Darth Praxus
Member
BBW, WG—A growing college feedee doesn't need a love interest, but she could use an enabler...
Chapter One
“Wow,” I say, surveying the carnage. “I'm surprised you didn't accidentally eat the boxes.”
A thick burp. “Ahh—hic—go to hell.”
Two medium pepperoni pizza boxes sit empty on the coffee table, littered with floury crumbs and smeared with orange grease. Scattered on the floor are plastic rings and crushed aluminum, the only remnants of the two six packs that we began the evening with. A box of cheesy garlic bread balances precariously on the corner of the table—there's one piece left. I was responsible for half a pizza, half a six pack, and two slices of bread.
The rest all went to Sara.
She's sprawled on the couch, lips smeared with grease, belly rising from her form like an orb of butter. It quivers every time she hiccups, fat rippling. Her skin shows through diamond-shaped gaps between the buttons of her shirt, chocolate-brown and creamy. The buttons strain, desperately trying to restrain the great paunch behind them.
Sara burps again, a noise that sounds like deep-dish pizza tastes, and motions at the table. “Gimme the last piece.”
“You sure? You don't look so good.”
“I look—hic—damn good,” she replies, patting her belly with sausage fingers. “And I'd look even better with this damn shirt letting me breathe. Hic!”
I lean forward, grab the piece of bread with two fingers, and pass it to her, feeling the heat radiating from her body as she takes it. One bite, two bites, and it's gone.
We sit a few moments, staring at her gut, waiting.
OOOOOYYYYYUUUURRRRRRRRRPPP
Her whole body trembles, but the buttons stay put.
“Dammit,” she grumbles, “I'm slipping.”
“Well,” I say, rising from the couch, “there is still some chocolate cake left in the kitchen...”
- - - -
When I first met Sara, freshman year of college, it wasn't like one of those stories online where she was drop-dead gorgeous and thin as a rail. She was a generous size, but not what you'd call obese; genetics had granted her wide hips and thighs and a round face, but her stomach was only slightly convex and she had but one chin. We were in an introductory literary survey course together, and the thing about her that got my attention was that, unlike most of the other English majors who had read Lord of the Rings or a John Green novel and decided they wanted to write for a living, she knew what she was talking about. Her favorite author was Nabokov for his style, she said when the professor asked us, but Wilde for his subject matter. I was intrigued, and when I asked her to lunch very pleased to get an answer in the affirmative.
We found a table in the dining hall and went our separate ways to load up our buffet trays. If I was mildly surprised by the fact that she brought back two cheeseburgers instead of one, I quickly brushed it off, and we soon fell to discussing books.
“I mean, I can admire Nabokov, but he's not someone I can really read for fun,” I told her. “He's too focused on prose compared to other things.”
“But that's why you read him!” she protested, pausing to take a massive bite from her second burger. “His writing is just—hic—the purest kind of sensory overload, all the descriptions and wordplay just, like, piling on each other, y'know?” Another bite. “That's why I love Wilde, too, he's so focused on senesation and experience. They're a model for how to live, right?”
We talked for another hour, and in that time she got up to refill her tray two times. By the time I had to leave for my next class, her eyes were slightly glassy and she spasmodically hiccupped semi-constantly, but she still insisted on keeping up her end of the conversation.
“I mean—hulp—obviously Lolita is his—hic—best, but Ada is just so much book—hic! It's like he poured his whole . . . his whole soul into it . . . “ She froze for a second, held up a finger, and then loosed a rumbling belch. “Excuse me!” she said, giggling, and patted her stomach, which was decidedly more swollen than it had been an hour ago.
- - - -
Chapter Two
It was perfect. There was no way this girl could maintain her current weight eating like that every day. And we both loved books!
And she was lesbian. Ah, well.
I didn't learn this until the first time she invited me to her dorm for a study session, a few weeks after our initial lunch. I brought beer, which turned out to be a mistake; a few hours later we had done no studying and both of us were drunk.
In these few weeks, Sara had put on a noticeable amount of weight. There was a flabby bit of skin hanging from the underside of her jaw, and her stomach was definitely straining against her jeans, as was her ass. Her thighs had gotten delightfully thick, and her face had taken a level in round.
She must have seen me snatching glances at aforementioned stomach every now and then, because after a while she commented on it. “Lydia doesn't like it,” she told me, laying a hand on her middle.
“Hmm?” I asked, quickly looking up to meet her eyes.
“My beer belly,” she said.
“Oh, you don't have a—” I began.
She chugged the remains of her sixth can and belched indignantly. “Oh yes, I do. Well, maybe not a whole one,” she considered, patting the stomach that was big enough now to jiggle slightly at the contact, “but definitely—MUUURRRRPPP—the beginnings of one.” She seemed pretty okay with that statement. More than okay, in fact, though I told myself it was probably just my imagination running away with me.
“So who's Lydia?”
“Girlfriend,” she replied, moving to open another beer. My heart sank ever so slightly—dammit—but oh well. “She thinks I'm getting fat. I just tell her it's a—hic—symbiotic relationship.”
“Oh?” I asked, wondering in my own not-particularly-sober brain if she'd gotten to the point where she was drunk enough to stop making sense.
“I,” she said, pointing a finger in the rough direction of her face, “drink too much beer, which makes me happy. And the—RUUURRRP—beer obliges by making my tummy big enough to hold more beer,” she continued, again patting her stomach. “I'm in the process of—hic—of—hic!—being transmuted into a walking beer keg. 's'a beautiful thing, really. Like Ovid.”
Too drunk to remember the Metamorphoses, I nodded anyway. “The food doesn't hurt, either,” I said, only realizing a few seconds after I said it that were I sober that statement would've been completely off limits.
She looked at me, eyebrow raised. “Oh?”
Belatedly panicking, I shook my head, took a swallow of beer too fast, coughed. “Nothing, nothing.”
She smirked, shook her finger. “Oh no, you ain't getting out of things that easily. You said something about the food?”
Shit, shit, shit, ran through my head. There was no way I could just make some excuse, either, because she clearly knew what I was talking about.
Her meals every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, when we ate lunch after class, were obscenely large. The two cheeseburger starter course wasn't a special occurrence, it quickly became clear—they were a normal portion for her. She never ate fewer than two trays per meal, and those trays were usually piled as high as she could possibly make them. Burgers, fries, pizza, desserts of various stripes, soda in copious amounts. Her capacity had increased, too; gradually, she ceased falling into a minor stupor near the tail end of our conversations, although the hiccuping and burping continued unabated. To be honest, I was amazed she had put on as little weight as she had.
Sara laughed. “It's okay, it's not like I'm not aware I make a pig of myself in front of you three times a week. If you hadn't noticed I'd worry about your writerly eye for detail.” Said eye for detail was currently affixed to the button of her shorts, which looked to be about five seconds away from bursting off and was gradually making its way closer and closer to my face. “I'm sure you're horribly worried for my health.”
“No!” I replied, spluttering. “Well, I mean yes, but—”
There was a ping and then a stinging sensation on my chest. I looked down to see a button sitting in my lap, and when I looked back up Sara's belly had relaxed outward by a good inch.
She cheered drunkenly and belched. “Time to treat myhic to a new pair of shorts! Gonna have to wait, though, I wanna pick up the new Atwood hardback at the bookstore this week.”
There was no way, I realized. No way she didn't know what she was doing. “Okay, you can stop fucking with me.”
She attempted a wounded expression, though in her intoxicated state the best she could manage was a sort of half-stunned-looking mug. “Fucking with you?”
“You have a girlfriend, apparently, and I don't appreciate being led on.”
She started giggling at that, hiccups interspersed amidst the laughter. “Why, what—hic—er d'you—hic—mean, Graham?” She slapped her liberated belly and gave a thick burp. “You don't mean to say you find this attractive, do you?”
Oops.
- - - -
Chapter Three
I was drunk, and I was embarrassed, and I had clearly not been fooling her whatsoever. “Yeah,” I said, doing my best to sound above it all. “Which is why it's shitty of you to lead me on like this.”
Sara collapsed onto the couch next to me, one hand hovering over her belly. “Why do you like it?”
For a second I had to sit and process. “What?”
She burped and slapped her stomach. “Quiet, you,” she said, and then looked at my pants.
Yep, things were busy down there.
A giggle. “Why do you like that?”
I was feeling defensive and decidedly not feeling any sort of banter. “I don't know, it's not like I have some theory of what I'm attracted to. Why do you like girls?”
She looked at me, seriously this time. “Y'know, to be—hic—honest I'm not sure. But I do know—hulp!—why I like this,” she said, hand moving across her stomach in a lazy circle. “It all goes back to literary preferences. Or maybe literary preferences go back to this. Chicken and the—hic!—and the egg.
“I like Nabokov, and Wilde, and Caitlin R. Kiernan, right? I don't care so much about plot or characters. I mean, those are important, but it's the language that does it for me. And the language is all about communicating the full—RURRRP, excuse me—experience to the reader, right?”
I nodded.
“It's my theory,” she continued, cracking another beer open, “that the glutton is the closest equivalent to the prose artist.” She paused to chug half the beer, swallowed a burp, and continued. “She experiences everything the world has to offer in terms of taste, of fullness. And just like reading too much prose gives you a headache, an overabundance of food gives the glutton indigestion.” OYYYYUUURRRRRP. “And, just as, in my view, the best books tend to be longer—Ada over Lolita, Les Miserables over Notre Dame de Paris—the best people tend to be fatter.” She leaned further back, sighing. “And that is why I'm eating and drinking my brains out.”
I cast about for something to say, and against my will found myself incredibly curious. “Why only start now? You didn't feel this way in high school?”
“Oh, sure I felt this way in high school! I've wanted to get fat since I was a little kid. But life doesn't tend to go too well for fat girls in high school. And having an unlimited meal plan is a rather perfect opportunity to change my ways.” She shifted forward, looked at me. “And that's where you come in.”
I returned to glaring. “Oh?”
She patted my hand. “First of all, I would've had lunch with you no matter what, right? I like you, you're my friend. So don't worry on that score, right? Wasn't in any way leading you on. But—” she raised a finger, drunkenly waved it around—“I couldn't help noticing that you were extremely happy to see a girl making a pig of herself while she talked to you about books. And that is something that's hard to find.”
Even had I been sober I would have been confused. “But . . . you're gay.”
“Yep. One hundred percent.” Another pat of my hand. “Sorry, really.”
“Then what the hell is going on?”
“I told you,” she said, indicating her slight paunch, “Lydia doesn't like this.” She shifted her weight on the couch. “I need someone to talk to about this, Graham! Doing it all on my own is fine, but it kinda sucks that I can't tell anyone. And Lydia is actively trying to discourage me. I need to balance that out, right? I need an enabler, someone who's gonna be fuckin' applauding me. And that's where you come in.”
I sat there for a few moments, thinking it over. “So you want me to be your feeder . . .and in return I get nothing.”
“Oh, bullshit, you get nothing,” she replied, slurping at her beer. “This is the closest you're likely to get to someone actively trying to fatten themselves up for a while. You get to watch me eat, watch me get fatter, maybe rub my belly when I need it. And c'mon, we're friends. I'd do it for you.”
Several minutes of silence. Then: “You realize I'm going to have blue balls constantly. I demand restitution for that.”
She cheered, and then belched magnificently. “Oh, just jerk off like any normal person.”
- - - -
Chapter Four
Over the next few months, I fulfilled my role dutifully. I encouraged her to eat more every time we had lunch, I came over for “study sessions” that turned into feeding sessions, I commented whenever I noticed that she'd put on weight.
And she did. A lot.
By Christmas break, her beer belly was no longer a mere beginning. It preceded her into rooms, jiggling with every footfall. She was drinking constantly, so that even during the day that jiggle seemed to be liquid-assisted; on nights when she would chug down beer after beer, you could hear the liquid sloshing around every time she took a step. She had indeed become transmuted into a beer keg, although she lurched and belched more often than wooden ones tend to and was decidedly softer than they.
To support the weight of that keg, her thighs thickened into great cylinders of meat, brown sausages that constantly strained against the casings of her jeans. Her arms had undergone a similar process, and her fingers seemed about an inch shorter despite being the same length as the beginning of the year, due to the width they had put on. (This was Sara's one regret—it slowed down typing, and she was working on a novel.)
Her breasts and her ass were mirror images of each other, twin round heavy things that wobbled with each step. Her chin had gone double. There was no question—she had gone from slightly chubby to actively fat.
As her size had increased, so had her capacity—her analogy of the beer (and burgers, and pizza, and ice cream) expanding her stomach to make room for more of itself had proved to be the case. Lunch was the equivalent of three or four meals, and it was simply the highlight of each day; she was snacking constantly, she assured me, from breakfast til bedtime, with a titanic dinner thrown into the mix every day as well. It didn't slow our conversations any, but the combination of gulping of food and taking in a lot of air to talk about literature meant that she would regularly unleash rumbling belches throughout the dialogue. It had gotten to the point where people across the hall would turn and stare, but she didn't deign to notice their gaze.
“Y'know, the Platonic ideal of satisfaction is a burp,” she told me one day, in the midst of her third container of fries.
“How so?” When it came to her theories on gluttony I had learned it was best to play the role of strawman to her Socrates rather than actively attempting to engage.
“Well—” this through a mouthful of deep-fried potato—“it'sh the ultimash eshpresshion of fulnessh.” A comically loud gulp, followed by a greasy burp. “You become nothing more than a mouthpiece for your stomach as it expresses just how stupidly full it is, how it can't take one more bite. And then you burp, and you get to taste the riches of what you've just eaten yet again, and then there's room for even more food, which once eaten causes your stomach to express its fullness yet again.” Which she did, in spectacularly loud fashion. “It's a perfect circle. You don't need language when you've gotten that full. It's just perfect, pure contentment. If I could pick the single most musical sound in the world, it'd be a deep, rich belch going on forever.”
She had gotten increasingly weird as more and more of her, percentage-wise, came to rest in her belly.
After the last day of finals, Sara threw a party. At least a couple dozen people were there, all of them making pigs of themselves to various degrees, but none could compare to the hostess. I lost sight of her for a little while, and a couple hours later when she waddled into view she had gotten absolutely trashed. Her pendulous, round belly quaked as she rolled from side to side, looking absolutely full to bursting with beer. The lower buttons of her shirt hung open, and I hoped for her sake she had loosened them herself rather than allowing her stomach to pop them open.
She was dragging someone by the arm, a thinnish girl with short blue hair and a distinctly irritated look. The two of them caught sight of me, and Sara belched by way of greeting. “Hey—RUURRRRP—Graham! Got someone for you to meet!”
I cautiously ambled over, desperately trying to keep my brain off the orb of fat and liquid that stood in front of me—true to my word, I had suffered from rather horrendous blue balls over the course of the semester, jerking off or no, and right now I was about as hard as granite. “Sara, how much have you had to drink?” I asked, a little worried despite my knowledge of her capacity.
“Oh—hic!—not a lot. Just ten or twelLLLURRRRRPP—twelve beers. Graham, this,” she slurred, gesturing at the blue-haired companion, “is Lydia.”
I reached forward to grip her hand; she looked at me in a way that conveyed a rather incredible amount of information, namely that she had no proof of what I was up to but she damn well suspected. “Hey,” she said, clipped.
“Hey,” I responded in original fashion. “I've heard a lot about you.” Which I hadn't, actually. Conversation around Sara tended to swing one of two ways, fat books or fat bellies. “Sara's lucky.”
“Yes, she is!” Sara slurred, bestowing a sloppy kiss on Lydia's cheek. “Even though I've—hic—gone and got a beer gut, she—hulp—she sticks with me.”
Lydia was looking increasingly irked, and I was getting increasingly embarrassed (and increasingly hard), so with a few babbled words I took my leave. As I turned to go, Sara belched, bellowed, “See you after Christmas, Graham!”, and slapped both hands against her keg.
I didn't look to see if that caused Lydia's expression to change.
- - - -
Chapter Five
Sara messaged me throughout the Christmas break. The highlight was definitely a photo captioned "Fourth dinner"—the photo depicted a belly swollen to Falstaffian proportions, shirt buttons all undone. Two plump hands rested on top of this mound, which made me wonder whom Sara had recruited to take the picture.
The day we got back from break, Sara asked me to drop by her dorm to say hello. Simultaneously anticipating and dreading the sight that was to follow, I lugged my bike out from inside my van and coasted down the newly-shoveled sidewalks to the main girls' dorm. Once inside, I took the stairs two at a time, a phenomenon I experienced relatively rarely—Sara had gotten to the point where the best she could manage on tall staircases was a langorous waddle.
The door was open when I arrived at her room, but the only person inside who I could see wasn't Sara, it was her girlfriend. Lydia glared when she saw me, jerked her head in a curt motion that could've meant "Come in" and could've meant "Go to hell". I chose to assume the former and made my way in.
My apparent nemesis held a book of poems in her hands, the pages ragged with use. "Swenson," I said, as if it weren't obvious by the fact that she was reading the damn book. "You like her?"
Lydia shrugged. "Borrowing her from Sara. She's all right, bit too high-flown for my taste." All this in a tone that made it sound like I had dragged it out of her.
"Lydia likes all her poetry to be depressing," Sara's voice called from the kitchen. I turned around just in time to see her pad into the living area, and my jaw nearly fell open before I clenched it firmly closed.
She must have done nothing but eat the entire break. Her belly, a red sweater clinging tightly to it, was enormous, a great round teardrop that protruded in a perfect half-globe. Her legs looked ready to burst from the sweatpants that they were squeezed into. She hadn't gained an incredible amount of weight, by the looks of things, but she had taken her shape and rounded it out to considerable effect. She hugged me, and her fat enveloped me like a massive pillow of gelatin. She must have been eating before I arrived--I could feel food shift inside her belly, and she burped chocolate into my ear. My fingers sank into the soft flesh of her back, and I squeezed before pulling away.
"How was the break?" she asked, moving past me to drop onto the couch next to Lydia--it creaked alarmingly under her bulk, and her girlfriend threw a glance at the frame that clearly feared for its structural integrity.
I responded with a few pleasantries about the family I'd seen, the gifts I'd received. Asked her how hers had gone.
She laid her hands on her belly, seemingly unconsciously. "I ate and ate and ate," she said, and then began to elaborate on what, precisely, that entailed. She had apparently made it a policy to eat at least four dinners at every family gathering, of which there had been three. Half of the money she'd gotten in gifts had gone toward new books, while the other half all went toward various kinds of chocolate.
"The highlight of the entire thing," she said, "had to be New Year's. Spent the entire night with a plate in my hand, ended up chugging an entire bottle of champagne. And being drunk on champagne is so much better than being drunk on beer. You feel all fizzy and funny and—"
"Are you seriously quoting Stephen fucking Sondheim to describe what swilling an entire bottle of champagne feels like?" Lydia asked.
"Hey, if it's an apt description," Sara said.
"Sondheim deserves greater dignity."
Sara shrugged. "At any rate, it was a thoroughly sinful, thoroughly lazy holiday season. Which reminds me," she said, lugging herself upward from the couch, "I brought leftovers!"
She waddled back to the kitchen. "C'mon," she called, "I know Lydia doesn't want me to eat all of them on my own!"
Lydia stood up, locked her eyes on mine. "Hope you're happy, asshole," she said, and gave me the finger, and stalked after her girlfriend.
I stood still for a while, staring at the door to the kitchen, and wondered what the hell Sara had gotten me into.
- - - -
Chapter Six
The kitchen, to my general relief, was not an orgy of gluttony on display. There were a couple trays of brownies present on the counter, along with several sheets of cookies and a jug of milk, but whatever was going to happen wouldn't be a repeat of the first time I'd met Lydia. “So,” I asked the blue-haired girl as I entered the room, “what's your major again?”
Either she was resigned to loathing me in private or she didn't care that much, because she answered, one hand toying idly with a peanut-butter cookie. “Double, theatre and political science.” A few moments of silence passed, broken only by Sara's munching on what looked to be two layers of brownie squashed together, before Lydia grudgingly decided to be polite and asked, “You?”
“Lit and writing.”
“A fellow bibliophile,” Sara said thickly, licking crumbs from her lips. “Lydia and I found common ground over Shakespeare—about the only common ground we really have, come to think.” She reached for another cookie. “Well, except that we both really fucking hate Andrew Lloyd Weber.”
The degradation of this name roused something like a romantic fire in Lydia's eyes, and I found myself hoping that this might just maybe be a normal conversation. “Why's that?”
Lydia dropped her cookie on the counter and began listing things off on her fingers, ire for me seemingly forgotten in the face of a greater enemy. “No musical subtlety. No thematic unity from show to show, or even within a show. Doesn't write his own lyrics. Chooses lyricists whose lyrics are the laziest writing this side of an E. L. James book. And he wrote Phantom of the fucking Opera, which has to be the worst thing to happen to musical theatre this side of the Vietnam War.”
“Sondheim didn't do his own orchestrations . . .” Sara whispered.
“Oh, go to hell. The man composes all his own music and lyrics, lyrics which might I add are the greatest works of songwriting in American history, and he's a thematic and tonal genius. So let him shop out the orchestrations to Tunick.”
I was inclined to simply watch the two of them go at it, which they did for the next ten minutes. Lydia seemed to have forgotten my presence entirely, which I found far preferable to the alternative. “You can't put Phantom in the same goddamn league as Sweeney Todd! Sweeney Todd transcends the penny dreadful, Phantom would fit right in on the shelf next to some bodice-ripper.”
“I thought Sara said you both hated Andrew Lloyd Weber,” I put in.
“Oh, we do,” Sara replied, giggling. “She just can't take a joke.”
The finger, courtesy of Lydia.
The argument refused to be resolved in any way other than our sitting down and watching the film adaptations of both musicals right then and there, and so we did. Sara brought her leftover goodies to the couch, nestled down in the center with me on one side and her girlfriend on the right, and ate through all four hours of moving pictures.
Midway through Sweeney Todd, she threw one arm around my shoulders and the other around Lydia's. I could feel the warm, heavy weight of it sinking down onto my back, the soft flesh forming a cushion against my neck. I looked over to see if Lydia felt a similar comforting sensation, but just as I did so she rose to her feet, saying she needed to take a piss.
Afterward, I made my excuses and slipped out. “See you at lunch tomorrow,” Sara called from the couch, one arm draped across her newly rounded gut. Lydia had her back to me, and didn't say good-bye.
I was about forty feet down the hall when I heard footsteps coming after me at a decently fast clip. I turned to see blue hair and glaring eyes coming toward me.
“Listen,” she hissed. “I know I may come off like a bitch to you, but I frankly don't give a shit.”
I stared. “Well, glad we got that out of the way, then,” I said, and started to turn away again.
“Hey!” There was something frightening in that bark—she'd make a wonderful theatre director someday—and I was compelled to look at her.
“I care about Sara, okay?” she said to me. “A lot. And I want her to be happy. But she's scaring me.” Her lip trembled; I couldn't decide if it was from anger or forthcoming tears or both.
“I'm not entirely sure what you want,” I said, hating myself for the cowardice even as the words left my lips.
“Fuck you, man.” She was quiet for a moment. “It can't be healthy. And just because you have some thing for fat chicks—I mean, she's gay, man, what the hell do you think is gonna happen?”
I held up my hands, alarmed by just how much she seemed to have ascertained. “Look, Sara is just a friend. That's all. And she's entirely set on what she's doing, she didn't need me to persuade her. She came to me.” I lowered the hands, gave what I hoped was my most earnest look. “I mean, you guys met in high school, right? She must have mentioned stuff about this back then.”
The trembling lip returned, and I was mortified to see that there were indeed gleaming spots on her eyes. “You're not helping things,” she hissed.
I opened my mouth and tried to find the words to reply, but they were slow in coming. She sniffed, disgusted. “We used to do things together, y'know? Like take walks or play with a frisbee or ride our bikes. Now all she does in between reading and writing is eat.”
Still, the words were slow in coming.
She sighed, wiped her cheek hastily. “Look, clearly she gets off on this shit, okay? And clearly she'll do it with or without you. But just . . . just think about her health. If you're really her friend.” And with that, she turned and walked back to the dorm room.
“Hey, I liked Sweeney Todd better!” I called after her.
I thought I saw the slightest hesitation between steps, but it was probably just a trick of the light.
The Decadent Movement: A Tale of Gluttonous Aesthetics
by Darth Praxus
by Darth Praxus
Chapter One
“Wow,” I say, surveying the carnage. “I'm surprised you didn't accidentally eat the boxes.”
A thick burp. “Ahh—hic—go to hell.”
Two medium pepperoni pizza boxes sit empty on the coffee table, littered with floury crumbs and smeared with orange grease. Scattered on the floor are plastic rings and crushed aluminum, the only remnants of the two six packs that we began the evening with. A box of cheesy garlic bread balances precariously on the corner of the table—there's one piece left. I was responsible for half a pizza, half a six pack, and two slices of bread.
The rest all went to Sara.
She's sprawled on the couch, lips smeared with grease, belly rising from her form like an orb of butter. It quivers every time she hiccups, fat rippling. Her skin shows through diamond-shaped gaps between the buttons of her shirt, chocolate-brown and creamy. The buttons strain, desperately trying to restrain the great paunch behind them.
Sara burps again, a noise that sounds like deep-dish pizza tastes, and motions at the table. “Gimme the last piece.”
“You sure? You don't look so good.”
“I look—hic—damn good,” she replies, patting her belly with sausage fingers. “And I'd look even better with this damn shirt letting me breathe. Hic!”
I lean forward, grab the piece of bread with two fingers, and pass it to her, feeling the heat radiating from her body as she takes it. One bite, two bites, and it's gone.
We sit a few moments, staring at her gut, waiting.
OOOOOYYYYYUUUURRRRRRRRRPPP
Her whole body trembles, but the buttons stay put.
“Dammit,” she grumbles, “I'm slipping.”
“Well,” I say, rising from the couch, “there is still some chocolate cake left in the kitchen...”
- - - -
When I first met Sara, freshman year of college, it wasn't like one of those stories online where she was drop-dead gorgeous and thin as a rail. She was a generous size, but not what you'd call obese; genetics had granted her wide hips and thighs and a round face, but her stomach was only slightly convex and she had but one chin. We were in an introductory literary survey course together, and the thing about her that got my attention was that, unlike most of the other English majors who had read Lord of the Rings or a John Green novel and decided they wanted to write for a living, she knew what she was talking about. Her favorite author was Nabokov for his style, she said when the professor asked us, but Wilde for his subject matter. I was intrigued, and when I asked her to lunch very pleased to get an answer in the affirmative.
We found a table in the dining hall and went our separate ways to load up our buffet trays. If I was mildly surprised by the fact that she brought back two cheeseburgers instead of one, I quickly brushed it off, and we soon fell to discussing books.
“I mean, I can admire Nabokov, but he's not someone I can really read for fun,” I told her. “He's too focused on prose compared to other things.”
“But that's why you read him!” she protested, pausing to take a massive bite from her second burger. “His writing is just—hic—the purest kind of sensory overload, all the descriptions and wordplay just, like, piling on each other, y'know?” Another bite. “That's why I love Wilde, too, he's so focused on senesation and experience. They're a model for how to live, right?”
We talked for another hour, and in that time she got up to refill her tray two times. By the time I had to leave for my next class, her eyes were slightly glassy and she spasmodically hiccupped semi-constantly, but she still insisted on keeping up her end of the conversation.
“I mean—hulp—obviously Lolita is his—hic—best, but Ada is just so much book—hic! It's like he poured his whole . . . his whole soul into it . . . “ She froze for a second, held up a finger, and then loosed a rumbling belch. “Excuse me!” she said, giggling, and patted her stomach, which was decidedly more swollen than it had been an hour ago.
- - - -
Chapter Two
It was perfect. There was no way this girl could maintain her current weight eating like that every day. And we both loved books!
And she was lesbian. Ah, well.
I didn't learn this until the first time she invited me to her dorm for a study session, a few weeks after our initial lunch. I brought beer, which turned out to be a mistake; a few hours later we had done no studying and both of us were drunk.
In these few weeks, Sara had put on a noticeable amount of weight. There was a flabby bit of skin hanging from the underside of her jaw, and her stomach was definitely straining against her jeans, as was her ass. Her thighs had gotten delightfully thick, and her face had taken a level in round.
She must have seen me snatching glances at aforementioned stomach every now and then, because after a while she commented on it. “Lydia doesn't like it,” she told me, laying a hand on her middle.
“Hmm?” I asked, quickly looking up to meet her eyes.
“My beer belly,” she said.
“Oh, you don't have a—” I began.
She chugged the remains of her sixth can and belched indignantly. “Oh yes, I do. Well, maybe not a whole one,” she considered, patting the stomach that was big enough now to jiggle slightly at the contact, “but definitely—MUUURRRRPPP—the beginnings of one.” She seemed pretty okay with that statement. More than okay, in fact, though I told myself it was probably just my imagination running away with me.
“So who's Lydia?”
“Girlfriend,” she replied, moving to open another beer. My heart sank ever so slightly—dammit—but oh well. “She thinks I'm getting fat. I just tell her it's a—hic—symbiotic relationship.”
“Oh?” I asked, wondering in my own not-particularly-sober brain if she'd gotten to the point where she was drunk enough to stop making sense.
“I,” she said, pointing a finger in the rough direction of her face, “drink too much beer, which makes me happy. And the—RUUURRRP—beer obliges by making my tummy big enough to hold more beer,” she continued, again patting her stomach. “I'm in the process of—hic—of—hic!—being transmuted into a walking beer keg. 's'a beautiful thing, really. Like Ovid.”
Too drunk to remember the Metamorphoses, I nodded anyway. “The food doesn't hurt, either,” I said, only realizing a few seconds after I said it that were I sober that statement would've been completely off limits.
She looked at me, eyebrow raised. “Oh?”
Belatedly panicking, I shook my head, took a swallow of beer too fast, coughed. “Nothing, nothing.”
She smirked, shook her finger. “Oh no, you ain't getting out of things that easily. You said something about the food?”
Shit, shit, shit, ran through my head. There was no way I could just make some excuse, either, because she clearly knew what I was talking about.
Her meals every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, when we ate lunch after class, were obscenely large. The two cheeseburger starter course wasn't a special occurrence, it quickly became clear—they were a normal portion for her. She never ate fewer than two trays per meal, and those trays were usually piled as high as she could possibly make them. Burgers, fries, pizza, desserts of various stripes, soda in copious amounts. Her capacity had increased, too; gradually, she ceased falling into a minor stupor near the tail end of our conversations, although the hiccuping and burping continued unabated. To be honest, I was amazed she had put on as little weight as she had.
Sara laughed. “It's okay, it's not like I'm not aware I make a pig of myself in front of you three times a week. If you hadn't noticed I'd worry about your writerly eye for detail.” Said eye for detail was currently affixed to the button of her shorts, which looked to be about five seconds away from bursting off and was gradually making its way closer and closer to my face. “I'm sure you're horribly worried for my health.”
“No!” I replied, spluttering. “Well, I mean yes, but—”
There was a ping and then a stinging sensation on my chest. I looked down to see a button sitting in my lap, and when I looked back up Sara's belly had relaxed outward by a good inch.
She cheered drunkenly and belched. “Time to treat myhic to a new pair of shorts! Gonna have to wait, though, I wanna pick up the new Atwood hardback at the bookstore this week.”
There was no way, I realized. No way she didn't know what she was doing. “Okay, you can stop fucking with me.”
She attempted a wounded expression, though in her intoxicated state the best she could manage was a sort of half-stunned-looking mug. “Fucking with you?”
“You have a girlfriend, apparently, and I don't appreciate being led on.”
She started giggling at that, hiccups interspersed amidst the laughter. “Why, what—hic—er d'you—hic—mean, Graham?” She slapped her liberated belly and gave a thick burp. “You don't mean to say you find this attractive, do you?”
Oops.
- - - -
Chapter Three
I was drunk, and I was embarrassed, and I had clearly not been fooling her whatsoever. “Yeah,” I said, doing my best to sound above it all. “Which is why it's shitty of you to lead me on like this.”
Sara collapsed onto the couch next to me, one hand hovering over her belly. “Why do you like it?”
For a second I had to sit and process. “What?”
She burped and slapped her stomach. “Quiet, you,” she said, and then looked at my pants.
Yep, things were busy down there.
A giggle. “Why do you like that?”
I was feeling defensive and decidedly not feeling any sort of banter. “I don't know, it's not like I have some theory of what I'm attracted to. Why do you like girls?”
She looked at me, seriously this time. “Y'know, to be—hic—honest I'm not sure. But I do know—hulp!—why I like this,” she said, hand moving across her stomach in a lazy circle. “It all goes back to literary preferences. Or maybe literary preferences go back to this. Chicken and the—hic!—and the egg.
“I like Nabokov, and Wilde, and Caitlin R. Kiernan, right? I don't care so much about plot or characters. I mean, those are important, but it's the language that does it for me. And the language is all about communicating the full—RURRRP, excuse me—experience to the reader, right?”
I nodded.
“It's my theory,” she continued, cracking another beer open, “that the glutton is the closest equivalent to the prose artist.” She paused to chug half the beer, swallowed a burp, and continued. “She experiences everything the world has to offer in terms of taste, of fullness. And just like reading too much prose gives you a headache, an overabundance of food gives the glutton indigestion.” OYYYYUUURRRRRP. “And, just as, in my view, the best books tend to be longer—Ada over Lolita, Les Miserables over Notre Dame de Paris—the best people tend to be fatter.” She leaned further back, sighing. “And that is why I'm eating and drinking my brains out.”
I cast about for something to say, and against my will found myself incredibly curious. “Why only start now? You didn't feel this way in high school?”
“Oh, sure I felt this way in high school! I've wanted to get fat since I was a little kid. But life doesn't tend to go too well for fat girls in high school. And having an unlimited meal plan is a rather perfect opportunity to change my ways.” She shifted forward, looked at me. “And that's where you come in.”
I returned to glaring. “Oh?”
She patted my hand. “First of all, I would've had lunch with you no matter what, right? I like you, you're my friend. So don't worry on that score, right? Wasn't in any way leading you on. But—” she raised a finger, drunkenly waved it around—“I couldn't help noticing that you were extremely happy to see a girl making a pig of herself while she talked to you about books. And that is something that's hard to find.”
Even had I been sober I would have been confused. “But . . . you're gay.”
“Yep. One hundred percent.” Another pat of my hand. “Sorry, really.”
“Then what the hell is going on?”
“I told you,” she said, indicating her slight paunch, “Lydia doesn't like this.” She shifted her weight on the couch. “I need someone to talk to about this, Graham! Doing it all on my own is fine, but it kinda sucks that I can't tell anyone. And Lydia is actively trying to discourage me. I need to balance that out, right? I need an enabler, someone who's gonna be fuckin' applauding me. And that's where you come in.”
I sat there for a few moments, thinking it over. “So you want me to be your feeder . . .and in return I get nothing.”
“Oh, bullshit, you get nothing,” she replied, slurping at her beer. “This is the closest you're likely to get to someone actively trying to fatten themselves up for a while. You get to watch me eat, watch me get fatter, maybe rub my belly when I need it. And c'mon, we're friends. I'd do it for you.”
Several minutes of silence. Then: “You realize I'm going to have blue balls constantly. I demand restitution for that.”
She cheered, and then belched magnificently. “Oh, just jerk off like any normal person.”
- - - -
Chapter Four
Over the next few months, I fulfilled my role dutifully. I encouraged her to eat more every time we had lunch, I came over for “study sessions” that turned into feeding sessions, I commented whenever I noticed that she'd put on weight.
And she did. A lot.
By Christmas break, her beer belly was no longer a mere beginning. It preceded her into rooms, jiggling with every footfall. She was drinking constantly, so that even during the day that jiggle seemed to be liquid-assisted; on nights when she would chug down beer after beer, you could hear the liquid sloshing around every time she took a step. She had indeed become transmuted into a beer keg, although she lurched and belched more often than wooden ones tend to and was decidedly softer than they.
To support the weight of that keg, her thighs thickened into great cylinders of meat, brown sausages that constantly strained against the casings of her jeans. Her arms had undergone a similar process, and her fingers seemed about an inch shorter despite being the same length as the beginning of the year, due to the width they had put on. (This was Sara's one regret—it slowed down typing, and she was working on a novel.)
Her breasts and her ass were mirror images of each other, twin round heavy things that wobbled with each step. Her chin had gone double. There was no question—she had gone from slightly chubby to actively fat.
As her size had increased, so had her capacity—her analogy of the beer (and burgers, and pizza, and ice cream) expanding her stomach to make room for more of itself had proved to be the case. Lunch was the equivalent of three or four meals, and it was simply the highlight of each day; she was snacking constantly, she assured me, from breakfast til bedtime, with a titanic dinner thrown into the mix every day as well. It didn't slow our conversations any, but the combination of gulping of food and taking in a lot of air to talk about literature meant that she would regularly unleash rumbling belches throughout the dialogue. It had gotten to the point where people across the hall would turn and stare, but she didn't deign to notice their gaze.
“Y'know, the Platonic ideal of satisfaction is a burp,” she told me one day, in the midst of her third container of fries.
“How so?” When it came to her theories on gluttony I had learned it was best to play the role of strawman to her Socrates rather than actively attempting to engage.
“Well—” this through a mouthful of deep-fried potato—“it'sh the ultimash eshpresshion of fulnessh.” A comically loud gulp, followed by a greasy burp. “You become nothing more than a mouthpiece for your stomach as it expresses just how stupidly full it is, how it can't take one more bite. And then you burp, and you get to taste the riches of what you've just eaten yet again, and then there's room for even more food, which once eaten causes your stomach to express its fullness yet again.” Which she did, in spectacularly loud fashion. “It's a perfect circle. You don't need language when you've gotten that full. It's just perfect, pure contentment. If I could pick the single most musical sound in the world, it'd be a deep, rich belch going on forever.”
She had gotten increasingly weird as more and more of her, percentage-wise, came to rest in her belly.
After the last day of finals, Sara threw a party. At least a couple dozen people were there, all of them making pigs of themselves to various degrees, but none could compare to the hostess. I lost sight of her for a little while, and a couple hours later when she waddled into view she had gotten absolutely trashed. Her pendulous, round belly quaked as she rolled from side to side, looking absolutely full to bursting with beer. The lower buttons of her shirt hung open, and I hoped for her sake she had loosened them herself rather than allowing her stomach to pop them open.
She was dragging someone by the arm, a thinnish girl with short blue hair and a distinctly irritated look. The two of them caught sight of me, and Sara belched by way of greeting. “Hey—RUURRRRP—Graham! Got someone for you to meet!”
I cautiously ambled over, desperately trying to keep my brain off the orb of fat and liquid that stood in front of me—true to my word, I had suffered from rather horrendous blue balls over the course of the semester, jerking off or no, and right now I was about as hard as granite. “Sara, how much have you had to drink?” I asked, a little worried despite my knowledge of her capacity.
“Oh—hic!—not a lot. Just ten or twelLLLURRRRRPP—twelve beers. Graham, this,” she slurred, gesturing at the blue-haired companion, “is Lydia.”
I reached forward to grip her hand; she looked at me in a way that conveyed a rather incredible amount of information, namely that she had no proof of what I was up to but she damn well suspected. “Hey,” she said, clipped.
“Hey,” I responded in original fashion. “I've heard a lot about you.” Which I hadn't, actually. Conversation around Sara tended to swing one of two ways, fat books or fat bellies. “Sara's lucky.”
“Yes, she is!” Sara slurred, bestowing a sloppy kiss on Lydia's cheek. “Even though I've—hic—gone and got a beer gut, she—hulp—she sticks with me.”
Lydia was looking increasingly irked, and I was getting increasingly embarrassed (and increasingly hard), so with a few babbled words I took my leave. As I turned to go, Sara belched, bellowed, “See you after Christmas, Graham!”, and slapped both hands against her keg.
I didn't look to see if that caused Lydia's expression to change.
- - - -
Chapter Five
Sara messaged me throughout the Christmas break. The highlight was definitely a photo captioned "Fourth dinner"—the photo depicted a belly swollen to Falstaffian proportions, shirt buttons all undone. Two plump hands rested on top of this mound, which made me wonder whom Sara had recruited to take the picture.
The day we got back from break, Sara asked me to drop by her dorm to say hello. Simultaneously anticipating and dreading the sight that was to follow, I lugged my bike out from inside my van and coasted down the newly-shoveled sidewalks to the main girls' dorm. Once inside, I took the stairs two at a time, a phenomenon I experienced relatively rarely—Sara had gotten to the point where the best she could manage on tall staircases was a langorous waddle.
The door was open when I arrived at her room, but the only person inside who I could see wasn't Sara, it was her girlfriend. Lydia glared when she saw me, jerked her head in a curt motion that could've meant "Come in" and could've meant "Go to hell". I chose to assume the former and made my way in.
My apparent nemesis held a book of poems in her hands, the pages ragged with use. "Swenson," I said, as if it weren't obvious by the fact that she was reading the damn book. "You like her?"
Lydia shrugged. "Borrowing her from Sara. She's all right, bit too high-flown for my taste." All this in a tone that made it sound like I had dragged it out of her.
"Lydia likes all her poetry to be depressing," Sara's voice called from the kitchen. I turned around just in time to see her pad into the living area, and my jaw nearly fell open before I clenched it firmly closed.
She must have done nothing but eat the entire break. Her belly, a red sweater clinging tightly to it, was enormous, a great round teardrop that protruded in a perfect half-globe. Her legs looked ready to burst from the sweatpants that they were squeezed into. She hadn't gained an incredible amount of weight, by the looks of things, but she had taken her shape and rounded it out to considerable effect. She hugged me, and her fat enveloped me like a massive pillow of gelatin. She must have been eating before I arrived--I could feel food shift inside her belly, and she burped chocolate into my ear. My fingers sank into the soft flesh of her back, and I squeezed before pulling away.
"How was the break?" she asked, moving past me to drop onto the couch next to Lydia--it creaked alarmingly under her bulk, and her girlfriend threw a glance at the frame that clearly feared for its structural integrity.
I responded with a few pleasantries about the family I'd seen, the gifts I'd received. Asked her how hers had gone.
She laid her hands on her belly, seemingly unconsciously. "I ate and ate and ate," she said, and then began to elaborate on what, precisely, that entailed. She had apparently made it a policy to eat at least four dinners at every family gathering, of which there had been three. Half of the money she'd gotten in gifts had gone toward new books, while the other half all went toward various kinds of chocolate.
"The highlight of the entire thing," she said, "had to be New Year's. Spent the entire night with a plate in my hand, ended up chugging an entire bottle of champagne. And being drunk on champagne is so much better than being drunk on beer. You feel all fizzy and funny and—"
"Are you seriously quoting Stephen fucking Sondheim to describe what swilling an entire bottle of champagne feels like?" Lydia asked.
"Hey, if it's an apt description," Sara said.
"Sondheim deserves greater dignity."
Sara shrugged. "At any rate, it was a thoroughly sinful, thoroughly lazy holiday season. Which reminds me," she said, lugging herself upward from the couch, "I brought leftovers!"
She waddled back to the kitchen. "C'mon," she called, "I know Lydia doesn't want me to eat all of them on my own!"
Lydia stood up, locked her eyes on mine. "Hope you're happy, asshole," she said, and gave me the finger, and stalked after her girlfriend.
I stood still for a while, staring at the door to the kitchen, and wondered what the hell Sara had gotten me into.
- - - -
Chapter Six
The kitchen, to my general relief, was not an orgy of gluttony on display. There were a couple trays of brownies present on the counter, along with several sheets of cookies and a jug of milk, but whatever was going to happen wouldn't be a repeat of the first time I'd met Lydia. “So,” I asked the blue-haired girl as I entered the room, “what's your major again?”
Either she was resigned to loathing me in private or she didn't care that much, because she answered, one hand toying idly with a peanut-butter cookie. “Double, theatre and political science.” A few moments of silence passed, broken only by Sara's munching on what looked to be two layers of brownie squashed together, before Lydia grudgingly decided to be polite and asked, “You?”
“Lit and writing.”
“A fellow bibliophile,” Sara said thickly, licking crumbs from her lips. “Lydia and I found common ground over Shakespeare—about the only common ground we really have, come to think.” She reached for another cookie. “Well, except that we both really fucking hate Andrew Lloyd Weber.”
The degradation of this name roused something like a romantic fire in Lydia's eyes, and I found myself hoping that this might just maybe be a normal conversation. “Why's that?”
Lydia dropped her cookie on the counter and began listing things off on her fingers, ire for me seemingly forgotten in the face of a greater enemy. “No musical subtlety. No thematic unity from show to show, or even within a show. Doesn't write his own lyrics. Chooses lyricists whose lyrics are the laziest writing this side of an E. L. James book. And he wrote Phantom of the fucking Opera, which has to be the worst thing to happen to musical theatre this side of the Vietnam War.”
“Sondheim didn't do his own orchestrations . . .” Sara whispered.
“Oh, go to hell. The man composes all his own music and lyrics, lyrics which might I add are the greatest works of songwriting in American history, and he's a thematic and tonal genius. So let him shop out the orchestrations to Tunick.”
I was inclined to simply watch the two of them go at it, which they did for the next ten minutes. Lydia seemed to have forgotten my presence entirely, which I found far preferable to the alternative. “You can't put Phantom in the same goddamn league as Sweeney Todd! Sweeney Todd transcends the penny dreadful, Phantom would fit right in on the shelf next to some bodice-ripper.”
“I thought Sara said you both hated Andrew Lloyd Weber,” I put in.
“Oh, we do,” Sara replied, giggling. “She just can't take a joke.”
The finger, courtesy of Lydia.
The argument refused to be resolved in any way other than our sitting down and watching the film adaptations of both musicals right then and there, and so we did. Sara brought her leftover goodies to the couch, nestled down in the center with me on one side and her girlfriend on the right, and ate through all four hours of moving pictures.
Midway through Sweeney Todd, she threw one arm around my shoulders and the other around Lydia's. I could feel the warm, heavy weight of it sinking down onto my back, the soft flesh forming a cushion against my neck. I looked over to see if Lydia felt a similar comforting sensation, but just as I did so she rose to her feet, saying she needed to take a piss.
Afterward, I made my excuses and slipped out. “See you at lunch tomorrow,” Sara called from the couch, one arm draped across her newly rounded gut. Lydia had her back to me, and didn't say good-bye.
I was about forty feet down the hall when I heard footsteps coming after me at a decently fast clip. I turned to see blue hair and glaring eyes coming toward me.
“Listen,” she hissed. “I know I may come off like a bitch to you, but I frankly don't give a shit.”
I stared. “Well, glad we got that out of the way, then,” I said, and started to turn away again.
“Hey!” There was something frightening in that bark—she'd make a wonderful theatre director someday—and I was compelled to look at her.
“I care about Sara, okay?” she said to me. “A lot. And I want her to be happy. But she's scaring me.” Her lip trembled; I couldn't decide if it was from anger or forthcoming tears or both.
“I'm not entirely sure what you want,” I said, hating myself for the cowardice even as the words left my lips.
“Fuck you, man.” She was quiet for a moment. “It can't be healthy. And just because you have some thing for fat chicks—I mean, she's gay, man, what the hell do you think is gonna happen?”
I held up my hands, alarmed by just how much she seemed to have ascertained. “Look, Sara is just a friend. That's all. And she's entirely set on what she's doing, she didn't need me to persuade her. She came to me.” I lowered the hands, gave what I hoped was my most earnest look. “I mean, you guys met in high school, right? She must have mentioned stuff about this back then.”
The trembling lip returned, and I was mortified to see that there were indeed gleaming spots on her eyes. “You're not helping things,” she hissed.
I opened my mouth and tried to find the words to reply, but they were slow in coming. She sniffed, disgusted. “We used to do things together, y'know? Like take walks or play with a frisbee or ride our bikes. Now all she does in between reading and writing is eat.”
Still, the words were slow in coming.
She sighed, wiped her cheek hastily. “Look, clearly she gets off on this shit, okay? And clearly she'll do it with or without you. But just . . . just think about her health. If you're really her friend.” And with that, she turned and walked back to the dorm room.
“Hey, I liked Sweeney Todd better!” I called after her.
I thought I saw the slightest hesitation between steps, but it was probably just a trick of the light.
