There would be eventual justice, I knew, but after Mr. Richards left, I was still really angry and I wanted to do something right then to get back at him, something that would hurt him on the bottom line, something that would eat into all his precious profits... and then I had it! A plan came full-blown into my mind. Something totally ironic! A way to really hurt him and have fun doing it! There were a couple of things I needed, so I hurried off to the thrift store, hoping I wasn't too late. I wasn't, and they had exactly what I needed. Then, it was off to my car, where I reached under the passenger seat, into the springs and found what I was looking for -- a spare set of keys. I'd locked myself out of my apartment so many times that I was always making duplicate sets and hiding them in places I might need them. And sure enough, this set still had a copy of the store key.

Luanne would be working, I knew, since she was the only key-holder now besides Scott and someone had to lock up. Sure enough, when I got back to the store at three o'clock, she was out front, sweeping the sidewalk. "I didn't see Scott's car, so I figured it was safe to come in and wish everyone a happy holiday," I said. "Besides, a couple of Luanne's special donuts make a trip so much nicer!" She laughed and asked where I was going, and I told her that I was going to a friend's cabin for a little retreat. "And all I'm going to do is sit in a chair, read a book and eat like there's no tomorrow -- in honor of the holiday of course!" "God, I wish I was going with you, rather than to the -- gag! -- in-laws. Imagine," she said, practically purring at me, "just me and you all alone... Can you see it? All that food and all our luscious blubber in one place. I've put on five pounds -- can you tell?" "Not really," I said. "That's okay," she replied, rubbing her hand over her shirt which was stretched tight across her round stomach, "when you get to be as big as me, it's hard for others to tell when I've put on a couple. But if I were naked, I could show you..." "Are you coming on to me?" I said incredulously. "Maybe. Or maybe I'm just teasing. I am, after all, a strictly heterosexual girl... so far." "Well," I whispered, "I'm not!" "I suspected," she whispered back, "and that means that the possibilities for the future are endless..." She gave me a big conspiratorial smile and then we walked inside to a flurry of "How've you been"s and "Happy Thanksgiving"s and "We've missed you"s. Then, while Luanne was putting together some donuts for me, I excused myself to go to the bath-room.

This was the crucial part of the plan, I realized as I made my way to the alarm control panel. If this screwed up, it'd be all over before it began. I knew that everyone had a personal code for the panel, but there were also master codes which were used to create the others. I'd discovered Mr. W's master code one morning that summer, written on a page in the manual, when there was an alarm malfunction and none of the regular codes would work. I was betting on Scott's not knowing that I had that code. I took a deep breath, pulled on a pair of rubber gloves I'd picked up from the supply shelf, and entered the four digits, relieved to find that I got a green light. After quickly entering the bypasses for the motion detectors, so they would be inactivated, I went over to the little used side door, nearly hidden behind a maze of boxes and removed the security bar from the inside, so that the master key would unlock it. Then I went to the bathroom, flushed the toilet and went back up front. It was a little after three and I said I had to get going, so I took the bag of donuts from Lu, gave her a hug and a kiss, wickedly sticking the tip of my tongue in her ear, then waved goodbye to eve-ryone and walked out to my car.

I knew that if it came to it, I'd need an alibi, and I realized I had a perfect one; after filling up the tank with gas and purposely flirting with the cashier, I high-tailed it for Ari's cabin. It was normally forty-five minutes away, but I broke so many traffic laws in my hurry to get up there that they would have had to clone me in order to take my license away as many times as I deserved. Thirty-five minutes after leaving town, I pulled into the parking lot of the town's only grocery store, grabbed a squeaky-wheeled shopping cart and began buzzing through the aisles, loading up with boxes of cookies and cakes and chips and candy, the last fresh turkey in the place, stuffing, vegeta-bles, potatoes, and plenty of other goodies. I brought them up to the register and struck up a con-versation with the lone cashier -- probably the store owner -- a very hefty short woman in her late fifties, with wiry silver hair and the smoothest, most wrinkle- and blemish-free complexion I'd ever seen on anyone over the age of ten. She rang things up efficiently, asking me where I was heading and nodding in recognition when I mentioned Ari's family. "Nice people," she said, nodding. "They've had that place since the forties. Are you up here with your family?" "Nope," I said. "Just me, looking for a little getaway." She glanced at me for a couple of seconds, trying to figure out her next question. "How long are you staying?" she asked. "Just through Sunday," I answered. "That's an awful lot of groceries for just one person for just a couple of days..." "Sure is," I said, patting my stomach through my coat. "And I plan on finishing it all! Overindulgence -- that's what the whole season's about isn't it?" She stopped ringing for a second, then slowly let a wry smile come across her face. "I guess it is," she said. "Only, most people aren't so up front about it! They'll all be stuffing their face tomorrow and going on diets on Monday, kicking themselves the whole time." We talked a couple of minutes more, then I loaded up my back seat with all my purchases and headed up the unmarked road to the cabin.

The place was gorgeously rustic, but I knew I couldn't waste any time looking around, so I put all the groceries away , then went out to the garage to check out the car. It was a brand new, four-door luxury vehicle with lots of space and -- more importantly, at that moment -- a full tank of gas. Ari had provided me with the key and a couple of seconds later, I was on my way back into Myrmi-don. My speed-demon behavior on the way up there had given me the luxury of a little more lei-surely drive back down; there was time to go over in my head the plan which had hatched full-blown into my consciousness. I searched through its every detail, looking for a flaw. I found none, but I did come across a couple of pitfalls and I made some notes on how to avoid them. I drove the car into the new multi-level parking garage downtown and left it there, then wasted some time, picking up a couple of things at the drugstore and the dollar store, until I knew I could catch a bus and be behind the store a little bit before closing.

When the bus dropped me off, I took an immediate cut through a backyard and quickly went to the store's side door, unlocking it and scrambling inside, replacing the steel bar, then climbing up the steel ladder into the cardboard loft. It wasn't a moment too soon, because I was barely settled in when everyone started coming back to the time clock. They all punched out, their voices becoming more and more faint, until I heard the unmistakable beeping of the alarm, mean-ing that it had been set and they had forty-five seconds to get out and lock the door behind them. There was no rush now, since I knew I'd be alone until Saturday morning -- alone in a supermarket full of food!

Climbing down from the ladder, I had a moment's apprehension that Luanne might have turned on the motion detectors, but then I remembered her telling me once that she had no idea what all those blinking lights were for, knowing only how to set the alarm and shut it off. Checking the lights, I could tell that she was either telling the truth or too lazy to check the blinking bypasses. Didn't matter, because I was home free. I unplugged one of the electric-powered handicapped shopping carts from it's charging station, making myself a softer seat by grabbing one of the couch cushions from the break area and taping it to the seat. I took out two of the items from the Salvation Army bag -- a pair of men's sweatpants in size XXL and a maternity t-shirt in the same size which said "Baby" with an arrow. I stretched it tight over my round, but comparatively small stomach and had a little laugh. Then I got onto the cart to survey my domain. The security lights were on -- only one out of four fluorescents lit -- not so bright that someone would notice me, but still enough for me to see what I was doing. I drove down the aisles, looking at all the cartons and cans of food and thinking about how I was going to put all of it my belly, getting so fat in the process that I'd have to roll myself out the loading bay door. My hand made its way beneath the very loose waist of the sweatpants and down into my panty-less pussy; when my index finger grazed my clitoris, the chill that ripped through me made me lose my grip on the accelerator handle and I came to a rolling stop.

That was okay, because I'd reached my starting point anyway: the bakery. Getting out of the cart, I walked around the counter and right to the big walk-in refrigerator. There were too many health codes for them to have left out any breads or rolls, but I knew that the refrigerator would be full of donuts and cakes and pastries. I found the biggest sheet cake I could -- a foot-and-a-half wide by two-and-a-half feet long and filled with a blackberry cream filling -- and put it on the counter.

As good a place to get started as any, I thought, and cut myself a big old hunk, picked it up in my rubber-gloved hands and started munching away. I could feel the smooth cream coating the inside of my mouth and the moist cake collapsing into a chewy, gooey mass. I ate greedily, feeling totally free from the possibility of being seen by anyone but myself, and reveling in the license to be a total pig. By the time I'd gobbled my way through nearly an eighth of the cake, my belly was starting to feel full and I began to wonder just how impossible was the task I'd set for myself of eat-ing everything in the store. Reality check time, I told myself and looked at the size of the cake. That's just one item in one department, I told myself. You'd better re-evaluate your plan. So I did. I picked out a jelly-donut while I thought and started nibbling on the cakey outside, before realizing that all I really wanted right then was the jelly inside. After ripping it open and sucking out the gooey jelly, I put the empty shell down and grabbed another, then performed the same operation. After taking bites from several more donuts and discarding them, I realized that this was a much superior plan. All I had to do was take a bite or a nibble or just open the box of anything in the store, and it would serve two purposes: I'd get to taste a lot more things before I reached my capacity, and the bastard would be forced to throw out anything I'd touched!

So, I started my rampage through the bakery, taking a handful from each of the lemon me-ringue and Boston cream pies, sticking my finger in the icing of each of the layer cakes, nibbling at all of the specialty cookies, taking big bites from the strudels and the eclairs and the donuts and the crullers, dipping big wooden spoons into each of the vats of butter creme which took up a large part of the refrigerator. By nine o'clock, I'd managed to sample almost every single item in the entire bakery; there were crumbs and frosting and fillings all over the floor and the counters and my face and clothes and my belly was full-to-bursting, unwilling to accept anything more. But I can't stop now, I thought as I climbed up onto the counter top and laid down on my back, while caressing my swollen paunch. Nibbling the icing off some petits-four, I wondered if I was really done for the night or if my digestive system would kick into high gear.

After a little while of resting, I decided that I'd better start expanding the horizons of my stomach or this was going to be a short-lived adventure. Heaving myself off the counter and step-ping gingerly onto the floor so as to avoid jostling the sloshing contents of my laden stomach, I got back onto the cart and motored over to the deli department. I pulled on the little tab of the number tickets and noticed that the first one was twenty-one; I got up and walked around the counter, tak-ing all the plastic lids off the big containers of food, then pulled on the signboard chain and changed the number to match the one on my ticket. "Next!" I said, then walked back around the counter. "That's me," I said, giggling a little bit at my silly game. "I'm really not sure what I need, so I'd like to taste a couple of things if that's okay." "Sure sure, lady" I said to myself, then continued playing the counterman. "Why don't we make it easy and you can just come around here and try what you'd like." "That'd be great!" I said out loud to myself, "but you have to tell me if I'm being a pig, okay?" With that, I walked around the back of the counter one more time, then slid open the door of the deli case.

Our store was pretty well known for the quality and variety of the salads, and people used to come here for lunch as if we were a real restaurant. I decided to start with the shells and pesto, reaching and dipping both gloved hands in and shoveling a big bunch of pasta into my open mouth. "Mmmm! That's good," I said. "I'll take some of that... and I think I'll try some of this..." I leaned in a little further and popped a couple of crab-meat stuffed mushrooms onto my waiting tongue. "Those are yummy, too! But I can't quite reach those," and with that, I hauled my entire body into the glass case. "This is much better," I said, laying on my side. Reaching into the cheese antipasto bucket, I took hold of the ladle, filled it up and dripped olive oil all over my shirt and my face while feeding myself the seasoned cubes of cheddar and mozzarella. I had handful after hand-ful of cheese tortellini salad, potato salad, cole slaw, macaroni salad, marinated mushrooms, crab salad, tuna salad, ham salad; I was totally immersed in the case, food smeared all over my body and eating so much that I started feeling dizzy and somewhat short of breath. "Ma'am" I said in my deli-clerk guise, "you asked me to tell you, so I'm telling you: you are one fat hog!" I made a couple of snorting noises, then laughed, but laughing didn't feel so good, so I decided to extricate myself from the confining space.

When I stood up, it felt as if someone had strapped to my chest an enormous bag filled with water. The weight of my belly was incredible and I lifted my shirt up, half expecting to see a dupli-cate of Luanne's massive belly. Instead, what I saw was skin stretched so tight that it had a sort of shine to it; I ran my hand over its surface, feeling the heat emanating from the frenzied digestion taking place inside me, marveling at its capacity and yet feeling a little disappointed that I had reached my limits. I sat down on the mart cart and ran both my hands all over my swollen gut, wondering what I was going to do if I couldn't eat anymore. "This isn't enough to ruin him," I thought. "He thinks I'm as fat as a cow, he says, but I've barely done any damage. I've got to be able to eat more than this!" The ticket number dispenser was just above my shoulder, so I idly took hold of the protruding piece of paper and pulled gently, letting the numbers come rolling out without ripping. I pulled for a long time before the chain broke and then I took the end and wrapped it around the most swollen part of my stomach, reading number forty-six when it finished wrapping around. "Imagine," I thought. "Imagine forty-six inches. Is Luanne forty-six inches? How much do I have to eat to be forty-six inches around?" I reached beneath the waistband of my sweats again and began massaging my sweating pussy with one hand, while the other rode over the smooth surface of my engorged stomach. As I got hotter and hotter, and my breath came faster and faster, I felt my belly as if it were some detached part of me, it's great load of food dampening its motion and giving it a rhythm different from the rest of my body. Concentrating on that, I worked myself into an ex-plosive orgasm like nothing I'd ever induced in myself before.

I must've blacked out for a few moments -- I wasn't sure -- because the next thing I knew, my right leg had fallen asleep from resting on a pressure point on the seat cushion. "Back to work," I said out loud after enjoying a good long shiver, and heaved myself out of the cart. A sandwich would be good, I thought. A real Dagwood kind of sandwich. I went around the counter and started taking out all the different meats, slicing a couple of slices of each different ham, the turkey breast and turkey roll, the chicken bologna, the pepperoni and salamis and all the varieties of slicing cheeses. I opened up a loaf of rye bread and smeared each slice with gobs of mayo and mustard, then I began assembling this masterpiece, alternating bread and meat until I was all out of both and my sandwich was nearly two feet high. It was sitting on the stainless steel counter and I could barely see over the top of it; nonetheless, I looked it squarely in the rye and took a big chomp, then another and another, chewing and swallowing and feeling my stomach quickly reach the protesting level again. But I wasn't going to stop, not even when my attack on the middle of the sandwich caused the creation to become unstable and collapse all over the counter; I didn't even use my hands, just con-tinued vacuuming up the crumbs of bread and chunks of meats. My belly was complaining loudly now, sending waves of wild discomfort through my core.

And then, something strange happened. I felt something I'd never felt before: all of a sud-den, at the height of my stomach's aggravation, there was a shifting, or a stretching or a relaxing of something deep inside my gut, and suddenly, all the pain was gone. I didn't know what was happen-ing and I paused a minute, wondering if I had caused some damage or something, wondering if I'd injured myself, figuring I'd know soon enough. But there was nothing else, just that cessation of pain and the impression that, somehow, I had more room for food. It seemed miraculous, too good to be true, and I tested it gingerly, afraid that it was just the calm before the storm and that any sec-ond, I was going to be overpowered by pain. But there was no pain, there was nothing but me eating as if I'd just had a big meal at the diner, instead of having consumed large quantities of the inven-tory of the bakery and deli departments of a major supermarket. I finished the sandwich, to my own amazement, then lifted up my shirt again, and -- maybe it was just my food-besotted imagina-tion -- but I could've sworn that before the "event" my belly had been riding higher and now, the fullest part seemed to be just below my belly button.

Well, despite the extra capacity I'd just developed, I decided that it was time for some kind of little break and maybe a little clean-up to get the food off of my body before it became impossi-ble. I motored the cart over to the health and beauty aids aisle, grabbed a bottle of body-wash and then went over to the produce aisle. I made some adjustments to the food sprinkler system, then shucked off my clothes and launched myself up onto a bed of lettuce; I waited a couple of seconds for the spraying to kick in and when it came, I was shocked by the ice-cold spray, forcing myself to roll around on the lumpy vegetables and get totally wet for as long as I could take it. It shut off after a couple of seconds and I soaped myself up, then hopped up onto the cucumbers and celery to clean myself off. Wiggling around as I was -- half to rinse myself and half to deal with the cold water -- I wound up with one of the cucumbers touching my pussy lips. I couldn't help a wicked smile, thinking, Why not! The first one I tried was big -- way too big for me, so I looked for a thinner one, rinsing it off in the spray before, squatting down, I forced it just inside me, the wax on its skin lubri-cating it enough to... hurt! Yikes! Good idea, but... "Sorry. Mr. Cucumber," I said. "you're not going to get lucky tonight!" Then I took a bite from the end that had been inside me and I laughed.

Knowing that I wasn't going to be wasting my time eating vegetables while there was so much good and fattening -- and expensive -- food around the store, I indulged myself in a little bit of destructiveness. I smashed pumpkins and gourds, littered the floor with shredded lettuce and broken carrots and stomped oranges and apples. I cut a couple of grapefruits in half and squeezed them dry, then held them on my boobs like a bra, taking them away after just a couple of seconds when I could feel the citric acid start stinging my sensitive nipples. When I was done with my frenzy, the produce department looked like it had been the site of a vegetable bombing.

It was pretty late by this time -- nearly one o'clock, and I knew that tomorrow would be a more challenging day, since I intended to keep eating from the moment I got up until the moment I passed out -- that is what Thanksgiving is all about, isn't it? So, I took my naked self into the aisle where we had the stack of towels were available for purchase with redeemed register stamps and dried myself off, then went back to the break room, and leaned back in the recliner. I thought sleep would come right away, but I couldn't stop thinking about that strange feeling I had gotten in the deli department. What was it? Why did it happen? What reason could there be for me to suddenly be able to eat some ridiculous amount of food without hurting myself? I ruled out anything super-natural -- take the simplest explanation, I told myself. So I started thinking about the natural world and how its only been a relative blink in evolutionary time since we were nomadic hunter-gatherers. Women's bodies, I knew, were optimized for child-birth, for propagation of the species. All humans were made to store extra calories in the form of body fat against the times of famine. Women, who might have to sustain themselves as well as a developing fetus, were programmed to carry a higher proportion of body-fat than men... And then I thought of lions, feeding at a carcass of a zebra or a wildebeest, and I heard in my mind some nature show narrator explaining that the lion could eat nearly half again his body weight at a kill.

Well, I thought, what would happen if some hunter-gatherer tribe had a spot of good luck and brought down a mastodon, way back when? The tribe would gather round after long famine and they would begin to eat. Their bellies would have been shrunken from near-starvation -- after all, a smaller belly is good when starving, since it needs less to feel replete. But when confronted with a sudden glut of food and the uncertainty of another encounter with such surplus, wouldn't it be advantageous for those bellies to expand to take in all the calories they could while the moment was there? Wouldn't it make sense for a human animal to have such a dual-purpose stomach -- small and easily satisfied in the long times of less and greatly expandable in the short times of plenty?

If you've got any comments or criticisms, you can post them on the WeightBoard or e-mail me at: melaniebel@aol.com.

And don't forget to visit my website at http://members.aol.com/melaniebel