~BHM, Sci-fi Fantasy, Eating ~XWG - What happens when a fantasy dream actually becomes true!
It was a typical Saturday. A typical Saturday morning, hot and hazy and humid, and Steven was firmly planted on the plush Lay-Z-Boy recliner in the air-conditioned living room in the little frame house at 304 Maple Avenue. He was watching cartoons, and his eyes were glazed over and glued to the television set.
Steven would go swimming later, probably, but this morning was reserved for watching cartoons. Unlike most college freshman, Steven was a cartoon zombie.
He was slurping down the last of a tall, icy glass of lemonade, to wash away the aftertaste of the chocolate Pop Tarts he had eaten for breakfast. Breakfast -- the most important meal of the day. Wasn't that how those public service announcement "nutritional messages" always put it? The ones that aired between the cartoons, usually in the middle of the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour?
Pop Tarts -- the Breakfast of Champions.
Steven settled down into the luxurious comfort of the chair and concentrated on his beloved cartoons. He had seen them all, at one time or another, but it hardly mattered. Cartoons were a ritual of his Saturday mornings.
It was the first weekend of summer vacation, after his freshman year at Hillman University. Since he'd decided to stay for summer school, to get a head start on next year, he'd rented a small house just a block away from campus.
Now, on this lazy Saturday morning, Steven casually flipped through the channels. The Flintstones was on Channel 2, and Fred was in the middle of one of his tirades. Scooby Doo was on 3, The Smurfs on 5 and something futuristic on channel 9.
He stopped when he reached channel 13, which was showing an old Popeye cartoon. It was one of those odd threesomes -- Popeye, Olive Oyl and Wimpy the Moocher -- on an outing to the beach. Only, it wasn't the beach. It was the Sahara Desert, and this time, it was Egyptian "savages" from whom Popeye had to rescue Olive. Typical.
Needless to say, Popeye rescued the fair Olive, and anticipating the commercial Steven was about to flip the channel when he suddenly burst out laughing. At the very end of the cartoon, as Popeye and Olive returned to their camp to find Wimpy, they found that their pal had devoured the group's entire picnic lunch, and was sitting there, polishing off the last of the hamburgers, with a preposterously big belly, so full from all of the hamburgers that his shirt buttons popped off as he sang, "it's bad to be tardy to a hamburger party, says Wimpy the burger man!"
Steven had no idea why he found that so funny, but he did. Maybe it was the shock of seeing the portly moocher become so large and so fat. And so round. Maybe it was the sight of his shirt no longer being able to fit over his hugely fattened belly. Or maybe it was seeing those buttons fly off at the conclusion of Wimpy's feast, to the dismay of the hungry Popeye and Olive.
Whatever it was, that cartoon made Steven laugh out loud. He climbed out of the La-Z-Boy and opened a cabinet next to the TV set. He pulled out his videotaped copy of Charlotte's Web and slipped it into the VCR. He fast-forwarded the tape to the scene where Templeton the rat goes hunting for scraps leftover from the County Fair's visitors.
Steven plopped back down on the recliner and watched as Templeton scurried across the fairgrounds nibbling and gulping and guzzling anything and everything edible. Templeton became fatter and fatter as he ate, finally becoming a virtual appendage to his enormous belly after gulping down an entire banana. Steven giggled as the colossally overtuffed rat belched and patted and rolled around on his grossly distended belly.
What was funny about Wimpy and Templeton gorging themselves to such huge propertions, Steven decided, wasn't the horrified or disdainful expressions of Popeye and Olive, or Wilbur the pig and Charlotte the spider, but rather the gluttons' unabashed pleasure in eating without limit or guilt. Steven found something indefinable but undeniably amusing in that.
Switching off the VCR, Steven pointed the remote control at the TV and turned to channel 5, as it was time for the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour. The first cartoon had already started, and was about a turkey that was being fattened up for Thanksgiving by a Ma & Pa Kettle lookalike hillbilly couple. Undermining their plans was none other than Daffy Duck, who was trying to con the turkey out of his mountain of food. Convincing to the turkey to diet and exercise, Daffy ate and ate while the turkey starved and exercised. Finally, on Thanksgiving, the turkey was as thin as a rail and Daffy was proudly finishing off the turkey's huge meal, patting his belly and burping apologetically. Steven giggled.
He suddenly felt funny. Funny in the peculiar way, not funny in the ha-ha way. He poked himself in his tummy. It was flat and firm.
But just imagine, he thought, what it would be like to eat an enormous amount of food like that and grow so fat that his belly would no longer fit in his shirt. To be so fat that Fat Albert would look skinny by comparison. To be incapacitated by a feat of overeating and to have a belly so big that he couldn't move. He sat back in the recliner and imagined that he had a big bloated stomach and carved an imaginary one out of the air with his hands, gesturing as though he were patting and rubbing it.
It wasn't the first time Steven had wondered what it was like to be fat. Terry, one of his longtime friends who was also going to Hillman -- Hillman College, population 2,104, plus or minus a few livestock -- had gained fifty pounds the previous summer and looked like a real life version of Fat Albert. It was weirdly fascinating watching Terry's gigantic belly bounce up and down and jiggle all over like Jello -- rhythmic and almost hypnotic, really -- but the very thought of being so fat frightened Steven, mostly because of how their classmates had always laughed at Terry behind his back, calling him names like "Blubberbelly," "Jumbo" and "Tub 'o Lard Terry."
But there were definitely times, like now, when Steven liked thinking about what he'd look like if he ate as much as Templeton, or Wimpy, or Daffy, until his belly swelled so large that his shirt buttons popped off. One that was enormously bloated and round but still shook like Jello and bounced and jiggled and made people giggle. Just like the cartoons.
Steven found it funny to think about, at least funny when it happened to someone else or to a cartoon character, but reminded himself how horrified he was at the thought of really being fat. Steven had a less than nutritious diet but he wasn't fat. In fact, he was on the thin side, what with playing baseball and all of the swimming he did. The girls at school wrinkled their noses and shouted, "Eeeeewww" at Terry or anyone else within a country mile of being overweight. Even the guys on campus were pretty ruthless when it came to teasing the heavier students. And even Steven himself had been guilty of teasing on occasion. He wasn't proud of that, especially since he secretly had these fantasies. But he knew that he wasn't interested in being called "Fatso" or "Two Ton" by his pals on campus.
But on that Saturday Steven smiled as he thought about Wimpy's belly, and Templeton's, and Daffy's, and Terry's, too.
Then he did something strange. He pulled himself up from the chair and went directly to the kitchen pantry. Steven wasn't particularly hungry -- not after all that sugar -- but there was a tingle, some sort of excitement that he couldn't quite explain, that was welling up in his stomach. He reached into an open box of Little Debbie snack cakes -- the vanilla frosting-coated, fudge-filled ones shaped like hexagons -- and with somewhat of an anxious lump in his throat he pulled out a twin pack and shut the pantry door.
Steven stood there a full minute, thinking. Thinking about pillows. And blankets. He had a few very large t-shirts, and....and wouldn't it be OK just to do this once, to see what it feels like? To satisfy his curiosity, yes, that's what it would do. And he'd see once and for all how gross he'd look and that would be that.
And what the heck did he need the Little Debbies for anyway? Steven put them back in the pantry and started back toward the living room. And then he stopped, and grabbed the Little Debbies, and then grabbed a can of Coke from the refrigerator, too.
Steven put the Little Debbies and the can of Coke on a TV tray beside the Lay-Z-Boy, and then went to his bedroom and rummaged through his closet until he found the Mother of all t-shirts, a great big faded pale green one that hung limp on him. Plenty of room under that. Next, he snapped up several folded quilts and blankets from the linen closet and three or four different sizes of pillows from his bed and the living room sofa, and deposited them in a pile next to the La,-Z-Boy.
With something like exhilaration, or maybe it was angst, Steven picked up the blankets and pillows, one at a time, and began fitting them under his big t-shirt, on top of his tummy, bigger ones first, then smaller, methodically, molding and shaping each one into an imagined whole, a huge, rounded, bulging cartoon-like contour that projected further and further outward in front of him. With each additional article of stuffing, the t-shirt grew tighter, and the bulbous mound underneath it grew bigger and bigger, fuller and broader, more bloated and bulging. Distended. Massive.
He felt fat.
When there was no more room in the shirt, which now was stretched so taut it was rather binding, Steven moved quickly to the other side of the living room, where a full length mirror hung in the midst of paintings of birds and ships and mountains. His "belly" looked so real that Steven felt a sudden wave of shock and horror convulse him, but it subsided. He turned sideways and felt the rush of excitement return as he marveled at how "fat" he truly looked. How enormous IT looked. His "belly". He stood facing the mirror and pressed himself gently against it, feeling the soft pillow on top of his "tummy" yield just a tad against the glass. From this position Steven tried to touch the mirror with his hands but couldn't even come close. He rocked on his toes and heels until his "belly" began to bobble and bounce up and down slightly, from the weight of all of the padding.
Steven wondered what it must be like to run or do a jumping jack or jump rope with a belly so large, flopping down with a hypnotic, periodic motion, and jiggling like Jell-o, only to rebound upward and gyrate from side to side, all accompanied by some kind of silly sound effect. Blub. Blub. Blub. Boinnngggg! He grinned a silly grin and plopped down on the Lay-Z-Boy, with a heavy thud.
And sitting there, his legs stretched out before him, his massive padded gut residing in the space that normally was his lap and reaching past his knees, he felt like a beached whale. Like he'd eaten a thousand hamburgers. Like his stomach had gotten so fat that his shirt buttons were about to pop off.
Like Wimpy the Moocher.
Steven grinned at the thought..
He couldn't sit up or turn or move very quickly, and his range of motion was very limited. Steven was sure that, if not for the support the chair was giving his back, he wouldn't have been able to sit upright at all. He imagined himself trying to sit up and not being able to as the weight and size of his belly forced him to fall helplessly backward and hit the ground with a thud. He thought about himself lying supine and helpless on the ground, having eaten a meal fit for ten kings, groaning contentedly with his fantastically bulging belly towering above him like some sort of monolithic monument to overeating. He chuckled to himself as he thought about that, and decided that just to make his silly fantasy completely over the top, his belly should have one of those flashing neon signs on it, saying "full."
FULL. full. FULL. full. FULL. full. FULL.....
Steven wondered what his friends would say if they could see him now, if they'd laugh and think it was funny or if they'd mock and ridicule him as one of those Berkley kind of kooks.
FULL. full. FULL. full. FULL. full. FULL.....
And then he opened the package of Little Debbies and ate them with mock greed, stuffing them in his constantly chewing mouth with one hand and patting what he could reach of his mountainous "tummy" with the other. When he finished the Little Debbies, he popped open the can of Coke and guzzled it straight down. He soon felt very full and bloated, and imagined that this was how it would feel after a big filling meal if were truly so fat. How it might feel to wildly ply himself with mountains of junk food -- doughnuts and Twinkies and candy bars and cakes and pies.
A moment later he belched a long and satisfying belch, and giggled. He reached for the remote, which was sitting on the table beside the chair, and after working up a bit of a sweat managed to reach it. As he huffed and puffed from the exertion, he replayed Templeton's orgy of overeating in Charlotte's Web over and over, grinning at the thought and sight of his own enormous belly rising into the air as Templeton rolled around on his.
Finally, yawning and switching off the VCR, Steven rubbed his big "belly" a few times, and drifted off into a wonderfully pleasant sleep.
Steven awoke to the sound of hysterical laughter.
Purple blobs. No, greyish. Smiling grey blobs.
There were four -- no, five -- little greyish blob-like creatures in the living room now, gathered around Steven's chair, and they were smiling. No, grinning. They were grinning mischievously. They stood perhaps a tad under three feet tall. Short, toothless, grinning chubby blobs with very pronounced fat cheeks and pudgy little arms and legs. They were round and fat and looked like lumps of clay and had those big, toothless grins that were really creepy.
"Who...who'r...who are you?", Steven asked, rather dumbly. He wore a look of sheer bewilderment on his face.
They giggled. The blobs. Hysterically. High-pitched, like a bunch of mocking schoolgirls. And they kept grinning those creepy, toothless grins.
"We're the Munchies!" cackled one of them, with an insidious grin. "The Munchies!" the rest of them chanted, in unison.
Slowly Steven became more fully conscious. He was in the living room, the soft drone of the TV set filling the background, that space between consciousness and nothingness. Everything was as he knew it, everything in its own place. He was sitting in the Lay-Z-Boy. The furniture was the same as always. But the immediate past seemed a distant memory, one he was struggling to recall at that moment, one disappearing as rapidly as swirling water drains from a kitchen sink. Try as he might, he could not remember anything of that morning. He stared at the blobs blankly and they stared back, still grinning.
Steven looked down at himself and recognized his wiry frame. Terry was always calling him "Skinny" at school, and the nickname had stuck. He was wearing a baggy pair of blue jeans and a short-sleeved white t-shirt and sneakers. That seemed normal enough, but the scene before him certainly did not.
As Steven looked again at the round greyish beings, he thought them vaguely familiar, yet he knew he'd never seen them before. He found them goofy-looking and comical, and his initial fright subsided. He asked once more, "Who ARE you?" Again, they giggled. As he drew back, instinctively, they began chanting again. A hypnotic, whimsical, rhythmic, almost playful chant.
"To munch, is what you want to do, and we Five here have come to help you. You've dreamed of pizza pies and sweets, which now we'll let you eat and eat!"
Steven told himself that he was caught in a dream, some surreal nightmare. He shook his head, as if to clear out the cobwebs, and held up his hands to protest, as if this would awaken him.
"We are your friends, and offer treats -- candy, cookies, chocolate sweets.
You must eat lots, of this and that, in order that you will get fat!"
It was all Steven could do to blink his eyes. He knew it was a nightmare. That had to be it. He told himself to wake up.
They still grinned at him.
Steven replied, lamely, "But I don't WANT to get fat." They simply laughed and giggled.
He reached out and began shoving these chubby grey beings to one side or the other. As he touched them, he noticed that they were rather squishy and fleshy, almost structureless and formless except for their fat cheeks and toothless grins. But the imp-like creatures would not be denied. They pushed him backward in the Lay-Z-Boy and then all together managed to lift him off of it.
"Hey! Cut that out! What are you DOING?!" Even as Steven protested, the Munchies began carrying him into the kitchen, one under each leg, two under his back and one supporting his shoulders.
"Put me DOWN! Where are we going?" The Munchies began giggling furiously as they ran to the kitchen, carrying Steven on their squishy shoulders as servants might have carried an ancient pharaoh.
Once the procession had reached the kitchen, the Munchies sat Steven down on the floor and then prodded and pulled him to his feet. As he brushed himself off, one of the Munchies opened the refrigerator and another pulled open the pantry door while the rest began emptying them at a frantic rate.
The Munchies grabbed cartons of leftover fried chicken, slices of pizza, slabs of chocolate fudge cake, canisters of cookies, bags of chips and boxes of crackers, bowls full of potato salad and pudding, plates full of doughnuts and hunks of cheese, all of which they eagerly offered to Steven.
He stood there flabbergasted. The scene before him had deteriorated into some kind of horrible dream but there was no escaping it just then, evidently. He stood there, disgusted, and pointed to the refrigerator.
"You put that back. And leave me alone. I don't know what you want here, but I told you I don't WANT to be fat. And I'm NOT HUNGRY. Now go away."
He dispatched them with a wave of the hand, and with that, he turned on his heels and marched out of the kitchen. As he was leaving, he heard the Munchies snap their fingers -- yes, they had fingers on their fat little hands.
Steven had almost reached the Lay-Z-Boy when he felt a tingling sensation, sort of all over. The room began to spin and all he saw was a blur of color, ebbing and flowing and twisting through space and time.
And before he knew what had happened, Steven found himself back in the kitchen, and reaching for a drumstick, as one of the creatures held up the bucket of leftover fried chicken. He had no idea how he'd gotten there, but he was glad, because as suddenly as all of that, he felt very hungry.
"OK, but just one. I don't want to spoil my appetite." He munched on the chicken leg, and the deep-fried crispy crust made his mouth water.
"Don't wor-ry about spoiling lunch, just en-joy and eat a bunch!"
Steven laughed at that, as he finished off the chicken leg, licking his lips.
"You guys sure are funny looking, but you're OK. I dunno if you're real or not, but it's pretty neat that you showed up, really. It does get kind of boring around here sometimes. Thanks for the snack. Better put that stuff back, now, OK? You guys wanna watch TV or something or something?"
The Munchies stood there, still holding up their tasty-looking offerings.
"Now look, I said put that stuff back. I don't want any more. Honest."
But he was hungry and he knew he was lying and they knew it too. His stomach growled. The pizza looked inviting. Steven loved pizza. The Munchies kept on grinning at him.
"If you're won-drin' why we popped in, it's because you looked so thin.
You're too skinny, you look funny. Why stop now, when you're still hungry?"
Steven looked at them, from one to the others, and as they grinned at him he knew they were right, as weird as this was, whatever it was. A dream. A weird dream. And in a dream, another snack or two wouldn't hurt, and besides, it was practically lunchtime. Oh, heck, why not just indulge them a little and have an early lunch? It was a dream after all, and what was the harm in living it up a little? He grinned back at them.
"OK, pass me some pizza. It's lunch time!"
The Munchies gleefully obliged, handing Steven pieces of pizza as fast as he could eat them. He'd never managed to eat more than three before, even as hungry as he usually was after a baseball game, but before he knew it, he'd eaten all six leftover slices of the large double pepperoni and cheese pizza he'd left in the refrigerator from the night before. The Munchie who'd been holding the pizza box now tossed the empty carton on the floor and went to find more food as another Munchie passed Steven the bucket of fried chicken.
Steven put his hands on his stomach. "I better not, guys. That was good, but I'm real full." But the Munchies snapped their fingers again and the smell of the greasy but delicious chicken was too much to bear. He grabbed a piece and ate it in seconds, practically in one swift, constant motion. With crumbs on his cheeks and still chewing, he reached for another piece as the Munchies giggled their encouragement.
"That's it! Have another! And another!"
"Eat!"
"Try THIS!"
"No THIS! It's yummy!"
Strangely, he found himself caught up in the Munchies' excitement. It was almost like a show, with Steven performing.
He grabbed pieces of fried chicken with both hands. They all giggled as he ate a bite from one piece of chicken in his left hand, then a bite from the piece in his right. He hardly stopped chewing. When he finished those, he picked out two more and gobbled them greedily.
When he'd finished the bucket of chicken, a large burp followed, and he beamed proudly at the little gremlins, patting his tummy. A Munchie handed him a can of squeeze cheese. When Steven looked at it dubiously, the Munchie said, "You love cheese, don't you? You know you want to..."
It was true. Steven was a cheese-a-holic. He loved the stuff. And so now, he obliged, turning the can upside down and depressing the nozzle, letting the tasty orange stream of pasturized process cheese flow into his mouth. It tasted so good that he couldn't stop. No sooner had the can emptied than a Munchie pushed the tub of potato salad at him.
"Starches are good for you. Looks yummy! Eat up!" The Munchie handed Steven a large serving spoon and he began shoveling heaping spoonfuls of the delicious potato salad to his waiting taste buds. It was undeniably delicious, and the more of it he ate, the hungrier he got. It was gone in a flash, and a bag of chips was thrust at him. He grabbed a handful and began munching on them.
"No, don't eat them like that. Like THIS!" The Munchie climbed on top of the shoulders of another, held the bag over Steven and turned it upside down as the chips funneled into Steven's mouth as quickly as he could take them. He chewed constantly and uttered an occasional "Mmmm!" When that bag was finished, another was brought, and then yet another.
"You're doing GREAT, Steven! You must be soooo hungry! Have some cookies." The canister was full of fudgy double chocolate chocolate chip cookies, Steven's single favorite thing to eat in the world. They were so large and so rich that he'd never managed to eat more than one. Well, maybe one-and-a-half. He grinned and grabbed one in each hand and devoured them, then two more, and two more, and on and on until the canister was empty.
"Hey, you guys, since this is a dream, can I have seconds on those cookies?" He grinned and winked at the Munchies.
"Sure, but eat this pie first. It's banana creme." The pie separated from its tin nicely, and Steven picked it up the whole pie and ate it as fast as he could, stopping between bites long only enough to swallow the wonderful confection and to get his wind.
"Okay, done. That was good, but where are those cookies?" He said it in jest, of course, since he knew he'd eaten all of them, but one of the Munchies snapped its fingers and the canister was once again filled to overflowing with the sinfully rich chocolate treats.
"And here's some cookie dough ice cream to go with those. And some chocolate milk to wash it all down."
Steven's eyes got wide like fifty cent pieces, and he exclaimed, "Oooooh, YUM! You Munchies are real pals!"
He gulped mouthfuls of cookie and ice cream, and guzzled the milk, licking his lips and grinning right back at them. When he'd emptied the last of the crumbs from the cookie canister into his open mouth, and cleaned out the last droplets of ice cream from the ice cream container, he sat back and belched, somewhat apologetically. "Pardon me. But gee, that was good. Really hit the spot. What's for dinner?"
With that, they all had a hearty laugh.
***************
Watch Out for the Munchies
by Cossaboom
by Cossaboom
It was a typical Saturday. A typical Saturday morning, hot and hazy and humid, and Steven was firmly planted on the plush Lay-Z-Boy recliner in the air-conditioned living room in the little frame house at 304 Maple Avenue. He was watching cartoons, and his eyes were glazed over and glued to the television set.
Steven would go swimming later, probably, but this morning was reserved for watching cartoons. Unlike most college freshman, Steven was a cartoon zombie.
He was slurping down the last of a tall, icy glass of lemonade, to wash away the aftertaste of the chocolate Pop Tarts he had eaten for breakfast. Breakfast -- the most important meal of the day. Wasn't that how those public service announcement "nutritional messages" always put it? The ones that aired between the cartoons, usually in the middle of the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour?
Pop Tarts -- the Breakfast of Champions.
Steven settled down into the luxurious comfort of the chair and concentrated on his beloved cartoons. He had seen them all, at one time or another, but it hardly mattered. Cartoons were a ritual of his Saturday mornings.
It was the first weekend of summer vacation, after his freshman year at Hillman University. Since he'd decided to stay for summer school, to get a head start on next year, he'd rented a small house just a block away from campus.
Now, on this lazy Saturday morning, Steven casually flipped through the channels. The Flintstones was on Channel 2, and Fred was in the middle of one of his tirades. Scooby Doo was on 3, The Smurfs on 5 and something futuristic on channel 9.
He stopped when he reached channel 13, which was showing an old Popeye cartoon. It was one of those odd threesomes -- Popeye, Olive Oyl and Wimpy the Moocher -- on an outing to the beach. Only, it wasn't the beach. It was the Sahara Desert, and this time, it was Egyptian "savages" from whom Popeye had to rescue Olive. Typical.
Needless to say, Popeye rescued the fair Olive, and anticipating the commercial Steven was about to flip the channel when he suddenly burst out laughing. At the very end of the cartoon, as Popeye and Olive returned to their camp to find Wimpy, they found that their pal had devoured the group's entire picnic lunch, and was sitting there, polishing off the last of the hamburgers, with a preposterously big belly, so full from all of the hamburgers that his shirt buttons popped off as he sang, "it's bad to be tardy to a hamburger party, says Wimpy the burger man!"
Steven had no idea why he found that so funny, but he did. Maybe it was the shock of seeing the portly moocher become so large and so fat. And so round. Maybe it was the sight of his shirt no longer being able to fit over his hugely fattened belly. Or maybe it was seeing those buttons fly off at the conclusion of Wimpy's feast, to the dismay of the hungry Popeye and Olive.
Whatever it was, that cartoon made Steven laugh out loud. He climbed out of the La-Z-Boy and opened a cabinet next to the TV set. He pulled out his videotaped copy of Charlotte's Web and slipped it into the VCR. He fast-forwarded the tape to the scene where Templeton the rat goes hunting for scraps leftover from the County Fair's visitors.
Steven plopped back down on the recliner and watched as Templeton scurried across the fairgrounds nibbling and gulping and guzzling anything and everything edible. Templeton became fatter and fatter as he ate, finally becoming a virtual appendage to his enormous belly after gulping down an entire banana. Steven giggled as the colossally overtuffed rat belched and patted and rolled around on his grossly distended belly.
What was funny about Wimpy and Templeton gorging themselves to such huge propertions, Steven decided, wasn't the horrified or disdainful expressions of Popeye and Olive, or Wilbur the pig and Charlotte the spider, but rather the gluttons' unabashed pleasure in eating without limit or guilt. Steven found something indefinable but undeniably amusing in that.
Switching off the VCR, Steven pointed the remote control at the TV and turned to channel 5, as it was time for the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour. The first cartoon had already started, and was about a turkey that was being fattened up for Thanksgiving by a Ma & Pa Kettle lookalike hillbilly couple. Undermining their plans was none other than Daffy Duck, who was trying to con the turkey out of his mountain of food. Convincing to the turkey to diet and exercise, Daffy ate and ate while the turkey starved and exercised. Finally, on Thanksgiving, the turkey was as thin as a rail and Daffy was proudly finishing off the turkey's huge meal, patting his belly and burping apologetically. Steven giggled.
He suddenly felt funny. Funny in the peculiar way, not funny in the ha-ha way. He poked himself in his tummy. It was flat and firm.
But just imagine, he thought, what it would be like to eat an enormous amount of food like that and grow so fat that his belly would no longer fit in his shirt. To be so fat that Fat Albert would look skinny by comparison. To be incapacitated by a feat of overeating and to have a belly so big that he couldn't move. He sat back in the recliner and imagined that he had a big bloated stomach and carved an imaginary one out of the air with his hands, gesturing as though he were patting and rubbing it.
It wasn't the first time Steven had wondered what it was like to be fat. Terry, one of his longtime friends who was also going to Hillman -- Hillman College, population 2,104, plus or minus a few livestock -- had gained fifty pounds the previous summer and looked like a real life version of Fat Albert. It was weirdly fascinating watching Terry's gigantic belly bounce up and down and jiggle all over like Jello -- rhythmic and almost hypnotic, really -- but the very thought of being so fat frightened Steven, mostly because of how their classmates had always laughed at Terry behind his back, calling him names like "Blubberbelly," "Jumbo" and "Tub 'o Lard Terry."
But there were definitely times, like now, when Steven liked thinking about what he'd look like if he ate as much as Templeton, or Wimpy, or Daffy, until his belly swelled so large that his shirt buttons popped off. One that was enormously bloated and round but still shook like Jello and bounced and jiggled and made people giggle. Just like the cartoons.
Steven found it funny to think about, at least funny when it happened to someone else or to a cartoon character, but reminded himself how horrified he was at the thought of really being fat. Steven had a less than nutritious diet but he wasn't fat. In fact, he was on the thin side, what with playing baseball and all of the swimming he did. The girls at school wrinkled their noses and shouted, "Eeeeewww" at Terry or anyone else within a country mile of being overweight. Even the guys on campus were pretty ruthless when it came to teasing the heavier students. And even Steven himself had been guilty of teasing on occasion. He wasn't proud of that, especially since he secretly had these fantasies. But he knew that he wasn't interested in being called "Fatso" or "Two Ton" by his pals on campus.
But on that Saturday Steven smiled as he thought about Wimpy's belly, and Templeton's, and Daffy's, and Terry's, too.
Then he did something strange. He pulled himself up from the chair and went directly to the kitchen pantry. Steven wasn't particularly hungry -- not after all that sugar -- but there was a tingle, some sort of excitement that he couldn't quite explain, that was welling up in his stomach. He reached into an open box of Little Debbie snack cakes -- the vanilla frosting-coated, fudge-filled ones shaped like hexagons -- and with somewhat of an anxious lump in his throat he pulled out a twin pack and shut the pantry door.
Steven stood there a full minute, thinking. Thinking about pillows. And blankets. He had a few very large t-shirts, and....and wouldn't it be OK just to do this once, to see what it feels like? To satisfy his curiosity, yes, that's what it would do. And he'd see once and for all how gross he'd look and that would be that.
And what the heck did he need the Little Debbies for anyway? Steven put them back in the pantry and started back toward the living room. And then he stopped, and grabbed the Little Debbies, and then grabbed a can of Coke from the refrigerator, too.
Steven put the Little Debbies and the can of Coke on a TV tray beside the Lay-Z-Boy, and then went to his bedroom and rummaged through his closet until he found the Mother of all t-shirts, a great big faded pale green one that hung limp on him. Plenty of room under that. Next, he snapped up several folded quilts and blankets from the linen closet and three or four different sizes of pillows from his bed and the living room sofa, and deposited them in a pile next to the La,-Z-Boy.
With something like exhilaration, or maybe it was angst, Steven picked up the blankets and pillows, one at a time, and began fitting them under his big t-shirt, on top of his tummy, bigger ones first, then smaller, methodically, molding and shaping each one into an imagined whole, a huge, rounded, bulging cartoon-like contour that projected further and further outward in front of him. With each additional article of stuffing, the t-shirt grew tighter, and the bulbous mound underneath it grew bigger and bigger, fuller and broader, more bloated and bulging. Distended. Massive.
He felt fat.
When there was no more room in the shirt, which now was stretched so taut it was rather binding, Steven moved quickly to the other side of the living room, where a full length mirror hung in the midst of paintings of birds and ships and mountains. His "belly" looked so real that Steven felt a sudden wave of shock and horror convulse him, but it subsided. He turned sideways and felt the rush of excitement return as he marveled at how "fat" he truly looked. How enormous IT looked. His "belly". He stood facing the mirror and pressed himself gently against it, feeling the soft pillow on top of his "tummy" yield just a tad against the glass. From this position Steven tried to touch the mirror with his hands but couldn't even come close. He rocked on his toes and heels until his "belly" began to bobble and bounce up and down slightly, from the weight of all of the padding.
Steven wondered what it must be like to run or do a jumping jack or jump rope with a belly so large, flopping down with a hypnotic, periodic motion, and jiggling like Jell-o, only to rebound upward and gyrate from side to side, all accompanied by some kind of silly sound effect. Blub. Blub. Blub. Boinnngggg! He grinned a silly grin and plopped down on the Lay-Z-Boy, with a heavy thud.
And sitting there, his legs stretched out before him, his massive padded gut residing in the space that normally was his lap and reaching past his knees, he felt like a beached whale. Like he'd eaten a thousand hamburgers. Like his stomach had gotten so fat that his shirt buttons were about to pop off.
Like Wimpy the Moocher.
Steven grinned at the thought..
He couldn't sit up or turn or move very quickly, and his range of motion was very limited. Steven was sure that, if not for the support the chair was giving his back, he wouldn't have been able to sit upright at all. He imagined himself trying to sit up and not being able to as the weight and size of his belly forced him to fall helplessly backward and hit the ground with a thud. He thought about himself lying supine and helpless on the ground, having eaten a meal fit for ten kings, groaning contentedly with his fantastically bulging belly towering above him like some sort of monolithic monument to overeating. He chuckled to himself as he thought about that, and decided that just to make his silly fantasy completely over the top, his belly should have one of those flashing neon signs on it, saying "full."
FULL. full. FULL. full. FULL. full. FULL.....
Steven wondered what his friends would say if they could see him now, if they'd laugh and think it was funny or if they'd mock and ridicule him as one of those Berkley kind of kooks.
FULL. full. FULL. full. FULL. full. FULL.....
And then he opened the package of Little Debbies and ate them with mock greed, stuffing them in his constantly chewing mouth with one hand and patting what he could reach of his mountainous "tummy" with the other. When he finished the Little Debbies, he popped open the can of Coke and guzzled it straight down. He soon felt very full and bloated, and imagined that this was how it would feel after a big filling meal if were truly so fat. How it might feel to wildly ply himself with mountains of junk food -- doughnuts and Twinkies and candy bars and cakes and pies.
A moment later he belched a long and satisfying belch, and giggled. He reached for the remote, which was sitting on the table beside the chair, and after working up a bit of a sweat managed to reach it. As he huffed and puffed from the exertion, he replayed Templeton's orgy of overeating in Charlotte's Web over and over, grinning at the thought and sight of his own enormous belly rising into the air as Templeton rolled around on his.
Finally, yawning and switching off the VCR, Steven rubbed his big "belly" a few times, and drifted off into a wonderfully pleasant sleep.
Steven awoke to the sound of hysterical laughter.
Purple blobs. No, greyish. Smiling grey blobs.
There were four -- no, five -- little greyish blob-like creatures in the living room now, gathered around Steven's chair, and they were smiling. No, grinning. They were grinning mischievously. They stood perhaps a tad under three feet tall. Short, toothless, grinning chubby blobs with very pronounced fat cheeks and pudgy little arms and legs. They were round and fat and looked like lumps of clay and had those big, toothless grins that were really creepy.
"Who...who'r...who are you?", Steven asked, rather dumbly. He wore a look of sheer bewilderment on his face.
They giggled. The blobs. Hysterically. High-pitched, like a bunch of mocking schoolgirls. And they kept grinning those creepy, toothless grins.
"We're the Munchies!" cackled one of them, with an insidious grin. "The Munchies!" the rest of them chanted, in unison.
Slowly Steven became more fully conscious. He was in the living room, the soft drone of the TV set filling the background, that space between consciousness and nothingness. Everything was as he knew it, everything in its own place. He was sitting in the Lay-Z-Boy. The furniture was the same as always. But the immediate past seemed a distant memory, one he was struggling to recall at that moment, one disappearing as rapidly as swirling water drains from a kitchen sink. Try as he might, he could not remember anything of that morning. He stared at the blobs blankly and they stared back, still grinning.
Steven looked down at himself and recognized his wiry frame. Terry was always calling him "Skinny" at school, and the nickname had stuck. He was wearing a baggy pair of blue jeans and a short-sleeved white t-shirt and sneakers. That seemed normal enough, but the scene before him certainly did not.
As Steven looked again at the round greyish beings, he thought them vaguely familiar, yet he knew he'd never seen them before. He found them goofy-looking and comical, and his initial fright subsided. He asked once more, "Who ARE you?" Again, they giggled. As he drew back, instinctively, they began chanting again. A hypnotic, whimsical, rhythmic, almost playful chant.
"To munch, is what you want to do, and we Five here have come to help you. You've dreamed of pizza pies and sweets, which now we'll let you eat and eat!"
Steven told himself that he was caught in a dream, some surreal nightmare. He shook his head, as if to clear out the cobwebs, and held up his hands to protest, as if this would awaken him.
"We are your friends, and offer treats -- candy, cookies, chocolate sweets.
You must eat lots, of this and that, in order that you will get fat!"
It was all Steven could do to blink his eyes. He knew it was a nightmare. That had to be it. He told himself to wake up.
They still grinned at him.
Steven replied, lamely, "But I don't WANT to get fat." They simply laughed and giggled.
He reached out and began shoving these chubby grey beings to one side or the other. As he touched them, he noticed that they were rather squishy and fleshy, almost structureless and formless except for their fat cheeks and toothless grins. But the imp-like creatures would not be denied. They pushed him backward in the Lay-Z-Boy and then all together managed to lift him off of it.
"Hey! Cut that out! What are you DOING?!" Even as Steven protested, the Munchies began carrying him into the kitchen, one under each leg, two under his back and one supporting his shoulders.
"Put me DOWN! Where are we going?" The Munchies began giggling furiously as they ran to the kitchen, carrying Steven on their squishy shoulders as servants might have carried an ancient pharaoh.
Once the procession had reached the kitchen, the Munchies sat Steven down on the floor and then prodded and pulled him to his feet. As he brushed himself off, one of the Munchies opened the refrigerator and another pulled open the pantry door while the rest began emptying them at a frantic rate.
The Munchies grabbed cartons of leftover fried chicken, slices of pizza, slabs of chocolate fudge cake, canisters of cookies, bags of chips and boxes of crackers, bowls full of potato salad and pudding, plates full of doughnuts and hunks of cheese, all of which they eagerly offered to Steven.
He stood there flabbergasted. The scene before him had deteriorated into some kind of horrible dream but there was no escaping it just then, evidently. He stood there, disgusted, and pointed to the refrigerator.
"You put that back. And leave me alone. I don't know what you want here, but I told you I don't WANT to be fat. And I'm NOT HUNGRY. Now go away."
He dispatched them with a wave of the hand, and with that, he turned on his heels and marched out of the kitchen. As he was leaving, he heard the Munchies snap their fingers -- yes, they had fingers on their fat little hands.
Steven had almost reached the Lay-Z-Boy when he felt a tingling sensation, sort of all over. The room began to spin and all he saw was a blur of color, ebbing and flowing and twisting through space and time.
And before he knew what had happened, Steven found himself back in the kitchen, and reaching for a drumstick, as one of the creatures held up the bucket of leftover fried chicken. He had no idea how he'd gotten there, but he was glad, because as suddenly as all of that, he felt very hungry.
"OK, but just one. I don't want to spoil my appetite." He munched on the chicken leg, and the deep-fried crispy crust made his mouth water.
"Don't wor-ry about spoiling lunch, just en-joy and eat a bunch!"
Steven laughed at that, as he finished off the chicken leg, licking his lips.
"You guys sure are funny looking, but you're OK. I dunno if you're real or not, but it's pretty neat that you showed up, really. It does get kind of boring around here sometimes. Thanks for the snack. Better put that stuff back, now, OK? You guys wanna watch TV or something or something?"
The Munchies stood there, still holding up their tasty-looking offerings.
"Now look, I said put that stuff back. I don't want any more. Honest."
But he was hungry and he knew he was lying and they knew it too. His stomach growled. The pizza looked inviting. Steven loved pizza. The Munchies kept on grinning at him.
"If you're won-drin' why we popped in, it's because you looked so thin.
You're too skinny, you look funny. Why stop now, when you're still hungry?"
Steven looked at them, from one to the others, and as they grinned at him he knew they were right, as weird as this was, whatever it was. A dream. A weird dream. And in a dream, another snack or two wouldn't hurt, and besides, it was practically lunchtime. Oh, heck, why not just indulge them a little and have an early lunch? It was a dream after all, and what was the harm in living it up a little? He grinned back at them.
"OK, pass me some pizza. It's lunch time!"
The Munchies gleefully obliged, handing Steven pieces of pizza as fast as he could eat them. He'd never managed to eat more than three before, even as hungry as he usually was after a baseball game, but before he knew it, he'd eaten all six leftover slices of the large double pepperoni and cheese pizza he'd left in the refrigerator from the night before. The Munchie who'd been holding the pizza box now tossed the empty carton on the floor and went to find more food as another Munchie passed Steven the bucket of fried chicken.
Steven put his hands on his stomach. "I better not, guys. That was good, but I'm real full." But the Munchies snapped their fingers again and the smell of the greasy but delicious chicken was too much to bear. He grabbed a piece and ate it in seconds, practically in one swift, constant motion. With crumbs on his cheeks and still chewing, he reached for another piece as the Munchies giggled their encouragement.
"That's it! Have another! And another!"
"Eat!"
"Try THIS!"
"No THIS! It's yummy!"
Strangely, he found himself caught up in the Munchies' excitement. It was almost like a show, with Steven performing.
He grabbed pieces of fried chicken with both hands. They all giggled as he ate a bite from one piece of chicken in his left hand, then a bite from the piece in his right. He hardly stopped chewing. When he finished those, he picked out two more and gobbled them greedily.
When he'd finished the bucket of chicken, a large burp followed, and he beamed proudly at the little gremlins, patting his tummy. A Munchie handed him a can of squeeze cheese. When Steven looked at it dubiously, the Munchie said, "You love cheese, don't you? You know you want to..."
It was true. Steven was a cheese-a-holic. He loved the stuff. And so now, he obliged, turning the can upside down and depressing the nozzle, letting the tasty orange stream of pasturized process cheese flow into his mouth. It tasted so good that he couldn't stop. No sooner had the can emptied than a Munchie pushed the tub of potato salad at him.
"Starches are good for you. Looks yummy! Eat up!" The Munchie handed Steven a large serving spoon and he began shoveling heaping spoonfuls of the delicious potato salad to his waiting taste buds. It was undeniably delicious, and the more of it he ate, the hungrier he got. It was gone in a flash, and a bag of chips was thrust at him. He grabbed a handful and began munching on them.
"No, don't eat them like that. Like THIS!" The Munchie climbed on top of the shoulders of another, held the bag over Steven and turned it upside down as the chips funneled into Steven's mouth as quickly as he could take them. He chewed constantly and uttered an occasional "Mmmm!" When that bag was finished, another was brought, and then yet another.
"You're doing GREAT, Steven! You must be soooo hungry! Have some cookies." The canister was full of fudgy double chocolate chocolate chip cookies, Steven's single favorite thing to eat in the world. They were so large and so rich that he'd never managed to eat more than one. Well, maybe one-and-a-half. He grinned and grabbed one in each hand and devoured them, then two more, and two more, and on and on until the canister was empty.
"Hey, you guys, since this is a dream, can I have seconds on those cookies?" He grinned and winked at the Munchies.
"Sure, but eat this pie first. It's banana creme." The pie separated from its tin nicely, and Steven picked it up the whole pie and ate it as fast as he could, stopping between bites long only enough to swallow the wonderful confection and to get his wind.
"Okay, done. That was good, but where are those cookies?" He said it in jest, of course, since he knew he'd eaten all of them, but one of the Munchies snapped its fingers and the canister was once again filled to overflowing with the sinfully rich chocolate treats.
"And here's some cookie dough ice cream to go with those. And some chocolate milk to wash it all down."
Steven's eyes got wide like fifty cent pieces, and he exclaimed, "Oooooh, YUM! You Munchies are real pals!"
He gulped mouthfuls of cookie and ice cream, and guzzled the milk, licking his lips and grinning right back at them. When he'd emptied the last of the crumbs from the cookie canister into his open mouth, and cleaned out the last droplets of ice cream from the ice cream container, he sat back and belched, somewhat apologetically. "Pardon me. But gee, that was good. Really hit the spot. What's for dinner?"
With that, they all had a hearty laugh.
***************
