from being so full. Even sitting on the bed was uncomfortable. When she tried the shirt on, it sat tucked under her billowing stomach only by clinging skin-tight over what had become into a sore dome. Her first instinct was to rip it off. But she stopped mid-action, and broke out in an obscene grin, almost giggling, as she flattened the fabric back over her tummy. She gave adoring presses with her palm, up and down her belly. The shirt was too good to take off. She liked the way it made her feel disgusting for wanting this. She loved the way it clung all over her, the fabric’s pressure points constantly reminding her where she bulged.

She ate dinner alone in her room, allowing herself to grow so bloated even the sides of her stomach ached. After letting it settle, she walked around the house held prisoner inside her stupidly tight top, but hid herself under an oversized sweater and pants she could hardly raise her knees in they stuck so tight. She would have worn other pants, except those others were just as bad, and her sweat pants would be in the washing machine for a while yet.

Curling into the furthest corner of the lounge adjacent from Sofia’s lounge, she felt the tension between them like magnets trying to escape one another. She could feel it in her temples, not to mention the seam-splitting wedgie she’d forced up her cheeks by drawing her knees up. Her pants didn’t want to allow it. There was nowhere to stretch, and the fabric was pulled so tight over her knees she could feel it branding her skin like cattle. But it felt too good to move.

Then Milo came by and sat down beside Sofia’s bulk, putting her own legs up on the coffee table. Linda stared at Milo’s lazy body and wondered how much weight she’d put on. Her midsection was made of helplessly shapeless flab, distributed so evenly that it left no room for creases or rivets in her top; everything about her waistline wanted to spill, all the way up to her breasts. Short black sweatpants strangled her waist, turning her hips into sloppy looking lovehandles. Milky thighs, left exposed where her shorts ended, were showing the development of cellulite up the sides. She said something to Sofia, absently drumming her thighs, and off they went jiggling happily. Eyes full of judgement, Linda guessed almost forty(-ish?) pounds, roughly?, maybe?, she couldn’t decide, had found their way onto Milo’s frame. It used to be so fairy-like and slight. Now a layer of jiggly adipose tissue had appeared all over it, hiding it away somewhere inside. Sort of like the painting she was working on; the slender body kept safe inside the excessive beauty of its larger self. But did that mean Milo was beautiful, all of a sudden? Maybe. But all Linda felt was disgust, not admiration.

Milo, after a moment of TV-watching silence, met Linda’s spying gaze and spoke up. ‘Hello?’

Linda looked away.

‘Haven’t seen you around the place much lately,’ said Milo, eyes narrowing. ‘You been busy or something?’

Linda scrambled for the first explanation that didn’t involve her sense of betrayal and seething disgust. ‘Well I’m working on something.’

‘Ooo,’ came Sofia, suddenly interested. ‘What is it?’

Feeling fangs emerging from her gums, she flexed her lower jaw as if to bite. ‘Just a painting.’

Sofia’s brows rose. ‘Oh? Would ya show us?’

‘ … ’

‘Kaaay then.’

‘Um. Maybe one day.’ Linda imagined showing them. She saw their faces go slack with confusion, a bit of “what-the-fuck-is-this”, slow realisation, and then, finally, disgust, twisting their faces. She imagined how offended Sofia would get. She’d think it was about her immense bulk. In a way it was? Milo and Prairie would probably think it was some insult, but have no idea to whom. But then they’d look at her twice, wouldn’t they? Linda wasn’t so thin anymore, after all. What would they think about that?

‘Oh sure. When is “one day”?’ Milo said. ‘I gotta write it down in my diary.’

Sofia suggested. ‘Is not finished yet, and all?’

Linda bit her lip. ‘Yeah. Something like that.’ She nodded slowly.

Free-to-air television had reached its 8:00 pm shit-streak, running those shows whose quality you can feel dismantling your prefrontal cortex the longer you leave your eyes glued to the screen. She was just about to reach for the remote when an advert came on and she froze, leaning over her legs, dinner-bloated stomach forcing itself into her lap.

A game show was being advertised in which, four weeks from now, participants would be enduring an extra week of Tjockningfest for hardcores. A Big Brother type competition, where players compete with the singular aim to out-do each other in binges and other obscene challenges. Broadcast across the island nation.

‘So dumb,’ Milo muttered. ‘I love these shows. So lame.’

In an old highlight from a previous year, a contestant sat sobbing in her uniform, dejected, with sauce and crumbs dripping down the left side of her swollen belly, crying that she couldn’t fit it in, while two males and a female kept stuffing their faces. In the next shot, only one guy was left eating, the other two half passed out with their guts stuck out and the camera panning up and away.

‘Looks like pain,’ came Milo again.

Sofia snorted. ‘I can do that, easy.’

Linda looked over at Sofia’s oversized body, and felt the words coming before she had time to kill them; ‘Well why don’t you?’

Sofia shrugged.

A pause.

Then she said, ‘I already did.’

Milo pursed her lips, full of mirth. ‘Wha-at?’

‘Yep,’ nodded Sofia.

‘– when? I don’t remember seeing you on TV ever.’

Sofia’s eyes dipped away to the side, and she shrugged. ‘That’s because you wouldn’t have recognised me, would you?’

‘Christ.’

Sofia’s cheeks turned pink for the briefest flash before she laced her fingers over her truck tire of a stomach and gave it a little rub, smiling sweetly to herself.

When Linda formed the almost impossible image of a slender Sofia, stripped of the blubber-packed body she walked around with now, she tried not to laugh. Then shut up. She wanted to be alone.


***


Sunday morning.

She drifted back into the real world and sat up to a light kiss from her underbelly against her thighs. Discovering herself jiggly all over, she spent half the day eating snacks in secret, studying for all of twenty minutes, working on her painting, eating snacks, snacking between snacks, masturbating with her mouth smothered in the pillow.

Busy mixing paints and testing colours, she came to realise that her palette had been tinted with revenge– shades of red, blood-purples, greys, dark greens, brooding blues. She dabbed her brush in dark maroon and practiced painting bellies, of all shapes and sizes, wondering all the while about her roommates. It was too hard to keep them growing fatter right under their noses. It would require a level of orchestration and genius she simply didn’t have. So unless she spent time, money, and hours of research into hiding some kind of “fattening” formula (if such a thing existed) in their food, there was no way to play that kind of ruse. She knew from eavesdropping that they thought it was time to dial back on binging. That  meant they’d notice any unaccountable changes before she got too far, with their eyes turned down on their bodies and all. She needed a way to make them feel bad for what they did, instead. To make them feel like shit. Guilt was the colour, here.

Narrowing her eyes as she gazed out her window, she imagined superimposing them into her painting. She’d show them the consequences of their own greed, visualised on canvas. Then she frowned, brush faltering in her hand. Painting their bodies would strike the wrong topic… Their bodies weren’t the issue; it was what they’d done to hers.

Then her eyes widened, and she sat straighter as a new idea came squiggling into existence. It rose into definition.

When eavesdropping those few days ago… it was either Milo, or Prairie, who had admitted to an amount of guilt. Knowing Milo, she would have been understating things, meaning she felt worse about it than she admitted. And Prairie had seemed to agree.

Well shit…

Linda suppressed a savage grin. Instead of shaming them directly, she’d set them up to shame themselves.



With no plans for tonight’s Sweets Fest, she threw Jaimie a message, just to get an idea what she was doing. Turned out it was a no-go.

Sorry :( I’m going to a party thing. Sorta “special” I think??? Apparently, anyway. It was invite only. You could ask Baily and co.? I think they said they were going somewhere, you could tag along.

Looking at the stash of junkfood by her bed, Linda shrugged, alone, realising she was happy to spend the night alone, if this was what it meant.


By noon she’d allowed herself to acknowledge the swamp-bogged feeling hanging over her soul, and she sank back into that same old sense that was always there, waiting all this time, whether she acknowledged it or not… She drifted out into the living room, passed the kitchen where Sofia was doing the dishes, and paid a visit to the toilet. As she stood washing her hands, Prairie came in with a towel over her shoulder, the protrusion of her waist jiggling under a pink silk nightie.

‘Hey Lind,’ with her sweet, tilt-headed smile. ‘Just need to use the shower.’

‘Yeah okay,’ from Linda, hardly audible.

Prairie straightened. ‘Linda?’

‘...’

‘Hey, everything alright?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You sure?’

A pause while she dried her hands. ‘No.’

‘Oh, uhm. What’s…?’

Linda looked up at her face in the mirror– she saw her eyes regarding her in return from within faint rings. Oh, shit. Since when had they been there? For the first time, she actually felt her heart drop a little, for real this time. ‘I feel like shit, and,’ she muttered, ‘I think I’m getting fat.’

Prairie didn’t speak, nor move. Linda knew she was about to go all gushy on her with a “you-don’t-look-fat-babe-I-promise”, like she would have with anybody else, but she seemed stuck. Linda watched her turn and hang a towel over the rail, pretending to prepare for the shower even though there was really nothing to prepare for. ‘Oh…’ was all she managed to eventually say.

Loving the way her words still lingered in the open silence, Linda ducked around Prairie and out the bathroom, leaving her roommate to wallow in the sudden odour of her own guilt.



Not long after, Linda’s plans for the night flipped.

She’d been given entry as a plus-one to some rich dude’s loft for Sweets Fest, via Sofia, who “knew certain people” via her insta network. In about half an hour she was to catch an Uber into town. Eyes smoldering with malice for her manipulator, Linda spread her cheeks into a smile anyway, and accepted the offer.

‘Dress code?’ she asked.

‘Don’t know. Smart but creative?’ Then Sofia vanished at the snap of a finger, probably to meet up ahead of time with people only she had the privilege of knowing.

That was hours ago. Now Linda stood in snug underwear, looking down at what lay on her bed and tracing lines up and down her belly with her fingernail. A dark denim skirt was spread out on the sheets. (She’d selected it after finding out that her favourite leather shorts, now discarded in a pile by the dresser, no longer housed her body without cutting off circulation to her waist and thighs, they cut so tight.) It wasn’t as if the denim skirt fit, either… but at least it wouldn’t murder her.

A sleeveless turtleneck, its millions of tiny sequins glittering dull bronze, lay above it.

A short denim jacket sprawled over top.

She knew this outfit choice wasn’t going to work– it would hug her body wrong. But there was little else. And honestly, you might have called this deliberate, by now. She enjoyed it too much.

The sleeveless sequin top was something of a crop top to begin with. If she forced it down, it stop just below her navel, but at the smallest twist in her waist, it slid back up to its resting position like a child who just won’t listen. After much pulling, grabbing, tummy-jiggling, and sucking in as though a gun was pressed to her head, she was finally suffocating in the denim skirt. When she relaxed her stomach, there was no room. Before she knew it, her midriff had nowhere to go except out over the waistband, bulging like a pool floatie. It was weird; while she wasn’t very fat in her upper midriff, it looked so round it resembled its own belly. All that was missing was a navel of its own. The real one was crammed behind fabric. You could tell her belly wanted out, pushing its denim confines flat. With her diaphragm squashed, her lungs had to do all the work, forcing her chest to stick up like some 50’s pin-up model, and it wasn’t long before she found herself a little short of breath. She wondered if this was what it felt like to have asthma.

She tried folding the hem of her top under her bulge, but it never wanted to stay for long. So she let it be, trying not to think about how conscious she was that a thin strip of flesh was left bare. She could feel it, feel the air touching it. She felt semi-naked, halfway exhilarated.

One last look at her painting… She’d reached the stage  where you could make out the shape of a 40+ bmi woman containing her skin-and-bones former self. Smiling, she ducked out into the kitchen, grabbed a chocolate bar to have on the way and waited for the Uber app to notify her a ride was waiting. The moment her phone dinged, she stole one last chocolate bar and took the stairs down, regretting it just about immediately. Two flights of stairs was all she had to take, but her legs met a weight they weren’t used to yet, just enough to feel say hello to her knees each time she came down on her heel. Her outer thighs wiggled. Her tummy tried its best to act like jelly inside its trappings. It was strange to notice her new momentum as she came to the bottom of the stairs, heart thudding, lungs doing some extra work.

When she emerged from the fire exit, she found a silver hatchback idling alongside the curb. The afternoon air was gentle as she walked towards it, promising a comfortably warm night. The window rolled down. She peered in to see a driver of comic appearance offering a friendly wave. Angling slightly to open the door, her skirt grabbed hard to remind her it was there. Its wire-tight strangle nearly choked her as she lowered herself into the passenger seat. She blew air out her mouth and sat up straight to kill a bit of pressure.

‘Hey,’ the driver beamed with one of those sparkly, personable grins Taiwanese lads are known for. ‘I’m Kim!’

‘I’m Linda,’ she said with her lungs.

He seemed to think nothing strange about her– he simply chatted with her in a high, gleeful voice, about work, about study, the latest memes, life… all as Linda occasionally added to the conversation with breathy responses.

What a stupid idea to wear this skirt. Soon as she leaned forward to step out of the car, she felt it constrict her again, probably crushing a kidney or something important. In a way it felt kind of comforting… the sensation of something hugging her, wanting to stay close, and never let go, and it rang the bell of a memory stuck in the lag of time, returning just now after years of absence. She remembered being a little child, safe under her mother’s arm from the social tides of the world. Like that one day she came home from school, having let a part of her die; she was forced to watch as a final note of hope drifted away, severed by that “other girl” with mean eyes and mean words about her weakness. She’d drifted mute, thoughtless and numb through the rest of the day, at some point bobbing up against the warm bed of her mother’s arms, where she’d been waiting to receive her all this time. They wrapped around her, and didn’t let go, and she fell asleep with tears clogging her throat–

‘… yes?’ came her Uber driver.

For a moment everything scattered, her thoughts disarranged by the shock of sudden memory. Her head felt flattened, as if she’d stepped out from some inter-dimensional portal. She bent down to face the Uber driver, a gush of breath escaping her crushed stomach. ‘Ooph. Sorry?’

‘I rated you five stars– ha-ha!’ with a big cheesy smile, ‘thanks for the easy trip! See ya another time!’

‘Oh. That’s okay, I’ll rate you five stars too, thanks!’

She turned around with a small smirk on her lips. The Uber driver’s happy little vibes soothed her. When she looked up, she was dominated immediately. A skyscraper stood over her, impossibly tall. It dared her to challenge.

Empowered by the gravity saddled in her pelvis, goaded onwards by the unbreakable grip of her waistband, she stepped forward.

She gave her name to a sly looking attendant who ticked her off a guest list at a gold and ivory-lined reception desk. Not long after, she was shown into the lift. The attendant tapped some buttons, glanced at her midriff, seemed to think about something, then met her eye with some sort of social manoeuvre that she couldn’t decipher. Then he left. The doors shut.

Alone, she felt herself ascend. All the way up she imagined what would have happened if she took the stairs. She imagined passing out, after hours of slow labour, her knees destroyed, the backs of her legs cramped up, and her body radiating sweaty heat, wishing she could escape from her clothes. Looking down, she opened her denim jacket to sneak a look at her stomach. She saw it, wrapped in bondage. The longer she stared, the higher the lift ascended, the harder it was to keep her hands away from the buckle. She wanted to breathe; even worse she wanted to bust her skirt open, let her potbelly break out and reclaim the semisphere shape it so loved to take.

She drifted away, consumed in a daydream in which she held her head up and sauntered out the lift with her flab on display, jouncing freely for all eyes to turn like compass needles towards a magnet– then the doors actually opened. Exposing her to a suited up guy letting a rake-thin woman hang off his arm, whispering secrets while they waited. Linda realised she’d been playing with her clasp. She jagged her hand away and edged past the couple, the electric fizz of embarrassment coursing through her body.

One glance around, and she knew she was out of place.

Suits, gold watches, tuxedos, long silk dresses draped dreamlike over gym-shaped asses, sparkly hoop earrings, exotic bangles on wrists, elegantized for theatre as they posed holding precious doses of wine. Edging her way around these other-worldly party guests with their moderated laughter, she stuck to a long stretch of wall. She felt shorter than she should have in her low-heeled boots, among women who strutted around giraffe-necked on stilettos. She was trapped back in school, a disempowered young girl hiding in the midst of potential enemies. She tried to focus on something good and nice. The wall beside her became one long stretch of glass paneling from floor to ceiling, and she came up to it, and felt herself set free in the view. Like the paradigmatic Instagram post; caught out in some vulnerable-but-attractive pose, framed by a glass outlook over a milkyway of city lights far below, all stars of dreamed-up yellows, midnight blues, gentle lens flares, and… Even the cheapest camera would have picked up the obscene shape her upper stomach was forced into. She knew it, too.

Had anybody noticed her? Nobody was looking. Probably for good reason. Instinct made her stomach suck in on itself, but it didn’t go far. Her waistband had already done what it could, and this was as good as it was gonna get.

Pulling her cheeks into a flat, humourless smile, she wondered if she might find Sofia. Sudden self-awareness struck her chest. Searching for Sofia would make her look weak and lost, a bubble-bellied little girl clutching for the coattails of a woman larger than her and full of momentum, full of power.

Well, she decided, I’m here now, and I don’t know anyone, and so I won’t even try to.

Holding her shoulders back, she went exploring, thighs rubbing each other inside her skirt. The wall of glass eventually met one adjacent at a right angle, and in this corner sat a long, draped table supporting platters of jello-shots, eclairs, wine bottles, and spirits. A pocket of air opened up inside her stomach through her eyes, expanding, then collapsing in on itself with a deep churning rumble. Defeated by the lack of available calories, she settled for two jello-shots. Raising one in each hand, she tipped her head back, opened her mouth and squeezed the contents out. They fell with a plop into her mouth, and she went to swallow– just as the nose-searing odor of alcohol shot through her sinuses and out her nose. Eyes moist, she nearly gagged. Her tongue started to reject the contents.

They were all going to see her spew.

Eyes bulging, esophagus constricting to protect itself, she forced her throat to swallow against its will. She shivered. The jelly sank in, sliming its way down her throat. She swore she could feel it come to rest deep in her stomach, cold and vile.

Just then a dishearteningly handsome, wealthy-looking young man edged up to the table alongside her. ‘Damn. You’ve got a plan there.’ With a passing glance at her midsection, he began to pour two glasses of wine.

She felt the need to suck in. With that option still unavailable, she threw her social manners in the total opposite direction, as if to intentionally wreck her chances, and pushed her belly out as far as her skirt would allowed. Which still wasn’t much. Making an effort to lean over, she placed the empty shot cups on the tray with a grunt. The guy looked over and made an amused comment. ‘You must really be wanting to fuck yourself up tonight.’

Linda went vacant. ‘Huh?’

‘You know what strength they are, right?’

‘...’

‘Shi-i-it. You know they’re full-strength? You just had two full strength shots of Balkan Vodka. Fuck-all jelly in those things.’

Linda silently watched his face, watching hers.

He shook his head with an half-smile, stooped to retrieve his wine glasses, then turned around and left her alone with the realisation that her head was, in fact, lighter, and the colours of the room fuzzier, and the potential of each moment deeper than it was just moments ago. But she was alone. Alone, and her throat felt like fire, her groin its hearth. Humming to herself, throat tight, she drifted past the table, moved to the window, and looked out across the cityscape. She was alone with herself. For a moment she allowed herself to leave her body, and her eyes travelled with her soul as she roamed out through the open air, across the land, alone, knowing each of the million individual lights and their ground-level narratives involving cars, street signs, pavements and pedestrians. She was a stray cat navigating the unknown, alien night. With her back to the party, she let her fingers touch the slice of upper belly left uncovered between her top and skirt. She pressed gently, finding brief softness, then tender firmness. She was her only friend, here, and nobody looked at her. She was barely here. She ran her fingers up and down her skin, feeling the mathematical shape of each curve, each bend of flesh, wishing she could know more of it. There came a voice from behind her. Like home, in a way– the thought of helped the trajectory of her soul fly gently down, back towards the present. ‘Lindy?’ Only vaguely, the way someone’s mouth moves in your dreams but you hear nothing. ‘No way, it *is* you!’

Sofia’s magnificent bulk came to her mind. Sofia’s smug, all too knowing eyes. Resentment soaked Linda’s heart, heated, in through her open pores. She readied herself to see the girl in all her weight. When she  turned around, she nearly tripped on her own heels.

Jaimie, eyes aglitter like shadowy gems full of glee, hair tossed up in a messy bun, reached out and grabbed Linda’s shoulders. They held each other’s eyes. Jaimie wrapped her into a full-bodied hug. Consumed, Linda froze, then fell into her, melting as their warmth bled into each other through their chests. Standing so close, Linda felt her stomach graze her friend’s. She felt heavy, slug-like– there was a deep tension ringing through her like a deep bell. A shudder crawled up her shoulders, and with a wave of heat rushing into her cheeks, she began to cry. She broke. Her head fell against Jaimie’s shoulder. She tried to say something about being so thankful, so happy, but Jaimie just maintained the embrace, laughing. ‘Don’t be so silly. I had no idea you were here either, until I met your roommate, Sofia is it?, and she told me you were here.’


‘So,’ said Jaimie some time later. They’d found their way onto a stretch of balcony, where they sat down on sun chairs and shared the open night sky. Cool air iced the line of moisture still on her cheek. ‘Tears of happiness, then?’ Jaimie asked.

‘Yes.’ Linda laughed as she sniffed her sinuses back into order. ‘Guess I was just so relieved to see you,’ gesticulating as she explained her behaviour away, ‘I really don’t know why I reacted the way I did, I…’ Then immediately thought of everything, one event by one, the plot points playing themselves out to her observation. Fear, loathing, body image, deception, weight gained, weight lost, muddled sexuality, displacement, watching as her body changed… then finding out she wanted it after all. Echoes of an anguish she never really knew she had came rolling down on her soul, reverberating through her sternum. She didn’t want to cry again.

‘You were standing by the shots table…’ Jaimie observed.

‘Yeah. I was.’ A nervous little laugh. Her abdominal muscles bucked into the violent cut of her waistband.

‘Shots would have done something.’

Linda smiled yes, though she was held back from saying the actual word thanks to the sternum-punching shock her realisations had just left her in.

Secretly, Jaimie had detected a swamp of hidden woes. She read the shadows they cast; Linda’s tensed-up left shoulder, one hand touching her forearm, her heavy slouch… not to mention the way you could see, between the flaps of her denim jacket, the sequin top stopping just short of her skirt, letting flesh escape from between the two pieces. Jaimie killed her smirk; the respect and sympathy she had for Linda needed its own space. The girl was an artist, beneath all her recent bravado– a naturally timid one –and Jaimie’s respect would always sing for the an artist. Best to leave Linda’s pain alone, for now, until a time other than this. One so sensitive as Sweets Fest. ‘How many shots did you have?’ she asked, helping Linda set up her own diversion.

‘Two.’

Jaimie smiled. ‘That would do it.’

Linda laughed easier this time, abdominal muscles tensing against their rope-tight boundary once again.

Slowly her drunkenness shifted away from depression. Once the monsoon-flood of emotion had left her bones, a smile-making energy filled her chest, and she was on her way back to the heights of optimism. Seeing this, Jaime got up and led the way back inside. ‘Follow me, I’ll show you were everyone really is.’

Across the other side of the loft…weaving around suits and dresses…through a set of double doors, Linda followed her into wide open space. Her face fell slack. Nearly the size of a ballroom, the room was lit by chandeliers, carpeted with deep red patterns, and there was so much food you could hardly walk without grazing your hip on a table. Thick with sugar, the air clogged your nose. This is where everyone was at. It seemed like hundreds of people, all congregated into one section of the loft closest to a large bar and an indoor pool space. People of all shapes and sizes, the type Linda knew from the real world, ate and drank and laughed and bent over the balcony rails to projectile-vomit so loud you could hear it above the music from inside. ‘You don’t want to be back there,’ Jaimie snatched two small cakes as they passed a table and offered one to Linda. She bit into her dusted cake, smiling as sugary warmth fizzled along her tongue as they worked through the crowd. ‘Back there is where all the rich people are,’ Jaimie said, her voice contested by nearby yelps of laughter and music. ‘There’s almost two different venues in this place, would you believe it? I think your roommate was over there last time I saw her?’ She pointed across the room, beyond too many heads to count.

‘Yu-ack,’ Linda shook her head until her hair fell across her eyes. ‘Don’t wanna see her.’ She brushed it aside.

Jaimie’s brows sat up. ‘Oh… kay then, come with me, I’ll show you where I was hanging out before.’

They migrated across the floor, with much slow going, pausing, not at all thanks to browsing and picking food as they went, halting to let people by. Such as this guy: Linda froze, a pizza roll held to her mouth. She watched a shockingly large specimen of a man earthquake past on elephant legs, his wrecking-ball stomach swaying side to side, inhumanly massive hips forcing a table to go sliding with a screech of rubber against tiles as his dominant bulk barged between it and a water fountain pumping out what looked like soft drink, pink and thick with froth… Across the far side of the room was a set of double doors, left open for traffic to trickle through. They aimed for them.

Through the entrance, she met a gloom that sank deeper the further they went down the hallway, and then out into a room the size of a night club. Before it got too dark, they were rescued by huge neon-lit panels embedded in the walls and ceiling. It was a sort of statement; whoever owned this place had wealth funneling down their mouth and out their asshole. But that money was what brought such soft indigos, violets, aquas and golds to bloom all over her, gentle as a dream upon the flesh of her arms and legs, as if she walked under water. Her painting-wrist twirled as she looked up and around (as her other hand pushed a custard tart between her lips), tracing the scene upon her imagination’s canvas.

They came to a leather L-shaped sofa near a small bar that served drinks. They had a view on one side out across the city through the windows, while behind the sofa rose another wall of glass separating them from an indoor pool area where guests in bathing suits paddled along, performed elaborate dives, stood around chatting over glasses of alcohol, and… Jaimie sat down, Linda fell backwards onto leather with a burst of breath as her skirt wrenched her diaphragm in half. Sighing, she reclined against the sofa, then got a better idea and sat up, grunting slightly. She performed a 360 degree look-around with her head; everywhere she looked she saw money. Possibly she’d devalued the sofa by sitting on it. Around a mouthful of custard tart, she said, ‘Does this guy own the entire floor, or some shit?’

‘I’m not sure, but whoever it is, they have more food than I can eat. Fuck.’ And slapped her stomach.

Linda tried not to look. She lowered herself down and relaxed, trying to think of something else. Out the corner of her eye she observed her friend. ‘Omigod love your dress!’ escaped her mouth.

‘Oh you noticed?’ Jaimie grinned, twisting in her seat to show off. ‘Slightly tight, though.’ She patted her sides, thought about something, then shrugged.

Without tears in her eyes, Linda saw her friend clearly for the first time tonight; the poet had shown up in a white & black body con dress with sleeves flared at the wrist, and a little gold locket. The trinket seemed to point downwards, and Linda made the mistake of letting her eyes follow. When she saw Jaimie’s lower half, her heart sank so low it just about fell out her asshole… Inside the lower end of her dress, two swollen thighs bulged. They were weighed down upon by an even larger burden; Jaimie’s lovehandles were blobs, full of fat, their globular presence hogging all the fabric available. All wanted nothing but to take up space, ballooning out against her dress. Couched between them was a funny little paunch that honestly looked kind of dwarfed, frightened into a corner by the twin giants who’d bullied it into insignificance. Having stared too long, Linda realised that nowhere in the lower half of Jaimie’s dress was free from the stress-creases her hips simultaneously caused and eliminated.

She dragged her eyes away, GI tract pulling itself into a knot with the sly old, low-key seething sensation that came into her once again; all the disgust you could pool together in the world. She wanted to stand up and tell her friend to pull herself together, stop eating so much, go for a hard sweaty run and shed her weight. Look at your body, she would say, Look how big your sides are, How the hell do you even manage that so quick? Uh, that’d be right, eating too much, Because all you’d do is eat, Stuff your face when your body doesn’t need it, You’re not even hungry and somehow you’re still cramming shit into your mouth then letting it all turn to fat, Who the fuck even does that?

‘I got this dress from a second-hand shop,’ Jaimie said, in real life, after a time. ‘Would you believe it?’

Linda blinked. She forced a surprise smile. ‘Oh wow.’ Then her thoughts turned self-wards. She looked down, glimpsed the dull bronze glimmer of sequins below her peripheral vision. A stage play of thoughts about the quality of her outfit squashed her heart under its own weight. ‘I look shit compared,’ she half slurred without meaning to. Punishment for the disgust she just felt for Jaimie. ‘Everyone here’s dressed formal, I’m just here in some trashy top and denim shit I can’t even fucking wear–’

A caterer came along with a tray of wine. Jaimie accepted the offer, and two glasses of red were poured for the them. Linda regarded her glass with a sneer, then raised it near her lips. The odor was like fire up her nasal passage, and she wondered if it would cause her to put on any weight. She sipped.

‘Stop being a bitch to yourself,’ Jaimie returned to the topic. ‘You look awesome.’

‘I’m not being a bitch to myself.’

‘Yes you are.’

‘Nope.’

‘No. You’re not. What you’re being is a – get ready for it –  See. You. En. Tee. To yourself. A nasty, mean little cunt, Cunt with a capital C. Look, lind, imagine someone right now just comes up and says to you what you’re saying about yourself.’

‘Yeah,’ she took another sip, wincing, ‘becuz I’m fat.’

‘No you’re not–’

‘Fuck you, don’t lie.’

Jaimie’s eyes flashed. She leaned in, dangerously close to laughing. ‘Hel-lo!’

Linda deflated in on herself. ‘Sorry. Not my fault. Yes it is.’ Another sip, the alcohol like cold fire inside her. ‘No, wait, it isn’t. Well it is… It’s just that it isn’t.’ She sighed, shoulders slumping. ‘Do you believe anything I say?’ Then, thinking of the jello shots, she mumbled, ‘I feel funny.’

Jaimie stared at her. ‘Okay. Fine. Honesty has come zipping in, loud and all obvious like, so I’ll just take it up. You ready?’

Linda shook her head no. ‘Yes.’

‘It is a pretty obvious roll you have there.’ A smirk tested Jaimie’s lips. ‘Skirt looks pretty tight, too. It would be reasonable to think if you loosened it,’ her smirk struggled to become a smile, ‘there’d be something causing it?’ She fell into laughter, then shut up and took a sip of her wine, eyes full of glee. ‘But honestly, that’s all there is.’ She shrugged. ‘You can’t call it fat, though. That’s just an insult to actual fat people.’ Then Jaimie met her eyes. ‘And I’m being serious.’

‘Awww fuck…’ Linda drawled over her wine. ‘It’s true isn’t it.’ She slouched, face growing heavy. ‘It’s the truest thing ever?’

‘Hmm. You’re never like this…’

Then, who should appear out of nowhere but a plump, olive-skinned brunette, smiling at them out of silver-linered hazel eyes.

Jaimie beamed up at the newcomer. ‘Hey, you’re back!’

It was Jaimie’s cousin, Valeria. The one whom, Linda remembered all of a sudden, had been there way back on the first night of Tjockningfest– that time Jaimie had guilted her into displaying her food baby. Her belly hadn’t been like this, back then…

For a moment she almost curled her arms around herself.

Valeria sat down next to Jaimie with a sort of heavy plop, draping one smooth arm around her cousin’s shoulder as she nibbled on a block of icecream. She handed them one each and they spent time re-introducing each other and fed their faces. Soon, a stupid amount of sugary food was being literally chauffeured to them by a waiter.

‘Is this your fault?’ Jaimie asked.

Her cousin cast her eyelashes down and shrugged.

Perhaps it was only her wine-goggles, but Linda remembered Valeria looked lighter than this. Certainly, her round hazel eyes, patiently observing from within her elegant wide olive face, seemed to store secrets– and it could have been her bone structure – but… She had that certain, undeniable bodily presence in the way she sat. That gravitational vibe which only extra bodily weight can give you. ‘So,’ said Valeria, opening up to Linda, ‘how do you know Benson?’

Linda quickly swallowed what was her third chocolate brownie in five minutes. ‘Sorry, who?’

‘The owner… He owns this place…’

Jaimie intervened, ‘Linda was invited here by Sofia as a plus one.’

‘Oooooh!, I know her.’ Her eyes sparkled. ‘She’s so lovely.’

Yeah, thought Linda, So lovely she twisted me up. ‘We’re roommates,’ she sipped her wine. ‘She invited me here.’

‘Oh that’s so nice.’

‘Yeah I guess. Maybe she just felt sorry for me.’ Another sip.

‘You “guess”?’

Jaimie interjected again; ‘You’re just hungry, and **. Mostly **. Here, take this.’ She spun around and reached for the huge tray of junkfood beside the couch. Taking a milkshake and plopping a straw in, she handed it across to Linda. She took it, and without thinking, went to tip it back wholesale down her throat. She stopped mid-action, lowered it and stared at it like a bullet that’d narrowly missed her skull.

‘I love your outfit,’ Valeria crooned after a silence.

‘Thanks, but you don’t have to lie.’

Valeria frowned half bemused..

‘Drink!’ Jaimie laughed.

‘No.’

‘And why?’

‘Fat stuff happens.’

God damn, she wanted to drink it and feel fat again.

‘And why is that a bad thing?’

She wanted to drink it, then pile so much food on top that her liver gave in. ‘Because fat is ugly,’ she philosophised, ‘and people agree to hate it. It’s unaesthetic. No one wants so much as to *look* at it,’ she scoffed, coming close to spilling the beans. ‘You can’t even *paint* it.’

‘Really?’ Jaimie tilted her face and scrunched it up doubtfully. ‘I don’t think so. Muscle and bones; too paranoid about starvation, too… brutal. Too many angry angles. Better to be soft. There’s something nicer about softness don’t you think? It’s gentle, and there’s more of it… and it’s got a smooth texture like nothing else in the world has.’

Linda listened with her brows raised, mouth creaking open. She’d never heard it described that way before. ‘Do you… really think that.’

Jaimie angled her head to the side with a shrug. ‘Yeah…?’ like she’d been asked if today was Sunday. ‘I wouldn’t have thought that was too hard to understand…? Maybe I’m talking out the throat of a wine-muse. Shoo! Go away! No, of course I think that.’

Valeria leaned aside to grab a block of chocolate. ‘I’ll remember you said so. When it appears in a poem one day, I’ll know where it came from.’

Jaimie did a happy little dance in her seat and popped chocolates into her mouth. Then looked over at Linda. Narrowed her eyes. ‘Doing alright?’

‘Yeah,’ she said with the top of her lungs.

‘You look puffed out,’ Valeria frowned.

You could tell she was breathing with her chest. ‘No I’m fine.’ Another sip of wine, and her head went whistling up into the clouds.

‘If you’re fine like that,’ said Jaimie, ‘then I’m the one who owns this entire skyscraper. Undo your stupid skirt or you’re gonna suffocate yourself.’

‘Whut?’ another sip, another rush.

Valeria chuckled. ‘I’d do it, if I were you. No shame. Had to do it myself a million of times.’

‘...’ Linda sipped again, scrunched her face as she twirled the disappointing dregs of liquid left at the bottom.

‘God sakes, Lindy, why are we still doing this?’ Jaimie said, thinking the alcohol could allow her to get through to her at some deeper, unguarded level. ‘I remember before Tjockningfest even started, you treated the topic like we were talking about the death penalty.’

‘Y-yeh but–’

‘Fine, don’t give yourself any slack, but you’ll have to eventually. Count on it.’

‘Okay, MOTHER.’ She tried her best to lean back, but the walls of her stomach were under too much pressure with all the food forcing it out while her skirt pushed back on it with a firm “no”. She sat there, being slowly crushed. It’s possible, isn’t it, that one needs to hate oneself  in order to do these sorts of things to yourself, on purpose.

Some time later her stomach walls were feeling sore and abused. Aches shot themselves up and down her abdomen. It took an entire block of chocolate, a glass of wine, a bowl of jelly b**s, almost an entire 1.5 litre diet coke, another glass of wine and about five more brownies before nausea crept through her insides, looking for a way out. And her bladder, hard as a rock, was getting ready to burst.

‘Escyuse mee,’ she slathered, thinking she sounded posh, and leaned up. She had to try twice. The waistband squashed a pocket of gas from inside her, and she growled out an airy burp to the snickering of Jaimie and Valeria. Finally standing up, she stood higher than Jaimie and her cousin, and felt proud. She levitated upon some astral material that sent her wavering forwards to the sound of dimly-perceived laughter. She heard a, ‘Bathroom’s that way,’ and a hand pointed across the room. When she moved forward, she had to carry a huge load. It felt good. She wanted to cradle it like a child. She carried it past glass walls, shimmering pools, coloured like a memory, and suddenly she was sitting on a toilet with her skirt down around her knees and a violent stream escaping from her groin. The room was bright with white tiles, and her eyes throbbed. Then she was standing up again, and she hit the wall with her shoulder. She fought with her body, trying to tuck her belly back inside the skirt. It was naughty. It moved around everywhere but wouldn’t go back in. There was too much to go back inside the denim, so she got the great idea to stretch the denim. But the denim wouldn’t stretch. She grabbed her uncooperative flesh and it jiggled at her, squishing and shifting everywhere but but back inside. She let it go with a grumble, and sounded like a gurgling sink. Her skirt sat stuck against her hips, hopelessly open over her belly. She floor swam all happy. Then she was at the glass walls again, looking into the indoor pool area. She got lost staring at the alien aqua light of the water wriggling a million light spiders upon the ceiling, and she put her finger against the glass so she could paint them. She giggled as she painted. It was like her painting coming to life. She heard someone else’s voice.

Jaimie came up laughing as her potbellied friend stood with her skirt busted open just as she’d predicted. Linda looked over with one finger pressed against the glass, an anesthetized slackness in her face. She held out her arm. ‘Come here, miss artist.’

Linda let herself be guided by the hand, feeling the warmth of their palms melting into each other, every step jolting her paunch into a jiggle, slowly approaching her place of judgement. When she fell backwards into the sofa, nobody chose to say anything; her chubby belly sought its freedom of expression, and found it by resuming its blob shape where it could between the open denim. Having sat again, Linda felt tickled and radiant. A slew of giggling rose from her, drawing her knees up.

Suddenly everyone looked up. It was Sofia with some dude, politely making way for a moving group of people as she came towards them. Linda dropped her knees and shut up. She went to cover her waist, but all she could do was freeze up.

Valeria shifted aside to make for Sofia room on the long end, which sank as it took the punishment her weight brought down. The guy fetched a stool and brought it up alongside. There were hey’s and hi’s all round, but as they got chatting among themselves, all Linda could think about was Sofia’s largeness. Every time she tried to chat, she would get distracted by Sofia adjusting her body to be comfortable under its own weight. Her hair, strung in a high ponytail, fanned down around her swollen shoulders and upper arms like sausages squashed in against her sides. Her body would shake whenever she shifted, until finally she found a comfortable sitting position. The uncontainable overhang of her heavy gut lay cradled in her lap like a round pile of dough, and her breasts, burdened by their own shape, only added to the load. Linda stared at a team of stretch marks trailing down a handspan of her upper stomach fat left naked in the opening between a flowy midriff skirt and a knitted crop sweater. She wanted to lay her palm against the wall of flesh and feel it sink away, swallowed by oozing flesh.

Linda shrank inwards. She could feel whatever roundness she thought she had thinning under the shadow of Sofia’s immensity. Suddenly she was no longer fat. Expecting to feel better about herself, she met instead a cold shock when her heart launched into nothing but an abyss of emotional limbo where, for some reason, disappointment was reaching for her soul. Here she was, with her bit of belly flab jutting out from between flaps… Over there was Jaimie, with almost comically bulbous lovehandles forcing her dress to pull tight across her waist… There was Valeria, who had a strange way of looking bigger, but keep you second guessing… And then there was Sofia, who outplayed them in every category, her body parts having taken on so much fat it’d take years of punishing your digestive tract to even think about matching her shape. Linda beheld her dominance, and shriveled before it.

She felt small, but even worse, she felt insignificant.

But the words came to her; “too much food makes you fat.”

Looking around for the nearest, biggest thing, she spotted her prize. She mumbled something like, ‘Gimmy that,’ waving her arm at a dish of apple crumble. A cold pocket of air bloomed in her stomach, then collapsed on itself with an animal gurgle.

Seeing what she wanted, the three girls lifted their arms in a tipsy cheer, and without further ado passed the dish of apple crumble along. She put  it on her lap, drinking the heat it sent through her thighs, and proceeded to feed herself stupid. She didn’t ask for a spoon or fork. Nor did she listen to a word anyone said. She dug her fingers into the warm mush, clawing clumps into her mouth and sucking them in, getting sauce in the corners of her lips, and then swallowing, even as it pumped her stomach stealthily larger each time her throat did its job.

Time spun forwards on its moonlight axis, and a drawn-out sequence of events went by. Images happened to her, one by one, and she sort of phased out of memory. Her friends told her it was the wine. What they didn’t mention was her flesh ** of a belly billowing out, pregnant with food. Without knowing how she got there, she’d ended up wandering around a theme park a few blocks outside the loft, following Jaimie’s bubble-shaped hips like a lost puppy. Sofia was no longer around, and Valeria had wandered off with a couple of randoms– leaving Linda alone with her friend. Jaimie kept having to catch her food-dazed friend from falling whenever she staggered with the weight she carried in her middle. They found a fairy floss stand, and Jaimie sat her down to consume fluffy sugar. She waited, patient as a nun, until she sobered up.

By the time Linda came cross-fading back into sapience, what she found in her hand was a bare stick. She sat there for a long time, contemplating the object, twiddling it in her fingers, somewhat confused. She could feel nausea trying to rise up and down her throat. Carrying so much food, her stomach felt like a bubbling swamp.

They were in an open area full of benches between various food stalls, with a view towards the walkway and rides lining the path. People, couples, groups of friends, parents with children passed by holding ice creams and bags of lollies, all watched over by angelic rainbow bulbs of light, and an ambience of otherworldly joy, high screams thrilling into the night as spinning carriages went wheeling through the air.

Jaimie left for a minute. Linda sat alone in total, bloated peace, drinking the breeze through her skin (and her belly, exposed, feeling the need to palm it like dough). Then Jaimie came back with two large soft drinks and a supersized bag of jelly snakes. They sat in each other’s company sipping through straws, sharing from the bag and watching people pass by. They would stared at Linda’s unclasped skirt, and she’d stare back.

After a time, Jaimie spoke up softly, ‘Remember those doughnuts we had?’

‘You mean the ones at the food mall?’ her mouth felt gross and dry, and her left temple had started to pulsate.

‘That I do.’

‘Yeah, I remember.’ She nibbled her straw. ‘Why?’

‘Well I was doing some research.’

Linda’s ears pricked.

Turned out Jaimie really had been doing some digging. Apparently the only way to buy them was off the darkweb, and people used them for “dirty-bulking”, a term used by bodybuilders who allowed themselves to gain body fat for a period of time before they losing it all, then gain it back as muscle. These doughnuts, however, were instilled with an unheard-of formula, which in the right doses can make you gain, quote, “shit tons of weight” in one bite. At least according to people on the internet. The doughnuts, and other food items like them, have been located here and there around the world. It’s just that nobody seems to know where it comes from. Jaimie had spent hours reading random threads, with no apparent linkage, in which users of all kinds claimed that eating the doughnuts had made them gain unwanted weight scarily fast.

Jaimie told her this with a sort of soft-spoken, sensitive air about her, as if something about this was bad news.

Linda dipped her fingers into the bag and stuck a handful of jelly snakes in her mouth. ‘Pff,’ she said through a mouthful, ‘that’s the most made up thing I’ve ever heard.’

‘How can you be so sure?’ Jaimie had her face cast down, and was absentmindedly toying with one of her lovehandles. Linda watched a finger sink into the fabric and vanish, swallowed by flesh.

‘Uh.’ She looked away, and came up with no better retort than, ‘How can *you* be so sure?’

Jaimie threw a numb stare at her. ‘I wouldn’t have thought it was so hard to believe. Do you not remember what it was like eating those things? How heavy they felt, for how small they were? How difficult they were to eat? Purely laborious.’

‘I guess,’ she deflected, putting another handful of jelly snakes past her lips.

‘And,’ Jaimie suggested with her eyes cast aside, ‘wouldn’t you say so, too?’

Urged to suck her stomach flat again, it was still impossibile. She said, ‘No, why?’

Jaimie was staring at her like she wasn’t there. Then the lightest brush-stroke of amusement came into her eyes. She blinked slowly, looked away. ‘Aaaaaand we’re back to square one again.’

‘What.’

Jaimie gave a bored shrug. ‘Nothing.’

They sat in silence for a while, sipping and munching. Then Jaimie took a breath and slapped her knees. ‘Let’s go on a ride!’

And with that, they were on a machine comprised of carriages that spun in the opposite direction to the arms holding each carriage, hurtling you in an all-directions-at-once. Linda’s stomach was gearing up to implode. Her eyes couldn’t stay in one spot, and whenever she saw Jaimie across from her, the girl had this sado-masochistic thrill in her eyes, even as she looked ready to vomit as well. Each outwards swing of their carriage sent them careening through space, before throwing them back into G-forces that took Linda’s stomach and heaved its contents against the walls. At times she thought the weight inside her was going to send her flying out the seat. But never did. She just sat there and let herself get thrown around, regretting just about every choice leading up to this moment.

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After waking up through the usual head-throb routine that comes with a night of binging, Linda emerged from the shower feeling fresh and steamy in nothing but her underwear and a towel wrapped around her chest, her buttery hips and wobbly paunch left exposed– only to have some grown-ass man pass by on his way back from the kitchen, down the hallway towards Prairie’s room, scaring the ever-living-shit out of her. A bolt of fright travelled down her spine, clenching her pelvis. The man’s eyes twitched down, saw what they shouldn’t have. He pulled them back up the moment as he realised what he’d done. Regret erupted all over his face. He ducked his head with a *whoopsy sorry* sort of grimace and hurried along.

Ten minutes later, Milo and Linda sat at the table waiting for Prairie to emerge from the hallway.

‘What the fuck?’ Milo waved her arm at their roommate the minute she sauntered, casual as ever, from her room.

Coming to a stop with a frown, and flutter of eyelashes, Prairie went, ‘What’s what?’

‘That!’ Milo gestured angrily.

Prairie glanced over her shoulder.

‘That guy,’ Linda made to explain. Then she saw a chance to let her emotions simmer. ‘I come out the shower, and see some fucking rando walking around, and I’m like, half dressed? feeling like a fat, ugly fuck?’

Prairie’s eyes flashed. The eye-contact lingered, before slipping away again– but it was all Linda needed to catch the flitter of red-handed guilt which Prairie so quickly tried to hide.

‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ Linda added after some silence.

‘I–’

Who should emerge, then, to stand just behind Prairie, but the lad in question, shoulders bunched up apologetically, about to raise his hands in defence. ‘Okay,’ he flashed dark eyes at his might-be-lover, then her roommates, ‘I’m really sorry– she told me she told you I was… I thought everyone knew I was here…’

Milo’s eyes and mouth stretched open like a clown.

Everyone looked at Prairie. She was busy chewing her top lip whilst staring vaguely at nothing in particular. As though she forgot to lock the door, she shrugged and turned aside. ‘I forgot! I’m sorry.’


Well it’s not exactly like “sorry” fixed things– but where else are you left to go from there? They left the matter alone with an apology and tentatively avoided each other for the time being, circumnavigating the empty zone between them as they waited for the vapour of awkwardness to make its exit. Later on, as Linda worked on her painting which she’d decided to name “Fat/Thin/Fat” for the time being, she snacked on a little too much food and got lost wondering if her roommates would keep getting fatter as well. As much as they kept eating, they seemed ready to stop. How long could this go on for, realistically?


* * *


Tuesday’s vibe was weird, all over the place. The more she thought about it, she started to understand why.

Week seven of Tjockningfest had taken the nation by surprise. Still seemed to them as if the ride had only just begun. As Södrahem turned aside to collectively contemplate, hindsight was quick to sink in. They lowered their eyes, not in prayer, but introspection, stealthily looking down at slipped-up shirts, at belly buttons shown by accident, at flashes of bare skin that we usually keep private, a display of roundly smooth flesh that wasn’t there six weeks past.

Most of people Linda knew were bigger, now, even if only slightly. Her uni friends’ complexions looked swollen when she compared them to her mental image of the past. Though there’s a difference between “soft” and “overweight”, you can still tell when someone athletic suddenly softens. It’s subtle. But they appear to take up more space than they once did. You can’t quite tell why but… then you see it.

Prairie’s belly was finally refusing containment. It was either long skirts pulled tight around her midsection as plastic wrap, or tops two inches too short to cover her lower belly. There was no in between. Milo’s body had filled out evenly into this sausage-thick form, with no muscle-mass to shape her proportions. Even Sofia looked bigger. (Somehow.) Despite all the size of her body, it was like there was more of her than before. Already distortedly large, her beanbag of a stomach had undergone an eye-popping growth spurt. With no room left to take up on her frame, the additional fat had to share with its neighbours, her lovehandles. They had grown so large by now that they resembled potbellies of their own, heavy upon each side of her hip. Linda couldn’t stop wondering what it would be like living with all that weight. Would you find ways to cope? Would you grow strong to match it? Or would the weight drag you down, by the hour, until you collapsed under the burden of your own flesh?

She took the question to the canvas and worked on her painting. The shape of the thin woman at the center emerged in thick, curved lines, giving her a sort of melting appearance, the paint too thick for a frame so meek. The woman was faceless. Soon she’d be almost formless, painted like the mere memory of an angel. Then Linda was wondering, again… what would it be like to let your body to grow so large that its own weight displaced it? She placed the pencil on the canvas and began sketching her vision. Playing with the bulge of fat glopped over her abdominal muscles, she used her imagination to extrapolate. But it was strange. No matter how hard she tried, she only ever got so far in her mind. The only way to answer her question would be to keep eating. She squinted her eyes. The fatter she grew, the heavier her roommates’ guilt.

Thai takeout was for dinner; Sofia’s shout. They were sitting on the lounges, watching the news and shitty late-night game shows. Linda was curled with her knees up, eating to get fat… Then she stopped all of a sudden. She was trapped like an animal between the pleasure of eating and indignity among her peers. They had manipulated her, remember. This had to end. It was time to make her first move. She turned the plastic fork upside down and began poking her food with distaste.

After a while, Sofia observed Linda’s behaviour from across the coffee table. ‘What’s up? Is your food off?’

Linda glanced up. ‘Wah? No.’

‘What’s the matter then?’

‘Never mind.’

‘ … ’

Milo gave Linda side-eyes from where she sat beside Sofia.

To Linda’s left, Prairie seemed oblivious for a moment, eyes stuck on the TV.

‘I don’t really want to eat,’ Linda said.

‘Ah damn,’ grated Milo. ‘Why the sudden “not”?’

Prairie finally turned her head.

Linda made a show of shrugging. She leaned forward, grunting as her stomach ran out of room to bunch up behind her thighs. Dropping the container of Thai noodles on the table, she sat back, folded her arms and brought her knees up. She said, ‘Just because.’

Milo made a surprised face. ‘Oh, shit, yeah, I forgot that “because” is an answer. It contains everything. We just have to do all the work. Sorry about that, I’ll remember it next time, I promise.’

Sofia had the strangest expression. It was almost amusement, dawning slow as a tortoise. ‘So… why not?’ she pressed.

‘I shouldn’t eat too much,’ Linda muttered.

Then Milo in total shock. Her head turned from one girl to the other, looking with a point at their fluffed-up bodies, then down at her own collection of chub ringing her waistline. ‘Oh, really? You shouldn’t eat so much. Well, okay.’

‘Because it’s embarrassing, okay?’ Linda pouted, then burst out, ‘When I was at the shops, some kid pointed at me, called me fat, and I felt like shit.’ And pressed on with the lie. ‘That’s why I’m not eating.’

‘What? When the hell were you at the shops?’

Linda nearly stuttered. ‘Last week.’

‘Oh…’ You could see Milo’s eyes lose focus. She turned aside and went quiet. She’d fallen for it.

Prairie had turned away also.

There came a massive silence, that kind of silence during which you can sense everyone searching for some other topic, before the clay goes too hard to be reshaped. Only Sofia was still looking at her, suppressing a perplexed smirk. Linda broke away before she revealed anything through her eyes by accident.


When she went to bed, hours later, she felt drained. It felt like half of her energy had vanished into her own lie. Sure, she could deny things. But fabricating entire events was something new. And it didn’t even feel that great to make shit up.

A bag of salted pretzels in bed saw her to sleep. Her belly, pregnant in appearance, lay out across her sheets.


* * *


On Wednesday morning Jaimie messaged Linda with a link to a Facebook page for an event in which her poetry was going to be read, and asked her to contribute a “like”. After doing her friend the favour, she came across a further link to a blog that Jaimie had never told her about. It featured week-by-week posts of poetry excerpts. She scrolled down the page, scanning a couple and smiling at Jaimie’s inventively aesthetic text formatting. Then she got stuck on the flash of a single word:

“bellies”.

She scrolled back up to find a ten-line excerpt from a prose poem. Seemed to be related to something that she wished it wasn’t. A mere nine lines found her, frightened her, then stole her thoughts away. She read them over again, laughing nervously under her breath:

“Summer-bound rosella flocks, bellies facing earth,
swarming east, knowing of the greenest lands
where the starved are reduced to the oldest myth,
taking for granted the abundant feast
while homosapien sneers contest the yield;
there’s something lovelier
in the gentle texture of excess flesh
than the unyielding brutalism of bone-backed skin.
No loving head ever slept on stone.”

Slowly, like some sort of recovering amnesiac, a memory came along. Of being with Jaimie at the loft last Sunday… Sweets Fest… drunken emotions, of self-loathing… Linda had claimed that fat was unaesthetic, that people agreed to hate it… then Jaimie said no… that it is in fact more aesthetic if you really think about it. Soft and yielding. Comforting. Unlike anything else in the world.

Late at night, sharing the kitchen with Prairie, Linda decided to fabricate a story about being fat-shamed by someone online… but she failed just short of opening her mouth to speak. She watched Prairie place a stack of bowls in the cupboard and shut the dishwasher, and the deep mechanical rumble as she put it on a cycle. Linda’s lie pushed against her heart, too weak to break free and pollute the air between them. Something too strong was holding it down, smothered.

Her bed embraced her with parental indifference. Her sheets felt wrong against her flesh, heavy with disappointment. She touched the layer of fat on her stomach and squeezed it, feeling its weight. After too much twisting and turning, she got up, pulled the cover off her easel and stood back to contemplate the final stages of her painting. All the lines were in place, the colours almost filled in. Sure, it was nearly realised. But she wanted it to be real for herself, real for her body… Real for the guilt of her roommates. No matter what kinds of obscene scenarios she came up with to make them feel bad for her, none of them really happened.

Suddeny Linda’s hand twitched. Her eyes narrowed, and she began to understand something.

Okay, they weren’t true, but… what was to *stop* them from being true?

Slowly her head filled with thoughts that sent her imagination rabbid, and she lowered the sheet back over her artwork, sat in her bed and imagined moments of embarrassment that could all plausibly happen. She was slack-mouthed. The possibilities were numerous. She could make anything to humiliate herself.

Before time drained away, she put her head to the pillow and let her thoughts turn to dreams. Invention awaited.


* * *


Linda didn’t exactly plan for the first incident to happen. The humiliation of unfitness had to find her eventually, anyway, whether she liked it or not. It was Thursday morning at work and she was machining coffees out at the rate of an automated drum beat. Unable to squeeze the pudge of her saddle bag hips into her work slacks that morning, she’d turned up in black leggings instead, inner thighs rubbing each other as if to start a fire, and a dose of inner knee fat observable to the scrutinising eye. The unusual business of this morning’s shift kept her from consuming snacks, dragging her hunger out like entrails into the slow arrival of midday when she was finally able to catch a break. Her coworker Maja, looking heavier in the waist and chest lately, burst in though the sliding doors with a, ‘Sorry!-sorry-sorry I’m late!, let me take it from here…’

Turning her duties over, Linda drifted out the back for “smoke-o”, as the Australians call it, clutching a kransky roll and a finger bun in one hand or the other, taking alternating bites from each, absorbing through her skin the sunlight of an unexpected warm change. She felt her face bloom in the hot radiance. She smiled. Settling her growth-prone backside atop of a stack of cinder blocks, she felt the beginnings of a sweat. It was too warm. She shrugged her jacket off. Suddenly she felt fat, sitting there in a tight black shirt and leggings. The fabric wanted to pull her belly back into itself, but could only hug in desperation as her gut commanded its own space. But it meant nothing, just yet. There was nobody around to see her. She shut her eyes. And all there was in the world was the song of the suburbs, invisible birds, midday traffic, red darkness behind her eyelids, and the ecstatic play of food in her mouth.

The growl of an diesel engine came by. Passed. Then there was a thud, and a series of heavy smacks against the bitumen. She opened her eyes to see a truck puttering away around the corner, leaving behind a spillage of concrete bags knocked off their palette stack. Somehow none had burst open. She guessed there were about ten or so lying wounded on the bitumen. She sat there chewing, staring, and thinking. Well she couldn’t just leave them there? It’s not as if she would be blamed if one of the managers saw it… but she wouldn’t feel good about it, either. Forcing the last of the kransky roll and finger bun into her mouth, she ended up with mixed sort of sludge bulging her cheeks with severe overload. Smidge by smidge she chewed and swallowed until her stomach was happy and busy again, then slid off the cinder blocks and onto the bitumen. She thumped down hard on her heels. Her tummy spoke back with a bounce, hips quivering.

She walked over to the bags of concrete, put her fists on her hips and analysed her angles of approach. Truth is that she’d misjudged the scenario; there were about twenty bags, not ten. If she’d looked at the weight printed on each package, she’d have waited for someone stronger to do it, but instead she bent down with the idea to lift them up them one by one. She rose in brazen confidence with the first bag. Her arms and shoulders took a shock hit, but she was stronger than she thought. Or thought she was stronger than she was. By the third, her lower back felt hot and sore. By the fourth, it outright ached. By the fifth, she remembered the proverb “lift with your knees, not your back!” said by every middle-aged man ever. And so she squatted– saying howdy to the way her belly compacted in a lump against her thighs –, grabbed the bag and proceeded to strain her knees. For a mere powder, this concrete was pure weight. She heaved it onto the palette with a grunt and took a huge breath. Then she squatted again. Why was she doing this to herself? Something slipped up from the back of her pants, and the breeze found the small of her back. Again she rose, shoulders tight, knees hot and her thighs asking how much longer this was going to go on for. Air exploded out her mouth as she swung with all her might onto the palette. But the bag landed at the wrong angle. Swooning in exhaustion, she watched it tumble back off with a thud-and-smack.

She breathed, ‘O my god are you joking,’ and returned to the squat. Her knees were full of acid. This time, when she rose, she stumbled on one foot and came down hard on the other heel. Her paunch danced about in a wild jiggle, mocking her stupid efforts, and now the breeze seemed to have found it as well. A regretful groan and a heave saw the bag swing onto the pallete the right way this time, carrying her with it. She leaned over the stack on her hands. Here she remained and could not stop panting. Any more than this, and her lungs wouldn’t be able keep up. She dropped her head, sweat bordering her hairline. She stared at the ground. Then she noticed a funny shape. It was her stomach. She stared at her companion above, watching the bulge pump back and forth like blacksmith’s bellows as she caught her breath. She was just about to lean to one side and touch the strip of flesh that had snuck out into public view, just where her belly button met the hem of her shirt… soft and pale, traumatically erotic … when she heard footsteps. She stood and spun, quick as if she’d been intruded on while getting dressed, and put her hand across the bottom of her shirt. Some fit, young gun of a construction worker, painted all in dirt and wood shavings, was making his way towards her, looking like something out of an aftermath of war. She tugged at her shirt in hurried cover-up, only to agitate her belly into a bouncy little leap as the fabric snapped back into place. And it looks like he noticed. She saw his eyes glance down and turn away, all in the same moment. At least he’d tried to pretend… She stared through him as he approached. A hesitant silence kept them apart for a moment. She tried not to breathe so hard. She felt useless. She felt out of shape.

Then he offered a plaintive shrug, ‘Need a hand?’, even as he moved in beside her and got to work anyway.

Linda scooted a couple of steps aside and cracked an unconvincing smile. ‘Actually yeah,’ she exhaled, cheeks radiating prickly hellfire, her entire torso tingling. Dizzy. An other-worldly ringing in her ears. She tried to laugh to ease the atmosphere, but all she did was sound embarrassed and puffed. ‘Thanks,’ she panted, ‘ooph – I shouldn’t have –  some guy came –  uff – came by and sideswiped the bags – they went everywhere.’

‘Oh,’ from the guy, who spent all of maybe thirty seconds shifting bag by bag back onto the pile in a flurry of athleticism, even taking the time to shove them into place again. She watched him use his whole body, arms, back, hips, legs and all to shape the unmovable world around him. She stood there feeling weak, like a jiggly bag of slop. The feeling submerged her from the soul up, and she dove into it, exploring its edges, exploring its deep yielding sensation.

The guy smiled at her and nodded, ‘Well see ya.’ And with that he walked away across the bitumen, got in his truck and drove off.

Linda stared at the stack of concrete bags… wondered how it’d feel to carry that weight but in fat… turned a little weak inside her thighs out of fear. Or excitement. Who cared any more? It was a feeling.

She turned back, pulled her shirt down as far as it’d go, collected her jacket, and got back to work without a word to anyone about what just happened.

The bus took her home in the evening. Thinking she’d work on finishing her painting, she just fell on the lounge instead and lazed in front of the TV, feeling weird and distorted with erotic shame, even as she grazed on a packet of chips from her private stash. Not long after, Sofia came through the front door and immediately asked what was up.

Linda’s eyes darted as she came back to life. There was an opportunity, here. She could prolong it. ‘I don’t wanna talk right now,’ she murmured. ‘Just ask me later, okay.’

Later came along, and Sofia could not have chosen a better moment to ask. All four roommates sat strewn among the lounges and dinner table, sharing an oversized dish of shepherd’s pie dripping with olive oil, fatty juices, sweating carbs and probably a million other ingredients that are cholesterol-raising. Milo and Sofia had dumped their asses on the lounge. Prairie was eating over her laptop at the table and Linda sat across from her. When Sofia got up to distribute icecream sprinkled with chocolate and nuts, she slid a serving over to Linda and hesitated when she began to simply poke at it dejectedly. Just for a moment. Moving along to Prairie, casually Sofia asked, ‘What’s going on?’

Linda looked up. ‘What, me?’

‘Yeah. You doing alright?’

She could’ve sworn a suspicious glint escaped Sofia’s eye… or perhaps that was just her big-girl sass. On a side now, Linda knew if she didn’t slow down on her gluttony, she’d probably be adopting her own big-girl sass one day. Well that was her roommates’ fault, wasn’t it? And it was time for them to pay up. ‘Oh nothing,’ she poked at the ice cream again. ‘I just… there was something a bit embarrassing at work today.’

‘Oh?’ Sofia half perked up. She put Prairie’s dessert beside her laptop. ‘Do tell?’

Linda shrugged. ‘Nothing. Just got embarrassed, that’s all.’

‘And what’s this got to do with poking your food?’

Linda made a big show of sighing. ‘Fine. So… I had to move these concrete bags… okay? and… I got so out of breath doing it. And this guy… I’m just so god damn out of shape!’ She dropped her fork onto the plate with a clatter. All three roommates were silent.

Out of nowhere, and without asking for it, a memory went off, bang, as if by tripwire. At school. Young. Fifth grade. Heat falling from the sky, sweating, heaving sand bags across the oval pitch. Storage shed, put them away. Sports ed teacher tasked her with this. Nobody around to help. Arms jelly. She weighed nothing. Hot wind knocking her around. Halfway across the oval with the last bag of sand. She has to collapse. Body crumples too weak, so weak, soul slung low, all broken, low as a subterranean bell. Her body will float away. Across the grass stronger kids play football and sprint in zig zags and dodge each other. Look at her arms and legs, they are wispy sticks, smallest in her class, footsteps approaching, her heart shrivels into a tight cold ball: this girl is not her friend, instead resents her. She has happiness because Linda is in pain, telling Linda how weak she is, too weak, laughing, saying get up, stop being weak. The nasal voice–

In the silence, thoughts zipped around the heads of each roommate– some telepathically exchanged via brief glances, others mute and private… But everybody was arriving on the same page, slowly, one way or another. When Linda stopped dreaming, Prairie was the first one she noticed, sitting utterly still and cold. Though Prairie had been keeping to herself until now, it was as if she’d embodied a silence even deeper, a bodily freeze of perfect cloistered stillness. She was pretending her eyes and thoughts were on the laptop screen, not elsewhere.

Milo sat facing away from everyone, brooding at the TV. Then she suddenly stated, ‘Oh no! A young male looked at you? That really sucks!’ And was silent again.

When Linda glanced at Sofia, she found her roommate’s face inspecting her with frighteningly close attention. Like a knowing teacher. Linda broke away quick-smart. She stood up, took her dishes to the sink, left them there and hid away in her room.

Against the direction of everything that had just happened, she lost herself anyway in the deep hours of the night feeding herself round and taught, in nothing but her underwear, legs spread lazily among empty wrappers and bottles of drink, until the upper half of her belly had little softness to offer her hands, as she massaged it in circles, caressing what she knew was a sorely brutalised metabolic system.


* * *


It was Thursday evening, and Linda was at the art museum, skin dryingly cold outside, yet unexpectedly stuffy inside, with the air vents lathering sixteen visual art students with humidity as they migrated from one exhibition to the other. They were nomads of aesthetic zones, and Linda wasn’t exactly the waify one anymore. She had to slip her coat off when all the back-and-forth walking gave her damp patches under her arms. Plus, all she knew about right now was hunger. She’d slept past her alarm and neglected breakfast except for a packet of corn chips on the way out the door.

Sensing a band of moisture gathering across her hairline, she dabbed it with her coat while no one was looking and scooted closer to Lorence, a comical, mop-haired French guy only a few years older than her. ‘You think this one was made using someone’s hedge fund?’ he asked her, pointing at a body form sculpture so modern and sterile you’d wonder if they took any risks in crafting at all. Somehow, it wasn’t even abstract.

Feeling talkative, she circled the sculpture, sizing it up. ‘Looks like white chocolate.’

‘Is it part of the exhibition if we try to eat it?’

Penny, a short, frizzy-haired girl in glasses located them. ‘Ew,’ she said, scrunching her face at the sculpture. ‘Are you serious? Why is this even here?’

‘Hey,’ Lorence interjected, ‘what did we learn this semester, Penny?’

‘That it’s time for lunch. I’m starved.’

Linda said nothing, even as a bubble of air opened inside her stomach, garbling. She even felt a burp of anticipation rise. Keeping it down, she walked alongside Lorence and Penny as they merged with the main group and brought up the subject of food.

A minute later all sixteen students and the lecturer filed downstairs to the cafe where they scanned the menu and clustered themselves around a long table to chat. Linda scooted in close to the table, allowing her belly to finally plop over her leggings and fight her shirt’s constraints. Conversation worked around the interruptions of their orders arriving, until finally Linda’s dish came floating across the room past tables and babbling heads. It had taken so long to come out from the kitchen for a good reason. A steam-cloaked mound of cheese, sauce, meat, potatoes, pasta, and more sauce, with a bowl of chips and gravy. ‘Damn, you gonna eat all that?’ someone asked.

‘I dunno, maybe,’ she shrugged. Course she was.

Chatter held its breath as everyone lowered their heads to eat like pigs at a trough.

Penny, sometime later almost done with her own, paused with her fork halfway raised and peered at Linda. Having ordered the biggest dish, it’d arrived so late. But in spite of this, she’d already sucked down the last bit of pasta by the time Penny was still going, and was leaning back with her arms folded across her torso… obfuscating something… squirming subtly, as if to massage her forearms against her stomach. Concealing a stuck-out potbelly that had transformed her midsection, all the way from front to back, into a spare tire the size of an overgrown watermelon. Her shirt was ill fit to contain it. Unaware of Penny’s gaze, she quickly twisted around with a sigh, pulled her jacket off the back of her chair and clutched it against herself. For all she knew, nobody had noticed.

Half hour later they went back upstairs to round up. It took an effort of silent grunting for her to stand up, carrying a new centre of gravity in her overextended gut.

One of the final art exhibits they inspected made you to look through a reversed pair of binoculars at a painting of someone’s face. (Or was it?) Linda leaned forward, setting her eyes against the rubber seals, and strained her eyes. So near, though so far, you could hardly make it out. Was it a man or a woman? Transgendered? All she knew was the back of her shirt had come untucked, and was dislodging its way around to the front of her waistband in a sequence of slippages. But even as she felt this, the undecided object kept retreating from her. Sure, she’d fix her clothes in just a moment– she just needed to find out what this face was. Was it even human? She felt herself falling in, falling…

Swimming so deep in an entranced swoon, before she knew what happened, she’d forgotten all about her hips peeking out. A distant laugh yanked her up by the scruff. She pulled herself away and stood up with a spinning head. Reclaiming her surroundings, she wondered what score to give the experience she just had… Then Lorence passed by and nudged a friendly elbow into her side. When she spun around, he glimpsed downwards at her hips with a cock of the brow like, *heads up*, or something, and kept walking. Linda’s eyes were glazed for a moment. It was then that she realised what he meant.

She breathed, ‘Oh shit,’ and tugged her shirt under her bulb-shaped tummy and down around her hips. When she let go, the fabric snapped back into place, making it all go bounce-bounce.

By the time the sun was on its way down, they all agreed to take a group photo using Kim Toluse’s phone. Linda, having to do without her jacket to conceal her waistline, stood beside Penny at the far edge of the group, using one hand to cover herself. As they all peered over Kim’s shoulder to get a look at the result, it was finally Linda’s turn to see her bloat-bellied self in the far corner of the frame. She heard them collectively hold their breath, trying to think of something else to comment on. But she knew exactly what they were thinking.

And yet… after all this time, and having ought to know better by now, she found that she no longer cared so much.

When she brought it up that night within earshot of her roommates, she got the same reaction as the night before, only a little worse this time. They were doing kitchen chores after dessert. When she delivered her story, sounding all morose and full of shame, Prairie fell just about dead silent… so silent, that even the cutlery she was cleaning ceased to clatter. Her body switched angles, and her feet turned as if she was about to leave the room. But she never quite made the move.

Milo seemed to be glaring at the ceiling in either frustration or something else.

‘Welcome to my world,’ Sofia said, simply. Her thick arms swept the kitchen bench in wide, jiggly lunges as she cleaned grime with a sponge. ‘That shit happens just about daily.’

Taking a clean bowl off the drying rack, Linda watched Sofia’s almost beanbag-sized ass cheeks swish like jelly as she stepped over to the bin. And then got a small idea. Breaking the silence, she said,‘It’s like–’ to get their attention, then made a deliberate step towards the cabinet so that they saw her belly jiggle. When she felt it, heat flushed her cheeks. Then as an added plus, when she crouched and stood back up, she had to do the old shirt re-adjustment.

She caught Milo’s dead-eyed equivalent of a scowl just before looking away. Milo drawled, ‘ “It’s like” what?’

Pause. ‘ … nothing.’ Linda lowered her eyes and turned away, wanting to feel shame– but instead felt something entirely off-kilter. An excitement she never should have felt swept her body. Suddenly she knew… she felt half-naked, and dirty… pleased with herself, as if she was carrying bare photos of herself in her pockets.

‘“Nothing”?’ Milo repeated. ‘You ate “nothing”?, is that what you’re saying? Or it’s “like” nothing? Doubt you ate “nothing”... ’ Then bundled up a few dirty towels just for an excuse to leave the kitchen. Out she went.

Linda’s eyes shone. She nearly smiled. But she killed her expression, before anyone got any sudden ideas.

She saw Sofia squinting at her. Who then scoffed and turned back to cleaning the kitchen. ‘It’s Tjockningfest, Lind,’ the heavy young woman sang over her shoulder. ‘But you said it yourself; you “aren’t doing Tjockningfest”. That’s your choice.’ A mere shrug.

Alone in her room, working harder than ever on her painting, maybe a little anger coming through, she meditated on the days’ events at the art museum and found herself stealth-bombed by yet another unwanted memory…

In class again, a child again, the morning hazy, foggy, and a relief teacher standing in tights with legs larger than she’d ever seen in her life, coming storming over to erupt godly thunder over the head of Jane, angry-eyed blonde oval face. Jane, sitting there and telling Linda she could snap her because she was a stick. She was going to do it at lunch. Playtime soon, on the bell. Linda, sweating, cold at the same time, wanting to be left alone to make drawings, just drawing, alone, peaceful. But her paper is snatched away. Jane looking at it. A piece of Linda lost in theft. Jane telling her the drawing sucks. It’s bad. Jane could do better. Pretending to scrunch it, eyes flaring alight watching Linda’s reactions. Teacher comes over, power, authority, Linda cowering beneath the mighty avalanche of colossal presence, floor quaking. But she absorbs the power, feels full and strong again. Jane withers. Jane is the stick. Tiny stick. Wind will blow her away–

And that was it.

Although it came and went, quick as lightning, it felt deep as a life time.


* * *


In the morning Linda began the final touches on her painting. It would be done, soon. All the lines had fallen across each other in the best way possible, after all these erasures and refigurements, after all these weeks.

In the afternoon she met the uni gang at a snooker club across the other end of town. Jaimie gave her a lift, and they entered side by side practically holding hands– one whose body had taken a bee sting to each rotund hip, the other to the fore of her belly. Linda rocked up in leggings and a dark plaid shirt tucked under a white sweater, but even in all this protective fabric, she felt exposed. Its tightness wrapped around her.

In the entire room, there was not a quiet corner. Music rocked the air and conversation crowded every corner as groups mingled around snooker tables under low-slung lights, cue sticks wavering in the air like war spears, lowering here and there to patiently aim at a noisy crack of billiard balls exploding across green tabletops.

Jaimie spotted the group at the back corner. Bailey returned the look and waved them over to a table where Travis, Billy, Patricia, Sebastien and Theo were setting up a game. Hey’s and hi’s were shared. Jaimie went off to chat with Patricia. Linda spotted someone extra sticking close to Theo’s side; a honey-skinned, dark-haired guy whom she didn’t know the name of. He was in animated conversation with Billy and Theo.

‘Who…?’ Linda muttered to Bailey, with a small gesture.

‘Oh.’ Bailey offered a cue to Linda and began chalking up her own. ‘He’s a friend of Theo’s. He’s on exchange from Italy.’

Eventually the new guy came around their side of the table and got chatting. Linda stood up from where she’d been sitting against the wall with a faint grunt and adjusted her sweater. He introduced himself as Zoli. He stood tall and lanky with an angular Roman face, dark hair, seedy eyes, but a huge grin. He shared friendly words, and delivered his syllables with emphasis, thinking he needed to be understood through his accent and the few words he knew. Which lead to a bit of an awkward scenario.

Suddenly his face lit up. He gestured at Linda and asked something she didn’t quite catch.

She smiled awkwardly. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t understand?’

He tried again. Mimicking a ball shape over his stomach with one hand, he said through a dense accent, ‘You is with babby?’ His face was beaming, so hopeful and delighted. ‘You are is preganante?’

But Linda’s smile evaporated in no time… leaving a shocked frown, deep as an inverted blade. She’d never been called out in public like this before. She hadn’t even considered this could happen… She should have known…

Couple of hours later they’d all found ways to pretend it never happened. Linda was playing a round of snooker with Jaimie, Bailey and Sebastien while everyone else stood around with a beer, or something fizzy, and talked. Before she could settle in, it was time take her sweater off. Her body-heat had built up under her arms, overflowing across her whole body, prickling her skin and making her feel trapped inside some infernal vat of heat. She slipped the layer of wool over her head, and now all she was trapped in was her constrictive plaid shirt. Her belly wished it could be free. With so little left blocking the way, why not just throw it all off? She’d been trying to suck in this entire time. Which was, reflectively, perhaps idiotic. After a long deliberated reflection she thought that, maybe, nobody really cared. So she relaxed.

Out her belly bulged, rounding out against a wall of strong fabric which was more than happy to enforce immediate rules. Her pelvis grew hot. She felt so fat and tight, she wondered if she could really play this entire round of snooker without excusing herself to the bathroom to release pressure. Then she bent over to line up a shot– and froze.

Her shirt was tightening around her like a vice. Without looking down, she knew the buttons must have been gaining stress-gaps all the way up and down her shirt…

All her belly fat sat bunched up like putty inside plastic wrap. She rested one fist on the table, notched the cue over her knuckle and leaned in. Something broke. Her lower belly came into contact with air. She couldn’t move. And she knew exactly what’d just happened.

Mouth left open in shock, she slowly looked around to see if anyone was looking. But nobody was.

Slow as an arthritic tortoise she stood straight, rested the cue against the table without alerting anyone, grabbed each busted flap of her shirt, scrunched them together in one fist and concealed herself. The tips of her fingers brushed flesh deeply soft. Just as she began to turn towards the restroom with a jerky spin of her body, Jaimie blocked her path. A mirthful smirk was all over her face. In her arms was Linda’s sweater. A knowing wink, or… not a wink so much as a playful squint…, and she held the sweater out. Linda stared for a moment before snatching it up. She faced the wall to hide her round bulge of flesh swelling out from between her busted shirt flaps and slammed the sweater over her head. Tugging it down, then tucking under her paunch, she exhaled. She was in too much of an adrenaline-rush to thank her friend. A little glaze-eyed, she reclaimed the cue from where it rested against the table and resumed the game. Somehow nobody had thought to look over.

Not so dangerously tight, this time. Only stupidly snug. This was where she had to face things. Her belly was too fat for her clothes.

She could hardly focus for the rest of the game. Honestly, she never remembered feeling so alive.

And then of course she had to tell her roommates all about it that evening. Acting so sad and ashamed, it was the straw that broke the horse’s back. Prairie’s new boyfie was over for the evening. Way to make first impressions. He overheard everything. All Prairie could do was lower her eyes, glance around evasively and finally give some lame excuse for leaving the room. Her confused boyfriend pursued her with an air of tension. Milo, who’d just walked in through the front door, dropped a bunch of shopping bags in the kitchen to stare as obviously as she could at Linda’s pronounced stomach, even as it lurked beneath the self-same sweater from today. ‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘it stops happening when you don’t eat so much all the time. It’s Tjockningfest. Just admit it. You’re in it. You’re eating, all, the, time. It’s gonna happen. Actually, I know: we should ask a scientist! They might help us out.’

‘Milo?!’ came Sofia’s surprise from the sink, where she was busy scrubbing a plate. She let it drop into the water and turned to evaluated the scenario.

‘Hi there,’ came Milo, as if nothing was wrong.

A prolonged look was all Sofia gave the chubby Scandinavian. But apparently it was enough to make Milo retreat from the kitchen carrying an air of injury.

Now Sofia was left smiling at Linda. A pause, in which any number of things could have been thought, or said. Sofia chuckled and shook her head, then turned back to the dishes, chuckling still. Something had amused her greatly.

Another memory, by way of late-night reflection. Face swallowed in her pillow, sunk in warmth. Linda came back to highschool.

Time again. Clock on the wall. You want to keep looking but this forty-five minutes is for friends. Lunch room halls, heads everywhere, you want to be in the conversation or you seem strange. Distraction. Big one, bigger than others. Fat girl, over there at the table opposite. She can see the back of her hips, flesh oozing. Someone walks behind and pokes it, no laughter. Just silent laughter, inside heads. Silent. Girl’s friends silent too. Girl not speaking. Fat spilling out her back. Rising up, she stands up, shuffles off to class. Watch her belly go. Too big and wide, jiggling past, so big and unwieldy, it’s not meant to be there. Linda feeling rigid, watching all the shakes and wobbles. Sinking heart. Chest hot and cold at the same time. How to stop feeling stiff when all she can see and think about is jiggling all over. School over, day over. Go home, think about it, see thick flesh behind eyelids. You think about soft flesh and your insides writhe. Pleasure and pain. Either or. Cannot stop thinking about it.


* * *

Sunday morning, Finals Fest. This was the last week. Linda found herself up strangely early, thrown into a surprise propulsion of creativity. She stood in front of her easel munching on a box of nut bars and obsessing over the ultimate details of her painting. But it was done. Matter of fact, it was more than done. She was walking on eggshells layered over hot coals. Every decision was monumentous. Each decision political. Etched down to the fine-grain line of an ant’s leg.

By 4 pm she had to call it in. This is always the hardest part. You feel there should be more to do. But there never is. Anything from here on out only results in damage.

Pulling her phone out, she debated taking pictures of herself squeezing handfuls of belly fat under lemon-yellow lamp light, but stuck to the task at hand. As much as she wanted to explore herself, she took a few quick shots of the painting to see what it looked like in alternate framing. When she examined the results, an obscene grin broke out across her face. She’d done it. She’d created what she said she would create. Like it or not, this was what it looked like.

But she felt like she shouldn’t dwell on success.

Busting open another packet of cookies, she turned her thoughts towards the afternoon. She and Jaimie were going to drive to a venue on the beach half hour out of town. Was gonna be the craziest night. There’d be so much food. So much drink. So much excess in calories. And she’d eat it all, get bloated beyond pain or pleasure and wake up even fatter. Her belly, inching its way out, could only grow bigger. There was no going back now, no shrinking, no downsizing. Only larger. God, how was she getting carried off already? It wasn’t even time yet…

Halfway through getting changed, she looked at her body in the upper half of her mirror, saw how it looked bulbous and soft. Delicate pink blotches marked her flesh where she’d been grabbing her fat too hard as she played with it, rolling it between her fingers. She thought they looked cute on her skin. Soft little rosy patches. Passion marks, given to herself by herself.

Jaimie swung by, Linda met her downstairs by the street.

‘Damn… Lindy?…’ Jaimie was looking across at Linda, who was getting into the passenger seat, particularly her midsection as it spilled forward to loom over her thighs. She was in a grey turtleneck sweater and a recently purchased pair of leather jeans, belted somewhat sado-masochistically, forcing all the wrong shapes to came out and play. ‘What,’ she asked, with all pretence, as she fitted her seat belt around the front of the ball of flab between her breasts and lap. But she knew precisely what indeed. Her heart fluttered at the idea.

Smirking, Jaimie brushed the topic aside and let the handbrake down, even as her wrist brushed against a grotesquely oversized love handle of her own. Linda caught it out the corner of her eye, but said nothing. Just admired its bulk. For the first time ever, she almost felt mischievously glad about it.

Half an hour later they found a park and found their way down to the shore. It was beginning to dusk.

‘You know,’ Jaimie, later on, was about to confess, halfway through her third mango Affogato, in such perfect weather for the icecream-infused drink, all comfy night-time temperatures, stars sharply visible by the sea shore half an hour’s drive from the city. By far the most expensive publicly-funded event in the nation, “Valencina Bay Finals Fest” every two years is built upon portable stone foundations lodged in the sand along the beach, and upon them, huge vibrant tents are raised, dressed with neon lights, filled with multiple supermarkets’ worth of food and finally opened up to the public. As the sun lowers and night turns the sky over, bands send music across the ocean, food is sold, old friends meet, stray glances connect. Bellies bulge, belts widen a notch. And sometimes, as the odd glance penetrates something more sensitive, a certain emotion comes into bloom between two lucky souls, and no amount of rational thought can explain why or exactly where it will go.

This is the last sigh of time. The last prolonged moment. The end point at which thousands turn their minds back and contemplate, at the latest minute, how far they’ve come in just seven weeks.

And it’s not even midnight.

‘I can’t lie,’ Jaimie said through a mouthful of mango ice cream as they sat down on a bench. They’d found a spot high up on a promontory overlooking the entire length of the shoreline. The sea was infinity to their right, the moon-silvered land to their left. Panting slightly from the climb, Jaimie confessed, ‘Myself and everyone around me got officially fat.’

They’d trekked up a long set of steps to the outlook, each carrying a bag of items purchased down below, where you can see a colony of heads swarming en-masse from stall to stall. Linda’s knees felt used, and her thighs were like hot jelly by the time they reached the top. She sat and took a moment to breathe clearly. Each lungful of air punctuated Jaimie’s observation about getting fat. They exchanged glances when they realised this. Linda let a quiet snicker escape. Jaimie chuckled, then they both laughed openly, Linda clearly out of breath. They laughed again, clearer, their voices trailing happily away. Then they shared a stretch of sisterly silence. Linda’s body looked like a marshmallow being squeezed, her belly a bulbous dollop of blubber packed into her sweater and choked off by a belt she really did not need to be wearing.

Jaimie’s body looked like a melted mushroom, her ass plopped onto the bench with her wide hips and flabby thighs oozing across it. Then again, there was a belly that hadn't exactly been there before, either? Since when had *that* appeared? Jaimie caught her friend looking. Tilting her chin up and draining the last dregs of her Affogato, she gulped, then let a little burp pop out her mouth. ‘Woops! Honestly, though, it’s not so bad.’ She clapped her hands on her new little ball of belly-flab and gave its sides a carefree squeeze. ‘Obviously everything I’ve been eating was sucking like a magnet straight to my hips, but now… I think my belly’s decided it’s time to come out from hiding. Took its time.’ She looked up suddenly, and reconsidered. ‘Actually, if I’m to be thoroughly honest? I was hiding it for a bit, there. Thought *wide hips* was more feminine. T H I C C and all. Oh well; not so much any more.’ Reaching for one of the bags by their feet, she fished around for food, massaging her tummy in anticipation. She sat back up clutching two bags of hot cinnamon doughnuts. She handed one over. The packet steamed in Linda’s hands. Cinnamon coloured the air for her nose, and she felt her heart stammer for a bite.

Jaimie put a doughnut in her mouth and said while chewing, ‘I mean. Eating this just makes me fatter still. But technically it’s still Tjockningfest, right?’

Linda realised Jaimie was actually looking at her for an answer. ‘Uh. Yeah. I guess.’ She watched as Jaimie brush strands of hair behind her ear, and then twisted to the side to look down at her hips. She said around a mouthful, ‘I can actually feel it on me, like, as in, the corporeal weight…’ She made a hefting motion with one hand to illustrate her point, then grabbed a chunk of her thigh through her jeans and wobbled it around. Even beneath the tough fabric, in the gloom of the beach-side night sky, you could tell a layer of soft flesh was jiggling wherever it found room to. ‘When I walk I feel like I have more momentum, and it’s like, when I stand up it takes a bit more core-work than it used to. I also jiggle like a spastic worm, soo… ’ She laughed and bit into another cinnamon doughnut.

Linda’s chest burned. Her legs were tense. The moment of opportunity had arrived, and it was holding its breath. Her whole body throbbed as something kept trying to push out from inside her chest. Something, kept in for far too long, grown large and bloated like a hot air balloon unable to rise anywhere. *She* was not rising. She was curling into a ball and swelling, all at once, and this could not go on. Her lungs began to expand against her will, collecting breath to put force behind her words. ‘I can’t stand this anymore!’

Jaimie looked over with a questioning look as Linda dropped a hand down to her belt and unclasped the buckle. There was an audible snick, her belt released, and her waistline developed on the spot.

Jaimie’d brows were high. ‘It’s about time!?’

Her chest full with the heat of recklessness, Linda flew off; ‘I can’t even pretend anymore. I can’t hide this. I never could. What the FUCK. What was I thinking?, I’m so over this–’

‘My god,’ Jaimie squealed, ‘it’s *double* about time!?’

Unable to control herself, all inhibitions evaporated under the warmth of night skies, and salt wind, and the crash of waves like college-room peer pressure against her self control… she dragged her waistband down and wrangled the soft mess of her gut all the way out onto her lap, jiggling as she manhandled flesh. Anyone could see. She held it in both hands like she didn’t know what to do with something that’d dropped out the sky. ‘Look what happened to me. Look what I did. I did this. I let myself get this big. I feel fat as fuck, all the time, I feel heavier when I stand up, and I–’

‘Woo!’ Jaimie was egging her on, throwing her fist at the sky.

‘ –all I feel when I walk is this flabby fucking thing jiggling all around, don’t even get me started on running. Running and me don’t agree anymore. Fuck running.’

‘Wooo!’ Jaimie wasn’t even ** and she was giggling at her friend as if liquor was on her breath.

Then Linda fell silent. Nothing more. On the wind, a moment sighed past. Jaimie grew still, narrowed her eyes, and waited for what she hoped might be coming…

But still, Linda said nothing. Suddenly concerned with her belly, left out bare and angelically soft in the moonlight, she began attempting to wrestle the accumulation of fat back under her waistband. But it didn’t end up that way. She tucked flesh in one way, and it spilled out in the other, sending little ripples across its surface with each movement. ‘You know what?’ Linda said through an expression like she’d just tasted battery acid… ‘Fuck it. If anyone sees me like this, then let them. Their fault. Let them see it all hanging out. They don’t like, they can look away.’

‘Aaaand…?’ Jaimie took her opportunity to press the case, while Linda’s emotions were still on the outwards tumble. ‘… Are there any reasons why…?’

And so, as Linda sat there with her belly spilled like beans from a can, staring down at the crowd below, feeling free to decide the aspects of her own fate outside the awareness of others, hundreds of others, now ant-like and small below them on the dark silver shoreline… as she sat there gazing, something vanished. Something like a wall, for years pressed under the weight of something immense, accumulated over time, finally gave away. It wasn’t adrenaline that surged her veins. More like a deep, throbbing energy. She thought of the words to say– the craziest, most honest confession –the truth, huge and shocking, about her, and her heart spun in circles around itself. She had to say it.

‘Because…’ she got halfway.

‘Because… what,’ Jaimie was leaning forward.

‘Because… I like it.’

Jaimie smiled.

Linda felt the need to say more, but came up short when she heard a faint fluttering sound. They sat in silence and watched a loose helium balloon nod around in the breeze, caught by its purple streamer upon a branch.

‘Because I’m finally okay with it,’ Linda said simply, the way she would to her pillow with no one else around. Gentle as if she was made of air, she stood up. Her belly stuck out but she let it. She went over to the branch, her sweater-wrapped belly bouncing happily, and unplucked the balloon from its snare. It jolted, then levitated into the air, purple streamer trailing after it. She sat down again, thighs spreading, belly spilling. Together they watched the balloon sway side to side on little tumbles of wind until it grew small and finally invisible. They heard distance-smothered music from PA speakers throwing sound in the opposite direction. They saw tiny little people as they thrived, stumbled, danced, ate, sat, walked. You could hear now and again the hiss of waves against rock nearby, somewhere out of sight. A gull or two threw calls to each other.

‘I um…’ Linda hesitated. Not out of angst, this time. But only to arrange her words properly.

‘Yeah?’

‘I guess… I think I might have to thank you for something…’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Remember last week? (or was it… two weeks ago…) I don’t know–’

‘You mean to say, at the loft?’

Linda nodded.

Jaimie cocked her head. ‘I remember. Why?’

‘You said something.’

‘Oh. I say a lot of things. I also write a lot of things.’

‘No, you said something that made me think.’

‘I like that,’ Jaimie grinned.

‘What you said about… fat. And how it… embodies a nicer feeling than “hard backed bone”?’

‘Oh!’ Jaimie leaned back. ‘That.’

‘Well, it was in your poem that I found on your blog, as well. So I read it, and... ‘ she shrugged. ‘All of a sudden I was getting all these memories. Childhood ones.’

‘Care to share?’

‘I guess. It’s just that I suddenly remembered when I was a kid. I actually learned, way back then, that being chubby or fat, or big, or anything… well it isn’t so bad. There were some good things, there. I just blocked it all out for some reason. Your poem, and what you said to me at the loft. It changed my mind completely. It made me remember those things.’

‘Well that’s good.’ Then Jaimie half laugh-scoffed, nose scrunched. ‘As for what I said at the loft, well I suppose it *was* a drunken honesty moment. Then again,’ she looked down at her hands and contemplated. ‘I believed it, of course. I still believe it. It would feel wrong to retract it, now. I said it, and I wrote it. And you’ve come so far. I’ve some so far. I mean, shit, *everyone’s* come so far, now.’

Linda squirmed. ‘Can I, um, tell you something secret?’

Jaimie’s brows went askew. ‘A secret? What else hidden could there possibly be?’

‘Um, I mean, not so much a secret. It won’t be a secret anymore, anyway. I was working on something of my own. I’ve actually been working on it for a while now. A painting. It’s about Tjockningfest– wait no, I mean, it is. But it’s about growing? I guess? Growing bigger. Changing. Developing. Going from small to large. A small body inside a big one.’

‘ … Can I see?’

Linda scooted closer to Jaimie and showed her the photo on her phone. The first thing Jaimie complemented was the painting’s form. Everything was in its right place. ‘Honestly I’m surprised how good this is,’ she admitted. ‘You’re going to exhibit this, right?’

‘Yeah. Maybe. When I get some other things to go with it.’

They talked about the idea of “form” for a while, wondering how and why one form could be good, and the other bad, but had a hard time reaching any answers. Eventually Linda burst open by admitting she did this painting mostly because she was learning to love the form of her own body.

‘It might, I dunno, sound weird to say this, but don’t you think getting big is kind of exciting?’

Jaimie balked. ‘Well. No shit. Hence the poem? Hence…’ She grabbed a large chunk of her own lovehandle and squeezed it to make a point.

Linda allowed herself to giggle. They looked out over the night-glassed ocean, all black, only half real. It felt strange to talk about getting fat over the last seven weeks so easily, as if it were nothing other than casual talk about sex lives, boyfriends, jobs, bills and shopping tactics. Linda couldn’t help herself but ask, ‘So… how much did you gain?’

‘What’s it look like to you?’

‘Uhm…’

Jaimie rolled her eyes. ‘You and your clamming up… No wonder you’re an artist instead of a speaker.’ Jaimie’s face was at utmost peace, hovering in moonlit silence. A distant horn honked. The wind carried someone’s drunken shout. ‘Thirty-three point five pounds, to the precise decimal, as of this afternoon when I weighed myself. You?’

‘...I dunno.’

‘Pff. Lying, lying!’

‘Okay. Forty. I think.’ After a pause, ‘Maybe almost thirty-five?’

Jaimie let the stretch of silence dictate the weight of Linda’s guilt.

‘Okay, fine. Forty. And a bit…’

Expressionless, Jaimie nodded, ‘Nice.’

‘Nice?’

‘Yeah. “Nice.” Didn’t you say so yourself?’

Linda nibbled her upper lip. ‘I guess so.’

Their laughter bubbled down the slope, sent half astray by the breeze, the other half to be smothered by throbbing festival music. But that is okay. It’s just them, up on the promontory, and the music they share together is inaudible to anyone else in its dual harmony, unknown except to the heart, of which two sit side by side in the final week of Tjockningfest, the nation’s bi-annual festival of indulgent freedom.


But no matter how much has been confessed this night, no matter what hidden stories finally told, one last tension resides. Linda never told Jaimie about her roommates’ role during the last seven weeks. Nor, really, has Linda told it fully to herself. And all the pressure would collapse just two weeks later.

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Soon as Linda woke next morning, she ran her hands all over her torso. She swore she felt little creases she never thought it was possible to have. When you’re on a gaining streak, that is, the smallest changes seem like leaps. Her bloat from last night hadn’t deflated much. Fact, it looked to have manifested an inch or two of chub.

Which went on, day to day, for about a week… “Hardcore Week Eight”, a seven-day stretch in which hardcore participants went for a final bout, a last hurrah. Carrying a vague sense of taboo, a surprising amount of people went and did it anyway, holding, for as long as they could, onto the personal liberty of doing with one’s body as one pleases. Linda didn’t participate directly so much as plow on eating like she had for the last seven weeks, for the mere reason that she’d come to take her new diet for granted. That and, she simply liked it.

Eighth week came and went. People claimed they’d eased off the food. But that’s never how it goes, is it~ not least for Linda. If she’d finished Tjockningfest at the top-end of the chubby range, by now she’d been promoted into the fatty-league. Sure, she was lurking near the bottom, a newby, but great promise would lift her to obscene heights in some years~ perhaps even months to come. Since running out of real estate upon which to protrude, her belly had decided it was time to grow sideways. That semi-spherical pouch of fat widened until it met her lovehandles and joined forces~ a spare tire, confident and proud, as if independent from the rest of her body. Her waistline as a whole was coming to resemble a mushroom, especially in a sitting position, and there seemed to be no motion it wouldn’t even microscopically jiggle at. By Sunday she dared touch the scales, only to discover she was making the needle tickle the “5” at one hundred and fifty-five pounds… Next morning it was touching the “6”.

A new set of outfits lined her wardrobe by the next weekend. Her old ones went to charity. She might have gained yet another bunch of pounds, maybe not. It was getting unclear. It was the jump in clothing sizes that told the story.

Today, an unanticipated flux of warm temperatures and open skies saw people out and about. Feeling inventive, Linda was bouncing around the kitchen, window wide open, her lungs full of sweet air. She was creating a batch of cupcakes. Ever since the festival had ended, she’d got it in her head to migrate her artistic curiosities from the canvas to the kitchen. Listening to a playlist on a portable speaker Prairie had left around for household use, she stood over the island bench mixing up a buttery paste. In one hand she held the whisk, in the other a cupcake from a previous test batch. Putting it to her lips, she taste tested it. Sure, it oozed flavour, but it lacked a certain… texture. This new batch needed to be smoother. In answer, she dumped more butter in, and a smidge of egg. She flinched as a drop of mix spat up at her, and looked down to see it dirtying the front of her mustard yellow shirt. She wiped it off with one finger and licked it clean, then became distracted by a sight. Her belly’s dome shape, beneath the mustard fabric, seemed admirable to her. And the dimple her navel made, leading the charge out front. Making sure no one was around, she jabbed a finger into her paunch and pushed around, just to make sure it still squished to one side, then gave it a few taps to make it bounce. She didn’t let herself lift her shirt and stare, by this point a habitual addiction.

Some time later there came the jangling of keys being tossed in a handbag. In bounced Milo, doing a final round through the kitchen to steal some snacks before heading out. Linda snuck glances. Milo was looking no thinner. The increase in household groceries had accustomed them to a bigger diet~ a way of life nobody seemed ready to dial back on. Despite Milo’s claims she should “probably start” eating less, it never actually happened. Her squished-together thighs showed pink lightning marks of growth. Thanks to the extra weight, she’d stopped prancing around the house in her old feathery, musical manner. There was something restrictive in the way her thighs swiveled past each other as she walked to the pantry and clutched an entire handful of biscuits, like she’d never felt so hungry in her life, and stashed them in her bag. As of yet she didn’t have much of a “paunch” to speak of~ not like the others. Instead Milo’s middle had grown thick in all ways~ up and down, from one side to the other ~taking on the appearance of a marshmallow. Remembering the waify Scandinavian body she used to dash around in, then extrapolating its surfaces outwards~ hips, waist, chest, arms, legs ~you find today’s version of Milo, overfed a for little too long, cute and pudgy. It turned out her face was capable of taking a hit as well. Even when she looked directly forward, a tract of flesh projected from her chin straight back to her neck, spreading upwards to find the backs of her jaw and a thin layer softness in her upper cheeks.

Milo hadn’t talked much with Linda, since Tjockningfest ended. As Milo turned to face her and offer a sarcastic bow farewell, Linda could smell the residual guilt still lingering in her eyes~ even her body language. As poker-faced an actor as Milo was, she could sense it still, bottled-up, nervous. She could also see the dimple of a surprisingly large belly button in Milo’s grey shirt beneath an open leather jacket. She couldn’t help but wonder how deep that navel went… the girth of it… the traceable shape… Milo’s squishy parts were a product of laziness. Who knew if she liked them. All anyone knew was that she couldn’t be arsed changing her habits.

With that, Milo spun around, shuffled out the kitchen, threw a “See ya” to the fleshy blob of Sofia on the lounge, and flew out the door. Linda fancied that Milo had taken that smidge of guilt out with her; the weight of an overdue apology which nobody wanted to give.

The same went for Prairie. Linda was in the middle of creating different icings and toppings, with mixing packets, sugar, spoons, bowls all over the table, and through the open window a pleasant breeze which had no place in winter, when Prairie appeared.

She could tell by the way her roommate came in. Prairie was chatting and smiling, not looking where she was going~ then hushed as she spun to see Linda occupying the kitchen. Her glee died, even as her ““maybe”” boyfriend tailed her in. Which is perhaps why she was dressed in such an ambitiously minimal outfit. She was almost pulling it off, except… she wasn’t exactly dressed in it. More like her body was spilling out of it in places, contesting it in others. Amid short blonde hair, curled like a 60’s broadway model, her face radiated cherubic vibes~ faintly flushed, even, in the cheeks, either from the sudden hot weather or the sudden extra weight she had to carry around. Softness had strapped itself behind her jaw and erased some of the definition in her neck, doubling up only enough to tease, just to tease another chin. But it came clear whenever she grinned at something her boyfriend said, her laugh lines as clear as ever, maybe even deeper, with that little extra cushion. Her shirt hung a few sizes too large, low in the neckline to let a breath of cleavage show, and her tubby midriff would’ve been concealed except that for some reason she’d tied the hem off above her belt. Actually, she had no belt~ twin lovehandles curved over her waistband, eliminating the need for support as her thighs and butt filled denim pants to their swelling-point. Her tummy’s flesh showed faintly pink in the window sunlight, but her belly button sat dark, deep like a peephole, as an inch or more blubber cushioned it begging to be poked the way it stuck out at everyone, all jiggly.

Her boyfriend lurked behind her, looking kinda dopey and uncertain. He could sense there was tension, but didn’t know why, or where, or what to do about it. Prairie was doing her best not to linger too long. Standing over the sink to fill her water bottle at the tap, she felt she had to break the silence. Trying her best not to look at Linda’s bubble-shaped body, her words came out rather desperately.

‘Watch’a doin?’, failing to sound natural.

‘Making cupcakes,’ Linda said, loving how obvious she sounded.

Prairie said nothing more. She spun the cap onto her bottle and tailed her boyfriend out and down the hallway, her bare lovehandles sent bouncing with each foot fall. ‘Bye,’ she called out last minute to the household, ‘be back tomorrow!’

When Linda heard the front door shut, leaving an absent silence, the sound she could hear was of her cutlery against the bowl.

Moving to the sink to rinse her whisk, she replayed the previous scene in her mind. The guilt must have got to them. Prairie never knew what to say anymore. Poor girl.

Linda sneered and shrugged. She’d forgive her roommate. One day. Just not now.

Well, then. With all her roommates out for the night, it was just her until morning. Alone with food.

Full of wild energy, all alone, the same way you felt as a child with the house finally to yourself, she’d planned this crazy, all-night binge, before she even knew what she’d done.

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It was long after dark. That eventual minute when midnight walkers vanish from the streets, perhaps a solitary car idles at an intersection all alone, not a sound in any house but the rustling of sheets and the mellow hum of a heating unit.

And yet there were shuffling sounds coming from the kitchen. The closer you got to the doorway, the clearer it became, until you could hear the fridge door scrape open. A faint light bloomed against the darkness. It was Linda, her plush rear outlined in the quicksilver light from inside the fridge as she bent over and peered in. This was unusually careless of her, but she couldn’t help it. Nobody was home. She was in love with this feeling. All she had on was a clingy  pair of cotton shorts and a cropped tee more like a strip of fabric wrapped around her shoulders than anything. And yet it stayed on. It only just hung over her breasts. Though it wouldn’t have, two months ago. She never used to have any. Tearing her gaze away from a bottle of milk, she looked down at her boobs, beginning to hang under their new size. She lifted her hands to cup each one individually, running her thumb along the spill of cleavage poking over the low neck of the top. If anyone saw her like this, there’d be nothing she could do. Her nipples stood to attention with the thought. She let her palms brush against their tips, gentle as a breeze, setting off tingles sharp as sparks. Her breathing grew heavy. She scrunched each breast in her hands, fondling them like dough, then moved down to her paunch, letting it sleepily jiggle as she ran her hands down its various subtle undulations. She wondered how much longer she had to eat before it started to hang. Not long, she thought. She traced one finger along the side of her belly where it protruded most and watched it tremble. She bit her lip. Time to make this thing bigger.

Looking back up at the fridge, she contemplated its contents. Cabbage. Turnips. Milk. What could she make out of milk?…

And the thud of footsteps.

Her heart stopped.

The footsteps had weight in them.

‘I knew it!’ came a voice.

Linda’s shoulder blades clenched tight. She bolted upright and spun around, one hand still on the fridge door ready to slam it shut. ‘Wh–’

Just beyond the kitchen entrance, who else stood watching her but Sofia, hidden in the dark except for where the dim light revealed the silver sheen of a nightie draped over ginormous hills of flesh.

‘Oh. I. Um,’ exceedingly pathetic, Linda’s lungs shrank and her legs turned to smoke, ‘I thought you were…’

‘I never said I was anywhere?’ Sofia gave her a confused glare. She shifted her weight to one leg.

‘Well… I– I… mmm…’ Looking off to a spot just past Sofia’s eyes to avoid contact, Linda began to ease the fridge shut.

‘Stop right there,’ said Sofia. ‘You can’t hide what I know, for a fact, you were doing.’

‘Uhm…’

‘You know what I mean.’

Painfully conscious of the refrigerator’s cold air coming onto her bare tummy, she moved one arm across herself as if she might actually hide her creation, but all she ended up doing was hover-handing her own hip.

‘Oh come on,’ Sofia giggled, ‘everyone knows what’s under there. No need to be doing that anymore. Everybody can see it, and you know what? Nobody cares.’

Linda stood still, hiding her shame, sucking in.

‘Oh for goodness sake, take your arm away.’

Her heart full of lead, Linda slowly lowered her arm.

‘Now, let go.’

Still she disobeyed. That was a no-no. Her eyes flicked to the side, off towards some dark corner of the room where she wouldn’t have to face Sofia.

Sofia came forward a step. ‘Let it go, Lindy.’

At last she relaxed. An entire day’s worth of snacking revealed itself, the spherical bulk of fat in her belly protruding even further. She looked down to see it swell past her breasts, her belly button pioneering the chubby advance. Despite the deep bodily relaxation in letting herself relax, a mega-ton of shame and guilt came swarming down over her soul like a flock of ghostly crows. Her shoulders sank under the weight. Her posture melted.

Sofia observed silently, as if evaluating a dress. Then, ‘I hate to say this, Lindy, but I think I’ve just outed you by accident.’

Something about the way she said it made Linda’s blood seethe. ‘Caught me what?’ she said through a clenched jaw.

Sofia hesitated, then shrugged. ‘Enjoying yourself.’

Linda’s heart raged. Suddenly she felt energised. Blinking furiously she said, ‘Ex-cuuuuse me? If– if it wasn’t for you guys, toying with my head, all season, I wouldn’t be, would I!’ … And it all came spilling out at last. … ‘How am I meant to even deal with this, now that it’s happened to me? You, and Milo, and Prairie. Yeah, that’s right. E-xact-ly!’ Her whole body was into the act now, stomping and stabbing at the ground with her finger to emphasise, making her thighs jiggle and her belly to take a shockwave or two. ‘I know what you guys did, I listened in on one of your little conversations.’

She watched the realisation hit Sofia’s face in the gloom.

‘I heard you talking about what you did to me. Making me eat fat-ass loads of everything even though I didn’t want to, no wonder you all got fat. I’m not even that fat yet–’ (provoking a ridiculous laugh from Sofia), ‘–no thanks to you guys. I can’t even believe you actually did this to me! I said over and over, I’m not doing Tjockningfest. And I meant it, didn’t I! I didn’t want to do it and yet here I am, I’ve done it, when I didn’t even want to, all because my manipulative, fucking, housemates, fed me, too, much, SHIT–’

Her voice faltered as she ran out of her last lungful. She sucked in a deep breath, but nothing came back out. There was nothing left to say. She stood there, defiant. She watched Sofia, waited for the guilt she’d seen Milo and Prairie to come over her.

But nothing did.

Sofia held Linda’s stare without a flinch. A direct challenge. Perhaps a smirk. It was hard to tell in this faint light.

Finally Sofia shrugged. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I get it. I know what we did. And I’m sorry… almost. Doesn’t even surprise me that you found out, really. But after all that, you’re just gonna quit? After Tjockningfest ended? Yeah *right*, Lindy. You’ve kept going. You’re *still* going. You still eat. You eat like an elephant. Because you like it, and you know it.’

‘I do not!’ Linda whined, shrinking back into herself.

Sofia took another step in, whole body wobbling slowly as if surprised by the sudden move. Her sheer presence felt like gravity, and Linda found herself retreating a little. ‘I know what you’ve been doing these past few weeks. I need say no more.’

Linda felt exposed, trapped in a glass box without clothes. Once more she tried to close the fridge and kill the light, but Sofia stopped her with a firm no. Linda had no idea why she obeyed.

‘I know,’ Sofia changed her tone. ‘You’re still confused about this. You’re like a high schooler, you wonder if you’ve gone too far. I know, I’ve been there.’

‘Oh really.’ Linda just wanted to be left alone. So many things inside her she wanted to get out, alone in her room. To touch herself in her room. She wanted to be fat in her room, alone.

‘So you think you’ve gotten too big? I don’t want to have to say this, Lindy, but you don’t know anything yet. You don’t know what fat is. Look at you, you’re still so skiiiinny! You need to see what being fat really *means* before you scare yourself off. Here, look at this.’

She stepped further into the dim light, and Linda could finally see her clearly. Large swathes of Sofia’s silk nightie obscured her folds, but were helpless against the shapes her huge dough rolls imposed against the fabric. Then Sofia performed the ultimately obscene act. Bending forward and forcing her rotund arms to cross over her even larger waist, she grabbed her nightie by the hem and wriggled it up over her head. There was a lot of fabric to remove. As she shimmied it off, every square inch of her was sent wobbling, parts of her jiggling that Linda never knew could move. All that was left underneath was an extra-sized bra hardly able to hold her breasts the right way, and… well you couldn’t even tell if she had panties on. Linda’s breath drained as she gaped, open mouthed. Her lips twitched. All she saw was flesh. Pale, faintly pink-mottled flesh. Sofia’s main attraction was her belly~ too large to be real, the shape of a beanbag with a huge dent at its centre, taking up half her thigh space with its bulbous droop. Despite her gut being such an oversized glob of fat that you couldn’t wrap your arms around her, it still gave Sofia a kind of presence that radiated raw sexuality, sheer power, and for some reason, unsurpassable love. Like a mother. Her breasts were enormous, hanging full like water drops under their own weight, drifting away from each other as the upper portion of her stomach protruded from in between, bringing into view a swathe of pink lightning. The lower end of her belly was queen, dwarfing all competition. It held her waist and hips in a ring of lard so deep and smooth it could swallow your hand whole, taking so much space that her lovehandles had finally become one with it, and it was as if her elephant thighs began all on their own, no hips or pelvis to join them together any longer.

Linda’s eyes felt burnt in their sockets. She didn’t know where to look. Blinded by Sofia’s nakedness, everything forced in her face, pale and overgrown, she could not look away. There was nowhere to turn and hide. Not even within herself. Feeling her soul melt from the inside out, Linda bolted from her emotions and simply squealed. ‘Ew, gross! I didn’t ask to see that!’

Sofia put it plainly: ‘That’s too bad.’

Linda gawked, her eyes exploring the path of every fold, every line caused by every roll of swollen blubber weighing down upon the next. Finally she said, ‘I’m getting out of here.’

Sofia sighed and looked around the kitchen. ‘Nope.’

‘Wh–’

‘You have to do something first.’

Linda fidgetted as if busting for the toilet. ‘Okay, okay! Fine. I’ll apologise to them. I’ll do it, just please let me go. I’m sorry, I’m sorry for whatever I did, I just–’

‘Uh - uh. Nope.’ With a plump finger-wag and an almost apologetic expression.

Linda tingled with an anticipation she didn’t want to feel right now. Anywhere but here and now.

‘You’re in the kitchen, and it’s 1.15 at night. You should finish what you started.’

Linda looked from side to side, searching for an excuse to leave.

‘I think that,’ Sofia explained, ‘it would be a good training exercise for you to try and to eat everything in this kitchen.’

Heat flooded Linda’s body. There was no way she could do that.

But the idea was enough to make her pelvis grow heavy. She wanted to. But she wanted to not want to. But she wanted to. She squirmed where she stood. Oh god.

Then Sofia shifted her weight, causing her body to shake again, and Linda got to see it happen all over. She marvelled at how heavy Sofia’s belly was, so full of fat that only its lower half managed to jiggle. Then disgust came screaming in from behind, and Linda found a new energy fueling her voice. ‘Move. Move out my way right now!’

The immovable Sofia only grinned. ‘First, you’re going to have to show me a girl can eat.’

‘No I’m not!’

‘Um. Yes? It’s who you are now.’

‘No I’m not! Move out my way.’

Sofia crossed her arms~ or tried to. The girth of each breast made it a task like trying to balance water bags on your forearms. With some wrestling, she managed to tuck her sausage limbs underneath her boobs, leaving them no room but to spill over their cups in blobs of faintly stretch-marked fat. ‘I’m can’t move until you do what I say.’

Leaving the fridge wide open, Linda decided it was time to walk away.

Denying Sofia’s claims to authority, she beeline straight for her room. But Sofia’s bulk loomed. As she drew near, Sofia took an easy step into her path. Linda came up short. She refused to lock eyes. Hopping to the side, tried to move past. But Sofia was in the way again, and Linda found herself shoulder-deep in a cushion of body-wide flesh, warm and soft as the embrace of a dream. She flinched away. Shook off the tingles running through her body and stared directly at the ground. ‘Please,’ she tried, ‘can you please move.’ Sofia remained.

Then it was as if Linda reverted to childhood; she planted her palms against Sofia’s belly and leaned into her, heaving with all her might, the balls of her feet slipping on the linoleum floor as she pushed. A prolonged grunt escaped from tightened lips. Then a faucet inside her spun loose, and her last strength drained away. She stood there panting, leaning like a child, exhausted, into the embrace of warm flesh, the feeling as impossible as a deep dream, its sensational bliss unreal. An immense calm stole over her. She found herself taking the excuse to stay here~ though in truth, she was not exhausted, merely hypnotised. She was seeing visions, again. The flesh could have been hers. This abundance of soft life, all hers… plush, smooth, gentle to touch, always yielding…

She realised what she was doing. ‘What the fuck.’ She recoiled, laughably weak. But it was too late. She’d done what she’d done. As she stepped back, her soul shrivelled. She felt overpowered, cornered, too small for her loudest cry to be heard for miles.  ‘What the fuck,’ she said again, even quieter.

‘The “what”,’ proposed Sofia after some time of silence, ‘in “what the fuck”, is this: You have to eat as many things as there are, in this kitchen, until you can’t eat any more. Then you get to leave.’

‘Wh– what the hell? Why?’ Linda fell back, looking for a shadowy spot, anywhere, somewhere she could hide away and take every spilled secret with her forever.

‘Don’t act so offended. You love this. Don’t imagine I can’t tell.’

‘But…’

‘Don’t worry. Milo and Prairie have no idea. Congrats, you successfully made them feel bad for helping you enjoy a fucking festival. Now what? You wanna make *me* feel bad about it? Me? At this size? I haven’t stood up straight and seen my own toes for three years now. And I love it. What’s it to me?’ Then she got an idea. ‘Oh hey, that reminds me. Guess what I weigh.’

‘...’

‘Don’t worry, you can guess high as you want.’

Linda stared somewhere into vacuous space between the two of them. All she wanted was to get out of here, put some clothes on, lay in bed and cry herself to sleep. But her huge roommate clearly wasn’t going anywhere. Swallowing her own spit, she gradually managed to use her voice. ‘Uhm… I… I don’t know. Two-hundred and…’

Sofia laughed at the ceiling, her water bag chest and overblown gut appearing as if to gulp with tremendous wobbles. ‘Lindy. Lindy, you can’t possibly offend me at this point. Go way higher.’

‘Three hundr… ?’

‘Three hundred and nineteen,’ Sofia nodded once, proudly, a pleased smile stretching across her fatty face. She tilted her chin up in pride. ‘And Milo? Prairie? Go on, guess what they gained … P.S; don’t let them know I told you… wink…’

Linda couldn’t believe she was being made to do this. Staring into a far corner, she did her best to imagine the difference between their past and present selves. She wanted this to be over with. ‘Uhm… I don’t know… twenty?’

‘Each?’

‘I guess…’

‘Up a smidge.’

‘Twenty… one?’

‘Look. Milo says she gained twenty seven pounds. To be honest, I believe her. It’s in her character to be matter of fact. Prairie, though, she claims she gained twenty eight. But she had a funny look when she admitted it, so we have to bump it up to at least thirty pounds. And yes, I’m dead serious.’

Linda couldn’t focus. Everything was double.

‘I know,’ Sofia beamed. ‘She doesn’t look it, does she. She looks like fifteen or twenty at most, wouldn’t you agree? But that’s only because I’ll let you in on a secret: us girls fucking loooove to suck in all the time, it makes us look thinner (psst, you’re still doing it, I can tell). Actually, I caught Prairie unawares once, just like you. Guess where the missing ten pounds were kept?’ Sofia pointed in at her stomach with a knowing look. ‘I was surprised, but then I remembered there’s two types of chunk.’ Sofia stood on one leg like a teacher. ‘Visceral, and subcutaneous. Subcutaneous fat is this beautiful stuff right here,’ reaching down to shake one thigh until it wobbled like mad, ‘and that stuff there,’ pointing at Linda’s puffy belly. ‘It’s under the skin, soft and jiggly. The other type is visceral fat. That’s under your stomach muscles, doesn’t jiggle, makes you look bloated. Like that beer-belly look… I think Prairie packs half and half. That’s her secret. She just sucks in all the time to hide it. It’s a certain kind of aesthetic, but it’s still nice, I think. You should see how big her belly gets if you catch her off guard. Jiggly and un-jiggly at the same time, ha!’

When no laughter, not even a smile, came from Linda, Sofia wiped the glee off her face and changed tone.

‘Look, Lind.’ She tilted her head like a concerned mother. ‘If it’s really so unfunny to you, I won’t pretend it is. So. In that case, let’s play a serious game. “Sofia Says”. Sofia saaaays…’ She evaluated the entire kitchen space for a while before deciding on something. ‘Sofia says… walk over to the stove.’

Linda stood her ground for a moment. But her resistance was pathetic as a guilty puppy. Gazing at the floor, she moped across the kitchen to the stove and stood by it, where she silently fumed and bit her lip.

‘Sofia says… turn on the stove light.’

With a sigh, Linda flicked it on, illuminating in dim yellow light a months’ worth of steamy grease and grime from all the fatty foods cooked here.

‘Sofia says; return to the refrigerator.’

Linda shuffled back, all too aware of the responsive jiggles her midriff and outer thighs gave. There was nothing between her bare feet and the hard floor.

‘Sofia says; close the fridge door before everything goes bad.’

The blue light was sucked away, leaving a solitary pool of warm stove light spreading soft shadows through the dark kitchen.

‘Sofia says; look in the top row of cabinets next to the fridge and tell me what’s in them.’

Turning around, Linda opened all three cabinets one by one, reporting in a bored drone what she saw. ‘Sesame seeds, salt, pepper, herbs, spices, mint… basil–’

‘Alright, Sofia says next one.’

‘ … jam, peanut butter, crunchy peanut butter, nutella…’

Suddenly the thought of being forced to eat everything she could made some sort of sense. Not in her head. Just down between her legs. Hot and itchy. Oh god… not now. She continued reporting items:

‘Maple syrup, chocolate syrup… food colouring?… chocolate buttons, jar of cookies… jar of wafers, jar of jelly beans, box of biscuits–’

‘Last one, now.’

‘ … coffee, flour, sugar, more sugar… drinking chocolate, mint slices… maple syrup again, more drinking chocolate, bread, bread again… um, who bought five– six, SEVEN blocks of chocolate???–’

‘Probably you. Okay. Sofia says; take the jam, peanut butter, nutella, chocolate syrup… all the jars and boxes, the mint slices, drinking chocolate, all seven blocks of chocolate and a bag of bread, and place everything in the middle of the kitchen.’

Linda froze for a moment in time. Panicked thoughts spun laps in her mind. She didn’t need this right now. Two opposites kept crashing into each other~ one a need, the other a rational thought. Nevertheless, reluctant as a child told to clean her room, she began taking each item out of the cabinet. Dropping all seven blocks of chocolate on the island bench top with a petulant smack, she awaited her next instruction.

‘Sofia says; list all the items in the pantry.’

She went over, stood inside and reported the items one after the other. By the time she was done, she’d window-shopped so many bright and charismatically wrapped snacks lined up along the walls that her belly was turning inside out with a hunger cavity as large as the pantry itself. Instinct erased sensibility as she began taking down packet after packet of cream tarts, cookies, chips, muesli bars, pretzels~ so many little packets of chocolate you could supply a party…

She wanted to stop. Then she didn’t. Then she did. Then she didn’t. Her head did one thing, her hands did another, her stomach grumbled for everything she saw, while her libido whirled around itself in leaps and bounds of energy.

Then without even being told, she was crossing the floor to the fridge to extract its contents; cheeses blue, yellow and white, yoghurts large and small, a whole box of left-over pizza, spicy chicken wings, sprinkled doughnuts, apple pie, a slice of cheesecake, cups jello, cans of soft drink and fruit juice bombed with sugar…

Sofia was doing well to hide her laughter. Wearing more of a leer, she hardly had to say anything before Linda obliged. ‘Sofia says… start with a soft drink can, then begin on a block of chocolate.’

Being given instructions triggered something in Linda~ a kind of impulse to rebellion ~and she hesitated. Her exposed skin prickled at the roomy cool air wrapping around her half-bare body. But tonight she only had one freedom. Cracking open a can and unwrapping a block of caramel chocolate, the first bites came timid and shy. Which didn’t last long. The more she swallowed, the hungrier she grew, and before long she was feasting without inhibition. Swillingly ** on the first calories, her stomach throbbed for more and her groin joined in now and again. After she finished, she looked at what she’d done, muttering hateful regrets to herself. Her belly was getting big again. But still, it felt spacious, and she was fuzzing with a sensation, smooth and warm, and indescribably satisfying, all the way up and down her spine. That slow ache in her pelvis that she’d come to know these past months was back again. God, if only she could sit down. Her legs were getting weak.

Sofia’s eyes glittered. ‘Good. Now… Sofia Says; a slice of cheesecake. It’s not much, you’ll be done in no time.’

‘Why are you making me do this?’ Linda asked in a small voice even as she massaged her belly and peeled the plastic wrap from the saucer. She began to steps towards the cutlery drawer for a spoon, but Sofia let out a short cry and held her hand out.

‘Ah! No spoon. It’s the rules. Fingers only.’

All Linda could do was deflate, then slowly retreat. ‘… okay then …’

Dragging a kitchen stool alongside the bench top, she lifted herself onto it and felt the chilly bite of leather under her backside as her plush butt cheeks spread themselves out and got comfy. Leaning on one elbow, she lowered her fingers to the slice of cheesecake. Then, picking it up gingerly, presented it to her open lips. The switch flipped instantly. She took a huge greedy bite, cramming as much of the creamy texture into her mouth as she could manage. She could hardly chew without dislocating her jaw. Flavour hit the back her tongue and she felt her body sag against the bench, tension draining from her defensively raised shoulders and her chest curling inwards as strength left her.

When she was done, she’d barely licked her fingers clean before Sofia gave the next command.

‘Well done. Really well done. Now, Sofia says; finish the tub of jelly beans.’

Clutching a handful of the colourful little things, Linda chucked them in her mouth. Then rebellion kicked in again. ‘What do I have to do before you just let me go already?’ she asked through a mouthful of sugar. ‘This is stupid.’ If only she could eat all this in private, and really let go.

‘Until there’s nothing left, miss.’

Linda blinked, an incredulous entering her gaze. ‘But there’s, like–’

‘A lot,’ Sofia smiled and winked. She shifted her body weight onto the other leg, causing a series of wobbles. ‘I know, there’s a lot. I counted nearly thirty things, just so you know. But guess what. I know you can do it.’

‘You’re insane.’ And yet Linda grabbed another handful of jellybeans and opened her lips.

‘Or,’ Sofia clarified, ‘until you’ve reached your limit.’

Linda’s mind ticked. An idea approached slowly through an unclear fog of carbs of sugar. But Sofia saw it in her eyes before Linda even knew what she was thinking.

‘That doesn’t mean you just say you’re too full,’ Sofia corrected. ‘I know what a limit really looks like, and… girly, let me tell you something. You’ve got some capacity to go. So eat up. Show me what that tummy can hold.’

When the last jelly bean vanished, Sofia nodded. ‘Well done. Now, Sofia Says; open the yoghurts.’

The tubs of flavoured yoghurt were only small, didn’t require chewing. Linda peeled away each plastic cover and scoffed them like drinks. While Sofia decided what was next, Linda slammed the last empty cup on the bench like a child trying to make the loudest noise possible, just to remind their parents they aren’t happy with the situation.

‘Sofia says… Sofia says; have the cream tarts to counter the yoghurt.’

Extending her body in a dramatised show of reluctance, she reached for the tub of tarts and popped the lid without caring where it fell. One hand palming her upper stomach like a cat, she got to work. They might have been a bit stale. But who knew. Who cared. All she knew was the filling sensation in her belly, which she was desperate not to look at right now. If only Sofia wasn’t here, overbearing the entire situation, the fat bitch. Glancing in the direction of her room, out there in the dark, past Sofia’s pale bulk, she gave the idea of escape a last-ditch effort. ‘Ugh…’ she made a distasteful face. ‘I don’t want this anymore. I’m too uncomfortable.’

‘Oh, so you still haven’t bought into this experience, then? even though you’ve been doing it for more than seven entire weeks? There’s your guilt trip, again. You don’t want to get bigger, or something, is that it?’

‘No! I don’t!’ Linda threw her hands around angrily and bit into another tart.

‘Why not? You’ve managed so well on your own so far. Most people have feeders helping them out, for god sakes. Why don’t you just throw it all away, already? Give in to whatever your body wants?’

Linda knew why. Her appetite shrivelled, and there was an extended silence. Sofia waited for an answer. Eventually it would emerged. It was obvious Sofia wasn’t going anywhere. Finally Linda slumped, consequence-laden thoughts coming down on her soul like a rush of plumbing. There was a sudden heaviness in the air. Sofia waited still. Linda’s heart dropped a level. She wished her roommate would just leave. She looked at the tart in her hand, eyed it like a lump of dirt, slowly put it down on the bench.  ‘Because…’ It took a long time to find her voice. ‘No one finds… guys don’t think girls like us… like me–’

‘Oh!’ Sofia interrupted, mortified, loud as possible. ‘Now that’s just not even true. You should know better than this. I know it for a fact. You listen here.’ Sofia looked her directly in the eyes. ‘There are guys out there who love this kind of shit, and you better believe it. They think it’s so hot they jack to it.’ Linda looked off the side, attempting to process this. ‘Think whatever you want. It’s just a fact. Now…’ She nodded at the food. ‘Eat.’

But Linda was still stuck on the last part. ‘Really?’ she asked, looking halfway up, struggling to find courage to believe.

There was no affirmation, nor denial, from the plus sized Instagram model, who struck poses as if she had all the answers in the world. ‘Sofia says; take the bag of pretzels… that one there. Eat all of them.’

She tried to bust the packet open with two hands, but it was tough. When it broke, her arms jerked and she felt her loose breasts shake. Scooping up a handful of the salty biscuits, she palmed them into her mouth, a crumb or two falling away either side.‘I can’t believe this is happening,’ she lamented through a mouthful.

‘I can. You’ve been gorging yourself for the past, what, eight, nine weeks? and you still can’t believe?’

Linda almost yelled at her, but fell back before anything blew up, all out of energy from too much food. She let her glare say its own thing. Who knows what Sofia interpreted. Probably just petulance. She just stood in the kitchen entrance, blocking it with her immense size, one hand resting atop her wreckingball gut, tracing discreet circles around the landscape of blubber. Whenever her palm skipped a few inches along its journey, a wave of flesh would tremble, then travel down her belly until losing its last jiggles through the underside of her overgrown belly. Linda couldn’t look anywhere else.

Once she was done eating, she pressed her palm into her stomach and the next instruction came.

‘Sofia says; it’s time for cheese. Have whichever you like. Take the biscuits to put the cheese on. Have a fruit juice too..’

Thinking of all the lovely little sugar molecules in that one bottle, Linda cracked it open, took a test sip, then chose a blue cheese, cut slices for the crackers, stacked them and lifted it to her lips.

‘Sofia says; time for some apple pie. You’re not going to want it cold. Sofia says; preheat the oven on fan bake, prepare a tray and wait for further instruction.’

Linda did as she was told. When she slid off the stool, she landed harder than she thought, potbelly bouncing. The linoleum was cold against her soles. She bent down to twist the dials, feeling her belly mush itself against her shorties. The apple pie came out of its box, onto a tray and into the oven. Then she pushed herself back up onto the stool and waited.

‘Sofia says; eat the  jello cups.’

Linda slurp them down like shots. Looking up at the ceiling, she arched her back, felt her belly jut out with freedom, then dumped each jello cup into her mouth, hardly savouring the taste they had to offer, one after the next.

Sofia was nodding in approval, amused. ‘I knew you had it in you. Now, Sofia says; finish the bag of chocolate buttons.’

Again, Linda was too fast. They were the size of smarties, and all she had to do was pour the bag into her mouth, chew not nearly enough to be safe, and swallow them all. If this was her idea of “rebellion”, then Sofia was going to give to allow it. Linda’s lips bulged with a suppressed burp, then her eyes glazed over. She let the empty packet fall to the floor and pressed into the side of her abdomen with her knuckles. Another burp found its way out.

‘Good stuff,’ Sofia encouraged. ‘Okay, Sofia says; time to put the pie in the oven.’

Linda’s eyes remained glazed. Without looking anywhere but ahead, she slid off the stool, rocking in her absence, and flung the oven door open. The whirring of the fan and a shockwave of heat bloomed in the kitchen’s chill. She slid the tray inside and shut it, the sound vanishing, then returned to the stool, making a small grunt as she pushed herself up with one hand on the seat and the other on the bench. Her belly was getting too big for this sort of movement.

‘Now we’ll pass the time. Sofia says; make that jar of wafers disappear.’

They were dry and brittle, hardly any flavour to be tasted, so she cracked open another can of soft drink without permission and sank half in a single chug. She gasped as she unstuck it from her lips, but was unable to think quickly enough and shut her mouth as a surge of gas came funneling out her lips. ‘Ugh.’ Swallowing sugary saliva, she finished off the rest of the wafers. An extended gulp of drink washed them down. As the last trickle of liquid fell into the back of her throat, she felt her stomach lining grow. It hurt to sit straight, even with her belly pushed out. Her lower back had to support this posture.

She would have spotted the silent laugh in Sofia’s handsome, fleshy face, but a calorie-laden veil came over her awareness. Her thoughts stopped coming so easy. The simplicity in everything around her seemed apparent. She didn’t even look at her obese roommate, who quickly wiped the knowing smirk off her face and issued another instruction. With a brief glance at the clock, ‘Okay. Sofia says; cookie jar. Think you can eat them?’

‘Dunno. I’m getting full.’

‘Too bad. Eat.’

Again Linda found herself in need of drink. The cookies left grit on her fingers, which in turn left crumbs all over her second bottle of fruit juice, which she was wrapping her lips around and sucking down, gulp by gulp. ‘Uh, fuck,’ she drawled. Holding the bottle away from her face and inspecting it like a foreign object, it was suddenly empty. She felt a new heaviness in her middle, and began to wonder if she might be nearing her limit. But there were cookies next to her hand. And they had chocolate in them. So she took another. Failing to insert the entire thing in her mouth, she munched one bite at a time. Then another, and another, until the cookies went extinct. Only crumbs remained, dusting the bottom of the jar. Linda’s throat tightened on the first notes of nausea as shivers went up and down the back of her stomach.

‘Sofia says; eat the two sprinkled doughnuts.’ A patient glance at the clock. There was ten minutes left.

Linda finished the doughnuts right on time. Slouched against the counter so badly that she was at risk of tipping the stool sideways, a few sprinkles still dotted the corners of her lips. She raised a weakened hand and dabbed them away with a finger, sucking it clean.

‘Sofia says; take the apple pie out the oven.’

‘Can you get it,’ Linda groaned.

‘No.’

‘Ugh m’ fuckn god.’ Linda’s eyelids were so heavy you could hardly tell if she was awake. With a deep breath, she eased herself off the stool, one buttery leg wobbling, then the other, and shuffled to the drawer to fetch a pair of oven gloves. The small of her back curved under the load of her gut, whose flabby surface still jiggled as she stepped heavily around. Bending down before the oven, she nearly tipped over. She got down on her knees instead. When she opened the door, a surge of trapped heat exploded, blasting her awake as she flinched away, scrunching her face. She waited until the heat died off, eyes scrunched. Squinting, she carefully eased her hands inside, elbows raised to avoid getting burnt and extracted the furnace-hot tray like a relic. It was heavier than she thought, and when she tried to stand, she put too much weight on one leg. She didn’t succeed. There was a pathetic yelp as she lurched. Her heaviness fell to one side. Even as she tried to keep the food level, her elbow hit the floor first, and the tray slipped out of her grip, the weight in her ass dragging her body onto the floor. She landed sideways, one hand extended towards the spilled tray.

The room was still.

She looked over at Sofia, who was heaving with silent laughter, mounds of flesh shaking. Linda looked at the tray. It’d landed okay, the apple pie having slid to the far end. For some reason she was out of breath. ‘Fuck,’ she breathed, lowering her head to let her cheek rest on the floor. She took a few deep lungfuls of air and wondered what just happened. Lifting her torso on weak arms, she wriggled onto her knees so she was on all fours. A handful of chub somewhere on her belly jiggled as it hung free. She liked the way it felt to have her back sag like a bridge under the weight of everything inside her. If only she was alone. Slowly, she got up on her feet again, readjusted her oven gloves, bent carefully down to the tray and lifted it like a one-million dollar lump of gold about to shatter at the slightest knock. This time she succeeded.

Sliding the tray onto the bench top, she caught sight of her tummy beneath her vision. When she looked down, she was greeted by a rotund sight. The bell-shape of her midsection met her with its blubbery grin, wrapping all the way around her waist, her belly button ballooned out past her breasts. Awe drenched her eyes. There was no way she looked like this, for real. Fuck. She wanted to be alone with herself, right now. She wished she could hold her belly and explore its surface. But  Sofia was standing right there, watching everything. What about her? Did she want to touch it as well? Did she enjoy the feeling? Someone like Sofia, with her own enormous tire of a waist?

Linda tried to leave one last time. ‘Please, I’m so sore. You won already. Can I go?’

‘You're getting there. Once you finish, you can lay in bed. If I don’t have to carry you, that is. Eat.’

Linda sighed. She fetched a small tub of thick cream, which she didn’t ask permission for, but if Sofia wanted her to eat everything available, then fuck her… Grunting with the effort, she lifted her backside up onto the stool. The first few bites of the pie had her tongue dancing. The next made her soul want to melt into a pool of fuzz. A few more and her stomach clenched on itself. At the halfway point she felt that strain in her lower back again. With a quarter of the pie left, her jaw was numb from chewing and her tongue was practically dead. For the last mouthful she cracked open another can of soft drink, taking three desperate gulps to wash it down. Carbonation seared the walls of her throat and she winced. Then as it filtered into her stomach, she swore she felt something over-extend. Her lungs squashed in on themselves, trapped. How long could she keep running out of room like this?

‘Sofia says; another block of chocolate to help it settle.’

‘Settle!?’ Linda nearly screeched. Her stomach was already packed with all it could hold. Any more would clog up like a backed-up pipe and come back out her mouth.

‘Yes, settle. Look, Lind. Let me give you a little education.’ Sofia spread her weight onto both her pudding legs and tried her best to cross one arm under her cumbersome boobs and rest an elbow upon her hand, waving her fingers in the air to illustrate her explanations. ‘Everyone has a limit. One you can’t go past. It’s painful, and it’s sickening, and it’s so powerful that you… well it’s impossible to go past. Want to know how close you are?’

‘ … yeah …’

‘You’re not even halfway there. Your body and mind keep tricking themselves into thinking you’re too full. But have you ever been *truly* full? I mean so stuffed you couldn’t move? I don’t just mean pain, or being sick, or sleepy. I mean so badly stuffed you can’t move anymore, you can’t stand, you can’t even think, you just pass out?’

Linda remembered all the punishments, day after day, she’d given her stomach these past months, and realised she’d never been quite so food-fucked. Sure, she’d been close. But she understood what Sofia was talking about stood in another league, even if she didn’t want to believe it. Was being that bloated even possible? Some sort of myth? The thought of more food kept leading to the thought of vomit on the one hand~ so how was it that Linda wanted to keep eating, on the other? She eyed the food, imagining how many pounds, jiggles and inches each would paint on her body.

‘So?’ Sofia probed. ‘Have you? No? Well then…’ She nodded towards the pile of food. ‘Eat.’

‘Eat what,’ Linda asked the the bench, her head lolling from side to side. For some reason her temples throbbed. Was it desire or hunger?

‘You chose, now. You’ve been good enough.’

‘Stop talking to me like that.’ Linda gave a long groan before sliding painfully off the stool. It was harder than it ought to’ve been, trying to position her waist so she didn’t have to tense her stomach muscles and vomit up everything inside her.

‘But you’re a bit of a piggy, aren’t you?’ Sofia observed.

Linda froze in her tracks, one arm still on the stool, her paunch immensely bloated, heaving in and out with her breaths. ‘W– what?’

‘You have to admit it, don’t you?’ Sofia gave Linda an approving look. ‘Unless…’ she tilted her jaw up thoughtfully. ‘Unless; would you say that you’re thin?’

Linda didn’t want to answer that. ‘I need to get napkins,’ she mumbled.

Sofia angled her jaw the other way with a miniature smile. ‘So, you know you’re not, then… You know you’re really, really fat.’

Linda slumped against the bench top as Sofia’s words sunk in. She kept her head averted, trying to ignore reality~ the living potential of what she would become. But no matter how hard she tried, she could not help herself. She looked down and brought one hand slowly, ever so slowly, to the surface of her bulging midriff. It’d grown so big and buttery. So round. She remembered the day, not so long ago, when her lovehandles weren’t much to speak of. Well, they’d appeared, now, in full force, around the same time her paunch had grown chunky enough to bear the weight of its first downwards sag. How was this possible? How did it happen, night by night, biological step by step? Science was one thing, but to see it happen was another. More like magic than anything. She ate, then ate some more, and before she knew it, everything was imperceptibly larger. She could pinch more flesh, her clothes felt slightly wrong. Repeat once, repeat twice, and suddenly you could tell she’d been doing something naughty in her spare time.

It was as if Sofia had listened in on her thoughts. ‘No, of course you’re not thin anymore. How did it get to this? I asked myself that once. The answer’s in what you are. It’s not a bad thing to be a piggy, you know. You have to love it. And you *can*. You just have to admit it, first. Now give that poor tummy a rub, and eat up.’

‘But–’

‘Eat.’

Message received, Linda took one of the blocks of chocolate and slunk back to the stool, which waited for her patient as a torture device, a pedestal from which her out-of-shape shame could be evaluated by some invisible crowd of jury members.

It all went wrong when she tried to get back up. When she tensed her stomach to twist her backside up onto the seat, pain shot across her abdomen. Nausea gurgled. The underside of her ass caught on the edge of the stool. It leaned back a fraction. Chocolate in one hand, seat in the other, she shoved her ass further up. But it was all over. Her weight went off back. She groped at the bench with one hand as the stool went over, but her body weight took her down with it, and she landed hard on her left ass cheek, legs sprawling one way, the rest of her the other. The impact thumped through her body, layers of fat jiggling.

There was a sharp smack as the stool hit the floor.

The event reverberated into silence.

Linda lay stunned. It was night. Nobody was around to see. Except for Sofia, who’d said nothing, yet. White noise drenched her elbow, slowly resolving itself into a dull painful throb. The floor felt cold, but the pressure in her overloaded stomach was worse, sagging as if pulling her entire body towards the earth. She tried not to lock eyes with her only witness.

Writhing into a sitting position, she put her back against the bench, splayed her chubby legs and just sat there catching her breath. She prodded her misery with a stick for a while. But… her heart kept thudding, over-excited. Her mouth was dry. She liked this for some reason. A lot. Too much. It felt good to be like this. Felt nice to be sore. To be overfed and heavy. Too many calories. She knew she was about to grow~ the rumble between her thighs knew it too.

Sofia knew what she was looking at. ‘See?’ she said. ‘Quite frankly, you love this. You should. It’s liberating. You were doing yourself a dodgy deal before. Now…’ She paused, waiting for Linda’s full attention. ‘Before I let you go… you’ve got to do me one last favour.’

Linda glared up at her from beneath troubled eyebrows, her resentment returning at a boil. ‘What “deal”? … As if this shit isn’t enough.’

‘You don’t get to stop eating,’ Sofia proposed, ‘unless you stop hassling your roommates.’

Linda scowled. She felt like a child being told to share the last toy she had to herself.

‘It’s over, Lindy. You’ve done this to yourself now, and you’ll keep doing it. You’re not fat like I am, but you *are* a little fatty. Do you see my point? Milo and Prairie feel like shit, so good job. Congrats. What are you gonna do about it now? Keep eating? Why do *they* have to pay for that? You paid already by getting fat. I mean look at yourself. Your clothes fit today, but they might not tomorrow.’

Hateful of giving Sofia the reply she wanted, Linda just tore open the chocolate she still held and took a deep chomp right out of the corner, giving her roommate dirty looks. She couldn’t speak with a her mouth so full, and she wanted it that way. Plowing her mouth with chocolate, again and again, she wanted to believe Sofia had moved on from the question.

Fact is, Sofia was just letting Linda do her thing. She was letting Linda grow.

It was sometime well past midnight. There was no sound, no movement, but that of chewing, and Sofia’s encouragement now and again. Most of the food was gone. Linda was still on the floor, an absolute mess of a girl, among empty wrappers and boxes and cartons. She kept swooning in and out of consciousness, legs sprawled open in a lazy V, belly blown up into a mushy hilltop of flesh littered with flecks of chocolate, sticky soft drink, grease smears. A few crumbs had found their way into her belly button, and sat there lurking in the depths to be removed at a later time. Sofia kept shifting her tremendous weight from one leg to the other, making comments and keeping the girl on her binge streak.

Linda felt only half alive. There was so much wrong with her right now, but so much right. She loved it. Or hated it. She loved it, then hated it, then loved it again. She’d tortured her stomach into holding a stash of cookies, a bag of potato chips, a packet of bite-sized chocolates, two blocks of chocolate, a row of mint slices, fourth soft drink can, three nut bars, a third bottle of juice, and an entire jar of Nutella and blueberry jam, still coating her fingers as she lifted them with little energy and took the box of leftover pizza from Sofia, who had come to stand over her. Linda brought it down to her lap with a plop and heaved the lid open to see what was inside. Three quarters of a pizza with supreme topping lay vulnerable. Taking deep breaths hurt, and her heart was progressing with heavy thuds. As she lifted the first slice to her lips, she knew she’d run to the end of her stamina. Her eyes kept losing focus, and the pain in her stomach had turned so dull that she felt less stuffed with food than pregnant with a boulder. By time she’d forced all the slices of pizza inside her, there really was nowhere left for her stomach to stretch. Sharp tensile pains ran everywhere. Something, unable to bear the load, was about to break. She could feel it. Her body was already going into safety mode. Her chest kept thumping, her sides were cramped, her lungs felt small, and for some reason her neck and jaw were throbbing like a headache.

Through her shirt’s opening, the smooth valley between her unbound breasts lay visible, incredibly soft in the hushed yellow glow from the stove light. Beneath the fabric, you could see how they angled to either side of her upper stomach, which stood high and inflated. Even this taut, her gut hadn’t forgotten how to jiggle at an accidental bump. Fuck. Was she really this meaty now? Her thighs, pudgy enough to accumulate dimples along their sides, exaggerated their width, squashed between their own weight and the floor. With her back slouched so drastically against the bench, her head tilted at a forwards angle was enough to fold the softness under her chin into a second version of itself. If the overload of calories she’d binged on had manifested as fresh fat anywhere on her frame by now, there’d be no telling. Although some part of her suspected it could've been true. Lifting one weak, trembling hand on top of her gut, she kneaded it with her palm and realised she might just be in fat territory now. If not now, then tomorrow. For all its beach-ball tightness, her abdominal wall was still lost beneath inches of mush, and there’d be no breaking out any time soon. She groped the meat around her overtaxed navel and came away with a good handful of blubber, her belly button pinched flat between two rolls. She squeezed until it hurt, then kneaded it between her fingers for a moment and a half, marvelling at how much she could still grab. Eyes half shut, lips open, she slurred, ‘Whass.. wha’s left?’

Sofia craned her neck forward. ‘You’ve only got… drinking chocco, three blocks of chocolate, some maple syrup, chocolate syrup, a loaf of bread, a can of fizzy, two juices, and spicy chicken wings left. You’ve eaten so much. Well done. You should be proud of yourself. What would you like next? Would you like me to make you some bread with peanut butter? Some chocolate milk? Chicken wings?’

Linda’s vision swished and swung like wine. A prolonged cramp, so violent that it went numb, coiled inside her gut, and she went manic for a second. She began to laugh, but her stomach had no room for her diaphragm to do anything. Her voice died out in a pathetic, windless grunt.

‘The chick–’ A silent burp of hot air blew out her mouth. ‘Ough. Shicken wings,’ she slurred. ‘Get the schicken wings.’ If she was going to reach the end, she decided the heavy stuff would come first.

With Linda too immense to pull herself up, Sofia had been free unblock the doorway. Every time the poor beached thing wanted more, Sofia gave it to her.

Linda could barely raise her head. With upturned eyes, she watched Sofia’s overtaxed legs push her bulk into motion. It amazed her how Sofia’s whole body could shake, some parts less than others, her monstertruck tire of a gut wobbling all over itself, beachball lovehandles rolling with each footfall and catching second-hand jiggles from her stomach. Standing over Linda, she had to lean on one hand against the bench to support herself as she leaned over with a quiet exhalation and slid the tray of chicken wings towards her body. Every slightest movement had the power of hypnosis~ nothing but jiggles, small and large, her huge belly wiggling over Linda’s head. Standing back up, she lowered the tray to the floor-bound girl, whose weak arms rose again. The thick scent of grease, sweet butter and meat persuaded her nose. Her tongue watered. She wanted it inside her. Taking the offering, she brought the tray down into her lap and, after stopping it from slipping multiple times, lifted a piece of chicken to her lips and tried to lean towards it. But she couldn’t. Her stomach couldn’t contract. ‘Oughf. Fffffuck.’ Nausea burbled up and down her digestive tract, her gag reflex bucked savegely, bringing tears to the corners of her eyes.

‘You can do this.’ Sofia waddled back to her corner of the room, her bum as wide as her hips and jiggling just as slowly with all its lard. She supported herself against the wall and splayed her hands over her stomach, idly stroking herself. ‘Wait for a moment, if you need. You’ll be hungry again in no time. That’s what piggies are, after all, always hungry.’

Linda’s groin clenched, calling for attention. Why did that name have to kill her so bad? Pig. Why did she have to want more? Always more. Pigging out. Taking a huge breath, she let her head fall back and massaged her gut, feeling out its various areas to see whether she could fit more. With a build-up of courage, she parted her lips and elevated a piece of chicken to her mouth. The first bite filled her face with warmth. Light spice woke her tongue up, and before anyone asked, she was bringing another piece to her mouth, forcing her lips around its shape, teeth sinking into the meat, sucking the flavour out in a prolonged kiss. With the next bite, she could feel her stomach take a hit as the first found its way down. The next bite tasted better than the rest somehow. She moaned. Her strained belly tightened some more. Another chicken wing, and she had to shut her eyes. Her face felt so heavy. As if slipping into a dream, she lost sensation in her arms and legs. It wasn’t her choice to bring another piece into her mouth. She’d just opened up and closed her lips around the object, teeth sinking, chewing, swallowing. Her tongue moving slow and thick. Her jaw aching. Her belly pulling tighter. Numb pain. Throbbing.

She lost focus. Pieces of chicken kept coming up to her mouth, and even as her hardened belly hit its peak, she swallowed again. Her abdominal wall nearly broke open. She let her eyes sink down to the tray on her chubby thighs. Empty, but for one last piece. Everything was inside her, now, so rotund she realised she was protruding out her sides~ and that was when it happened. She began to lift the final piece, but, as if in shock, her body fizzed. She began to float. She imagined a pillow beneath her cheek. Her eyes shut on themselves. Her grease-glossy lips hung open, and then with a sag throughout her entire body, her head lolled to one side. Her hand fell into her lap, and the last uneaten chicken wing spilled onto the floor.

At three hours past midnight, Linda was finally asleep. Over one eye an unguarded lock of hair swung down, settling gentle as a butterfly. Quiet snoring began to emerge in fits and starts before an unconscious little burp bubbled past her lips. Then it went away, and she was snoring again.

Sofia chuckled. She watched Linda’s ragdoll body slumber with its potbelly stuck out in the air, legs spread. She remembered being like that. She missed those days. Linda still had so far to go. Her journey had only just begun. The tray, meanwhile, had been creeping slowly off Linda’s thigh at an angle. Gathering momentum, it slipped off and hit the floor with a quiet thud, and a sleepy twitch jumped from Linda’s foot. Then she was still again, and the only sound was her deep breaths.

With a last chuckle and good-natured smile, Sofia snuck over as silently as her heavy feet could manage and went about picking up the rubbish around her. It was an effort, bending down with all that weight on one knee to stop herself from pitching forward. But she gathered each piece of litter in one chubby hand and rose, happily out of breath. After putting the rubbish in the bin, she retrieved her nightie top from where she’d discarded it on the floor by the entrance, wrestled it back on over her jiggly torso, made sure the fridge door was shut tight, then disappeared into the darkness of the flat.

When she came back a few moments later, she held two blankets in her arms. Getting down on her knees beside Linda with a grunt and a body-wide jiggle session, she did her best to ease Linda onto the floor so she laid sideways. Already out of breath from holding the weight of her own torso, she lifted Linda’s head off the ground, slid a bundled blanket underneath, and lowered it back down. Linda’s breath caught. She made a noise, just once, but that was all. Lying curled on her side, the dumpster load of food in her belly was on show as it sagged onto the ground like a bag of water. Sofia had to giggle, how cute Linda looked, all peaceful and filled up. She resisted the urge to poke her belly. With one last smile, she drew the second blanket over Linda’s body, tucked the edges in and nodded to herself.

Then she laboured to lift her body weight back up. After packing up everything Linda hadn’t managed to eat, she ambled over to the stove. She flicked the light off and glanced around. Faint bits of silver light from the kitchen window were all she could see by. She could hardly find Linda, sleeping down there on the floor, much less see the state of her body. (The state of it to come.)

With all done, Sofia smiled like a mother. She left the kitchen. Sooner or later, Linda would wake up, and Sofia knew what it was she would do. For that, Linda needed privacy. And privacy she’d get.

Tjockningfest is done. Linda Ellikopa, the impressionist painter, wanders into the future as yet another citizen whose inherent physique this festival has unlocked, spurred it along its natural path, even if only for an eight-week flux in time. In two years, this will happen again. Veterans will return. Young ones, joining anew, will discover what it all means. But who’s to say Linda needs another Tjockningfest? For all the art she brings into our world for consumption, she consumes as much food in proportion. Perhaps she deserves this, at least, and the body that comes with it. The happiness of letting go.

 

 

 

 

END

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