Trick or Treat(s)

Lilly insisted on walking to the door.

It was odd - not in and of itself, necessarily, but odd for a girl who normally eschewed almost any effort, let alone something as tremendously difficult as walking. Even the ridiculously short distance from her bed to her bathroom was handled by somebody else, to say nothing of the frequent and difficult trips to the kitchen when she felt that the food was taking too long. This was not only a matter of convenience for the girl; truth be told, she was almost entirely incapable of moving her enormous eight-year-old form under her own power.

Lilly Hargraves was, to put it mildly, one of the fattest - if not the fattest - child to waddle upon the face of the Earth.

She was barely three feet tall - short even for eight - but more than made up for it with a circumference that would put oil barrels to shame. Her stomach, a fleshy blanket of pure fat, dangled precipitously past her knees; her rear end, a slab of blubber four times the width of the average girl her age, wobbled slightly far past the reach of her stubby arms. Her feet were overwhelmed with leg flab, tiny toes just barely peeking out from underneath; her arms were slightly freer, but in principle no different. A wave of fat connected her upper arms to her immense hips no matter how she lifted or moved them. She spent her days pinned to her bed, hungry belly resting ponderously in between and past her legs, watching the world through the lens of the Internet. Just about the only thing she could do for herself was breathe, and even that was an effort.

But, even so, she insisted. The porch of every house she visited on Halloween - even those with stairs - would be graced by her ponderous footfalls.

This year, she was going as a creeper from Minecraft, although the only really recognizable bit was the hat - it is intensely difficult to transfer the idea of a creature composed of cubes to a bloated mass of youthful curves. Even though the costume was custom-designed for her immensity, she really didn’t fit, even less so when she heaved herself out of her equally customized and reinforced wheelchair as close to the houses as possible. Once out, already puffing, she took slow, heavy steps, stopping every so often to wheeze piteously through crushed airways as the parental figure in the doorway, framed by light and decorations, looked on in shock. Eventually, her sweaty, wobbling form reached the door, and she, completely out of breath, would force out a weak, inaudible “Trick or Treat!”

Despite her ludicrous size, and despite the murmurs of discontent from the candy-givers, she would always - always - receive a rather impressive handful.

The look upon her triple-chinned face as she settled herself back in her chair and tucked into the chocolates at hand was always one of purest triumph.