We spent our mornings working and giggling and talking loudly over the hums and thrums of the mixing machines, breaking from our flour-covered frenzy for the occasional bite of a crois-sant or a handful of cookies or a slice of butter-slathered marble bread or an un-presentable muffin. When I asked her if we needed to do any accounting for our consumption of the store's wares, she laughed and said that there was no problem at all. "Eat all you want; we'll make more! We're making plenty of extra, anyway," she told me, "because Mr. W. wants us to always have a good batch for the Guests."

The "Guests" she was talking about were the homeless people who had a well-established camp behind our store. Like just about every other town in America, Myrmidon, too, was dealing with the problems of tightening budgets and hardening hearts. Two towns away from us, the state had maintained an enormous psychiatric hospital since the 1870s. When the senile and mean-spirited federal government had begun cutting holes in the societal safety net during the 1980s, our state government had been forced to make its own cuts. No one cares about the mentally-ill, they reasoned, so they began a ten-year program to close the majority of the state psychiatric centers. With two years remaining in the ten-year plan, the nearby hospital had gone from a patient popu-lation of nearly four thousand down to less than six-hundred.

Some of the attrition had been due to deaths, some had been transferred to group homes, others to prisons, others to the care of their families. But many of the patients who had been committed in the less-enlightened 1950s and 60s for such things as epilepsy, mania or Tourette's syndrome, were simply wished good luck, given a bus ticket, a couple of hundred dollars and a suit-case of clothes, then thrust out of the safe confines of the institution into the harsh outside world.

The closest bus station to the hospital happened to be in Myrmi and that's as far as many of the former inmates got on their travels. At first, the people of the town were outraged at the state's callous behavior. Being good neighborly folk, they quickly convinced the town government to pass ordinances and funding proposals for shelters and food and public works projects for the homeless. The citizens felt good about themselves and their town and the attendant publicity that stemmed from their efforts. But eventually, the bills came due, and despite their initial good intentions, they found themselves closing the shelters and cutting back the food programs and diverting the fund-ing for the public-works salaries into schoolbooks and fire-fighting equipment.

No one fought the cutbacks more furiously than Mr. Walters, but to no avail. The Town Council was resolute in its decision to channel the funding from the homeless programs to the other needs of the taxpayers. So, realizing that he'd have to put his convictions where his mouth was, he decided to create his own program. There was a large lot behind the store which he'd pur-chased when it became available a couple of years ago, planning for some future expansion. He bought an enormous open-sided tent, covered the ground beneath the tent with a flooring of card-board-sheathed wooden pallets from the stockroom, rented several portable bathrooms, purchased a dozen or so kerosene heaters and hired a couple of security guards to watch the place on the overnights, then invited anyone who wanted to sleep back there, to do so safely and securely. He fed them from his own store, by arranging with some of his distributors to allow him to "damage out" a portion of the canned goods, by having his deli provide the butt ends of the meats and the leftover salads, and by telling Luanne to increase her production by ten percent. He put canned good col-lection boxes in all the churches and schools, big barrels for cast-off clothing in the town office buildings and University dorms, and reserved a portion of his weekly newspaper sale ads to thank the people who'd contributed to his campaign.

It was successful by every measure: the collection points were always overflowing, the local Army-Navy store donated dozens of surplus blankets and the local laundromat arranged to have them washed and cleaned each week. Other businesses and individuals donated what they could: doctors provided on-site checkups, the University offered the homeless free tuition in its adult edu-cation classes, lawyers volunteered to help trace the Guests' long-lost relatives and to defend Mr. W from the non-stop citations issued by the Health Department. Eventually, the Town Council even agreed to fund the sanitation of the camp.

The most miraculous aspect of the whole thing was its longevity: by the time I came to work at the Myrmi Market, Mr. Walters' Guests had been living their lives on their own terms for nearly three years. Some of them had regular jobs and chose to live outdoors nonetheless, while others were incapable of holding employment but still required the dignity of individuality and free will.

One of my favorite morning duties in the bakery department was when Luanne and I would set out the breakfast for the Guests. They were infallibly polite to us, obviously appreciative of both the food and the routine. Luanne told me that when they'd started the camp, the Guests had been very apprehensive, grabbing as much food as they could hold and hoarding it against the day when it would no longer be forthcoming. It took nearly a year for many of them to realize that Mr. W had no intentions of ending the program anytime in the foreseeable future. When they'd reached that conclusion, she said that it had been like a sigh of relief went through the camp. The two dozen Guests suddenly became more animated and more secure. Some of the psychology majors who were observing the camp residents told us that a few of them even exhibited behaviors that would have been regarded as breakthroughs when they were back in the institution.

There were victories, but there were a couple of losses, too: one of the women had become pregnant and died due to complications resulting from her severe diabetes, another man had been hit by a car and died, two of the older residents had been hospitalized for pneumonia, and a couple of the others just wandered off into their own futures. Although the Guest population was down to a dozen and a half by the time I was there, the campaign had taken on a life of its own. There was actually too much food and clothing being collected for our Guests, so we found ourselves re-donating our donations to some of the poverty centers and AIDS support groups and even the Red Cross.

So, when Luanne told me not to worry about accounting for how much I was eating, she knew what she was talking about! She certainly didn't seem to worry about it, often consuming a half-dozen of our jumbo croissants at a clip. Pretty soon, I was matching her pastry for pastry, and pretty soon after that, I started noticing that my clothes were all getting pretty tight.

While I don't think I've ever been called thin, I've never really been fat either. At five-foot five and one-hundred and thirty-eight pounds, I might've been considered "chunky" or "heavy" or -- as one of my boyfriends used to say -- "a voluptuous vixen." He was also the one who used to tell me that I "really knew how to fill a pair of jeans" -- only, now I was over-filling them, testing the strength of their stitching with every step or breath.

One morning, after the last rack of muffins were in the oven, and a pound of petit-fours were evenly split between mine and Luanne's bellies -- "An offering to the Spirit of Baking!" she said -- I screwed up my courage and asked her why she didn't seem to mind the possibility of gaining weight. She laughed and said, "God! At one point I swore that if I ever got as heavy as I am now, I'd kill myself. But -- when I had that revelation with the Princess, it became obvious to me that being happy and loving my work was all that really mattered. And when I met Jim -- we'd only been dating for a month or so when he confessed to me that he found my body to be the most perfect realization of all his life-long fantasies. I laughed at first, but it was obvious that he was in earnest. He told me that he'd always been attracted to heavy women, but that I was a more gorgeous and perfect woman than he'd ever dreamed of becoming involved with."

I was totally caught off guard by the thought that someone might actually find a fat woman the object of desire, and when I expressed this to Luanne, she said, "You're telling me! I got angry at him, telling him that I didn't think it was very kind of him to be treating me as if I was some pitiable creature just because I was fat. It took him a long time -- and took me a long time, too -- before he was able to convince me that he was telling the truth. But it was! I've never felt so appreciated in my life as I've felt since I've been with Jim. He worships me and loves me and makes me feel like I never thought I'd ever feel. I mean, how lucky can I get -- he's gorgeous, he's so good at his work that he's already had offers from every one of the top ten architectural firms in the world, and he loves fat women! It doesn't matter if I go to heaven when I die, because I'm there already!"

I strongly doubted that I'd ever be so lucky as to find the kind of man that Luanne had found, but it didn't matter much that fall or the next spring anyway; my schedule barely allowed me time to breathe and there was no way I had even a moment to spare for a relationship. Joellen was in the same situation with work and school, and sometimes it'd seem like days would go by without us seeing each other. Sometimes, I was only sure that I even had a roommate because the boxes of pastries I brought home were being eaten by someone besides me.

When we did get that rare day off together, we'd wind up spending our time stretched out foot-to-foot on the long couch we'd bought at a garage sale and lugged home. Neither one of us owned a television and we didn't much care to, especially since we were both voracious readers, plowing through books as fast as we plowed through the baked goods I brought home. We were very casual with one another, sharing food and clothes and makeup; we read each other's books and talked to each other's families on the phone and had no compunction about walking around the apartment in our underwear or in the nude. In fact, as the two of us began putting on the pounds, we began thinking of home as the place where we could be free of our too-tight clothing, stripping down to bras and panties as soon as we walked through the door.

One Sunday in the late winter, we were in our usual cozy positions on the couch, when I suddenly felt very thirsty and got up to get a drink of water. As I walked past Joellen, she reached out and spanked me right on my bikini-clad butt. "Boy, what a fat ass you have," she said. I barely heard her because the sting of her slap did something strange to me: suddenly I felt a slight flush in my face while a delicious tingle worked its way up my spine and down between my legs. I swallowed deeply, then got control of myself, countering by reaching down and putting my hand on her round and blubbery belly, and saying, "People who live in glass houses..."

She put her hand on my hand and slowly began maneuvering it around her soft flesh, over her navel-ring, circling lower and lower, until we reached the waistband of her panties and ducked underneath. I let her guide me down through the thicket of soft and curly fur while I stared at her sweet and freckled face, totally uncertain about what would happen next; when she opened her eyes and looked into mine, I couldn't resist kneeling on the floor next to the couch and kissing her on the lips. She surprised me by kissing back with an enthusiasm that I hadn't expected, and soon we were swept away in a sea of passion, our lips and tongues diving into each other's depths. Somewhere along the way our few clothes had disappeared and our naked bodies floated on each other's waves of flesh. Our hands and our lips never stopped moving, like breakers on the beach and the orgasms rushed up and engulfed us like some wild tsunami of pleasure.

Eventually, the storm died down and we wound up clinging to one another, our legs and arms entwined, nuzzling and stroking, chests heaving. I felt the firmness of her nipples against my chest, the softness of her buns in my sweaty palms, her tongue tickling my earlobes and her thigh pressing against my burning pussy. Her eyes were closed again as I stared at her face: the coppery hair glinting in the afternoon sunlight, the slight sheen of sweat on her brow, her full lips red from kissing and sucking, the slight creases that would someday be laugh-lines on her cheeks. When she opened her eyes this time, I saw how the pale green irises sparkled and stood out sharply against the darkly smeared mascara; "Wow!" she said dreamily, lifting her head up and kissing me.

"Ditto," I said, giggling like a child. "I've never..." "Been with a woman before?" "Well, that, too," I said, "but -- doesn't matter who I've been with -- I never came like that before." "My turn to say 'ditto'," she said, and we hugged and kissed some more. "Where did that come from?" I asked, when we'd finally let go of each other and began struggling to sit up on the couch.

"I don't know," she answered, "it's just... I know it sounds crazy, but... well, since you've been putting on some weight, I've just found myself totally fascinated by your butt. When you're walking around here in your panties, and I can see that you've gained some weight and you're rounder and softer, -- I don't understand it, but -- it drives me crazy! You don't know how many times I've had to restrain myself from just taking two big handfuls of your beautiful flesh and squeezing and caress-ing... It's definitely been an obsession. I've even snuck into your room in the middle of the night when you were fast asleep on your stomach, with the covers tossed off and your big rear end practi-cally glowing white in the moonlight... Don't hate me, please! This has never happened to me before -- not with a man and definitely not with a woman!"

Hate was about the last thing on my mind at that moment, and I kneeled on the floor again in front of where she was sitting, spreading her thighs apart and leaning in to give each of her red nipples a soft and wet kiss. I bent down further and stuck my tongue deep inside her belly-button, flicking the navel-ring which was practically lost in all that blubber, my hands roaming over her soft love handles, my cheek pressing and sinking into her bulging belly which was rolled out onto her lap. "As much as you're fascinated by my butt," I said, "that's how much I'm crazy about this bulgy tummy of yours -- and that ring..." "Sounds fair," she said, "but let me just warn you: good sex makes this bulgy tummy very hungry, and absolutely incredibly amazingly wonderful sex makes me absolutely incredibly amazingly ravenous! If you don't get me something to eat, I'm going to wind up taking an enormous bite out of that ass I'm so crazy about!"

When I got up, scooting around her playfully lunging teeth, I called the local pizza parlor and ordered a large pie, but she told me that I'd better order two of them; after they'd arrived, we polished them off with ease, while still having enough room to finish every last bit of pastry -- and there was plenty of it -- in our apartment. We slept that night in Jo's room, our gorged bellies taking turns filling the arch of each other's backs.

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