A Rubensesque Siren

Lena cursed herself. She'd been relaxing after a large meal – the tourists on the canals were always happy to throw down something nice to a passing mermaid, she'd found – just drifting idly on the mild coastal currents, when she'd let her eyes drift closed for just a second. The sun was warm, her full belly was making her sleepy and sluggish, and she'd been far enough from the shore that she'd felt in no danger of beaching herself.

But the next thing she'd felt was the rough-tumble of sand in her mouth and the thundering weight of gravity as she was deposited on the beach by the fickle tide.

Grunting, she managed to get her face clear of the sand and sucked in a breath of pure, fresh air, gasping at the switch from gills to lungs. She was face down, some twenty feet up the deserted beach, her shimmering blue fish-tail flapping helplessly in the thin, unswimmable air. What an absurd  situation! Mermaids could breathe on land, of course, but with only a fish tail for locomotion there wasn't really anything for them to do besides roll themselves back into the sea.

And so, grumbling at her own stupidity, Lena began to do exactly that.

Or tried to, anyway.

It had been a long time since Lena had last beached herself. It had been before she'd found this beautiful town of canals and viaducts, where the tourists were always so willing to throw a little food to a hopeful mermaid if she was willing to flash her tail or do a flip in the water for them. Back then she'd been lithe and agile, the very picture of a renaissance siren. She'd slid effortlessly through the water, hunting for fish in the ocean deeps, and if she did happen to get beached when searching for crustaceans in the shallows then it was just a momentary indignity to roll herself back down the sands and into the sea.

Now though... well, she had to admit that the steady diet of sausage rolls, pizza slices and buttered bagels tossed down by the tourists had had a certain affect on her body. She'd grown a little... plump. With such a steady, reliable food source constantly available, she hadn't needed to hunt in almost a year now, instead spending most of her days lounging around in canals, doing petty tricks for tourists and, of course, eating and eating. It had only taken her a couple of months to begin to resemble a Rubens more than a Van Dyck, and not long after that any resemblance to classical art was lost entirely. What artist of the seventeenth century could have visualised a girl growing as plump as Lena? On her steady diet of castaway fast food she softened steadily, until now, beached on the sands late in the evening, she more resembled a stranded whale than anything else.

Her face was round, her natural good looks blurred by the hefty amount of extra fat that clung to her jawline. Her rich brown hair, that looked so elegant and wavy in the water, was stringy and clung to her pasty cheeks now she was on land, like little more than so much seaweed stuck around her head.
Lower down, from her rounded shoulders sprang her thick arms, the hefty mass of those two human limbs sagging without the familiar support of the water.
She was bare-chested, of course – mermaids never wore clothes – and her heavy, pendulous breasts drooped into the sand as she propped herself up, flabby and rather shapeless with all the extra fat rounding them out. She'd had modest breasts back in the day, but they'd been pert and firm; now they were huge, but consisted almost entirely of fat.
Her gut, though, dominated her human half. Huge and quivering, it spread out in front of her as she lay in the sand even as it bulged out on either side, a massive expanse of white flab divided roughly into two thick folds across her navel. It made her look like a blubbery seal, a great pale mass of flesh slumped down on the beach, and full of rich food as it was now it was larger than ever.

Of course, her piscine half hadn't escaped unscathed. Her elegant shimmering fish-tail had thickened too, widening and widening – and becoming less useful with each extra pound of padding that softened it. She was hardly agile these days even in the water, the cushioning that clad her fat, clumsy tail rolling over itself if she bent it even a little, and swimming quickly tired her out in no time.

And so, it was with a sense of disappointed resignation that Lena discovered that heaving herself back into the sea wasn't going to be as simple as it once had been.

She went to roll over onto her back, but immediately she was foiled. Her body was heavy, the endless extra padding that she'd developed over the past year making even simple movements on land exhausting, and her muscles had long since weakened from lack of use. She shuffled and heaved, trying to use her shining tail as a lever to push herself over, but she just seemed to twist inside her own fat, the massive beanbag of her gut jiggling as she tried to heft it over. Already she was panting, face red, breathing hard through lungs that weren't used to the strain. Her stomach was still full, straining with the heavy meal she'd earned earlier by the pier, and its groaning and grumbling as her digesting gut was jostled by her attempts only made her more uncomfortable.

Moaning, she abandoned the effort for a moment, puffing out her cheeks as she gulped at the air. Now she really did feel like a fish out of the water, struggling to breathe as her biology betrayed her... or rather, her lifestyle, since there was really no blaming her natural biology for this predicament.

Rallying herself, she strained once again, letting out a long wheeze as, with both arms and her tail straining, she tried her best to roll over. Slowly, painfully, she managed to heave herself around, until suddenly she was past the tipping point and her weight began to work for her instead of against her and she rolled suddenly. Her gut flopped over her, knocking what little wind she had out of her lungs, and her flabby breasts slumped up over her face, almost blinding her as she lay on her back.

Here, pinned by the bulk of her gut, she began to panic as she realised that she definitely couldn't breathe like this. The sheer weight of her belly was crushing her, flattening her down into the sand and making each breath a desperate gasp. She wheezed and puffed, blinking over her own breasts as she realised the true mess she'd got herself into, feeling herself grow slowly more and more oxygen starved as her little gulps of air failed to supply the needs of her bloated body.

She strained again, muscles now reinforced by panic as she tried to heave herself back to lying on her front. There was still an indent in the sand beside her where she'd first landed, the deep single groove of her fish tail beneath the triple rounded indents of her belly and breasts, and she hefted herself back toward it hurriedly, desperate to get some air again. Her muscles strained and burned, but she managed to finally slip herself back over, lungs freeing up as the immense weight on them eased.

Puffing and panting, she rested her head for a moment as she caught her elusive breath. Tomorrow morning, the kids from the hotel would come down to play and make sandcastles near the rocks. Until then, she could do nothing but lie here like a bloated whale, shaking her head at her own greed even as she dreamed wistfully of the hot dogs and pretzels they made down by the pier.