The Weight of Generations by Benny Mon​

~BBW, SSBBW, ~XWG, Gluttony Stuffing - on the changing meaning of being superfat in America


Part 1 of 3

Two minutes passed before Elena managed to roll over and slap a hand on her snooze button. Her body bumped into something sharp along the way and she had to squirm and twist herself into a position that revealed it as a mostly empty pizza box, lying open in the middle of her bed. Two slices (pepperoni) still sat in their original places, and the smell of greasy, lukewarm cheese turned her stomach a little. She looked over at the alarm clock: 6:34. She’d only gotten five hours of sleep because, finding herself insomniac and ravenous at 11:00, she’d ordered a second dinner of dominos and stayed up watching old sitcoms.

Elena painstakingly pushed herself up on the side of her bed, her huge belly fighting her every step of the way. She just sat there for a minute, naked, fat, and miserable, contemplating the painful inevitability of beginning her day. She felt the weight of her belly on her legs (also fat, but nowhere near the same league as her midsection), looked down at the flabby breasts that hung off either side of her upper belly. She rubbed her soft, sore shoulders and let her hands stray hesitantly to her generous double chin, and then sighed as she tied her long, brown hair into a loose bun, slid onto the floor, and padded into the bathroom.

While Elena brushed her teeth, a gleaming silver scale stared at her from the corner of her eye. It was as good as new, never once used, but the truth was she had owned it for over a year. It had replaced her old, mechanical scale, a hand-me-down from her parents whose 250-pound weight limit she had exceeded long ago. Elena looked back at the blobbish body reflected in the mirror and wondered just when she had lost control of herself. She had always been fat, of course, was born fat, and she had resigned herself to the fact that she would never be a size zero. But through her teenage years and her early twenties, she’d managed to keep her weight in the low two hundreds. It wasn’t until she’d graduated from college and started her job--and not even then, not right away--that she’d lost control. She slowly stopped exercising and began to indulge her worst impulses, and her weight gain picked up speed. For a while she kept weighing herself, telling herself that if she cared enough to do that she would eventually go on a diet and rein herself in. But that delusion was already two holiday seasons old. By the time she’d had to replace the old scale, she was already too far gone (and too scared) to weigh herself again. Who knows how fat she had become.

Elena spit into the sink and dropped her toothbrush in its cup, and her two bellies wobbled as she fled the scale back into her bedroom. Now that she was up and moving, the pizza was starting to smell good again. Maybe a bite or two wouldn’t hurt, and she couldn’t leave it on the bed all day anyway...

* * *

Twenty minutes later Elena waddled out to her car, dressed in gray slacks, a teal top that barely met the pants, a brown belt that did roughly nothing to accentuate her nonexistent waist, and a cream cardigan. She popped the last pizza crust in her mouth and wiped greasy crumbs from her fingers before unlocking the car and tossing her purse in the back seat.

Now came the hard part: fitting in the front seat. The steering wheel was already cocked up as far as it would go, the seat pushed as far back as possible, but it would still be a tight fit. This car had gotten too small for her about six months ago, and she knew she needed a new one, but she just didn’t have the money right now. She stood for a moment with a hand on the car roof, took a breath, and then stooped down to get into the seat. She felt the steering wheel dig into her bellies, found no wiggle room between her flabby back and the seat back, and it took four vigorous, awkward squirms to get her body wedged securely in place. Elena paused, panting. She pulled down the sun visor and flipped open the mirror to check her makeup, but she was taken aback by the sweaty, corpulent face and shoulders that stared back at her. She didn’t normally look this fat, did she? She dabbed at her round cheeks with a tissue and cleaned up a stray smear of lipstick with her thumb, and she pulled out of the driveway.

Elena was cursed to have three junk food breakfast joints on her short drive to work, and today she couldn’t resist: after all the effort of getting into the driver’s seat, she was feeling a little peckish. She pulled into a Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru and placed her order.

“Two boston cream donuts please.”

“Will that be all?”

“No….” She stared at the menu. “I’ll also have a large caramel swirl frozen coffee. With cream.”

“Is that a--”

“And four more donuts. Boston cream.”

By the time she pulled out of the drive-thru and back onto the road, she was stuffing the last bite of her first donut into her mouth and reaching for the second. She wouldn’t be able to finish all six donuts right now, but she could leave three or four in the car for the drive home. Better to get more donuts now than face the temptation to stop again on the way home, right?

By the time Elena was waddling through the parking lot toward her office building, there were only two donuts left in the car, and she was slowly nursing her iced coffee. She stepped inside, waved cheerfully at the skinny black security guard behind the front desk, and stopped to examine her choice: the stairs or the elevator. Elena only worked on the second floor, and even before this past Christmas she would have almost always taken the stairs. But now it was early spring, and she could barely stand the thought of burning thighs at the top of the stairs. She lit up the elevator button and stood there sheepishly, sipping on her drink.

“Elena!” squealed her coworker Prissy as Elena walked into the office, startling her and sending a gasp and a squirt of frozen coffee into the air.

“Hey, Prissy,” she said, sipping again to regain her composure.

“It’s Tuesday, so we got donuts again,” said Prissy, walking behind the desk to take out the box. Prissy was a few inches shorter and many pounds lighter than Elena. Not that she wasn’t a victim of the sedentary office lifestyle--she must have put on dozens of pounds since Elena had known her--but it all went to her hips, thighs, and ass, leaving her belly mostly flat and smooth. Elena watched Prissy’s pert, shapely ass wiggle seductively in gray-blue jeans as Prissy went to retrieve the box and bring it over to Elena.

“It’s Dunkin. And I know how much you like boston cream, so I made sure we got a bunch of those,” she grinned. She gave Elena a napkin and dropped one, then two boston cream donuts on it.

“Thanks, Prissy.” She smiled uneasily.

The donuts sat on her desk for a few minutes, seizing some unexpected extra moments of existence before their inevitable demise. Elena just looked at them--she’d already had four donuts and half her coffee drink, and her stomach was already swirling with sugar. She knew if she ate more she’d just feel sick, but the glutton in her swept aside those fears as she reached out and stuffed half a donut in her mouth, biting it off and leaving a curl of cream planted on her lip. In six short bites, the donuts were gone.

Elena clutched her belly, part of her ruing her decision to eat the two donuts, another part craving a third (which was really a seventh…). She rocked in her chair for a moment and then decided to try to distract herself by checking her email. She cleaned out her inbox yesterday, so at the moment there were only a couple, both from last night.

8:39 PM

Subject: Weight Watchers

Hey Everyone,

I know this isn’t official since I’m just an analyst, but I wanted to see if we could get an office weight watchers group going. Maybe even make it a competition, see how much weight we can all lose? I just know that I’ve put on a few in the past year, and it feels like we have donuts here at least once a week, so--

Elena deleted the message with a click, her stomach feeling even more tossed than it had before. She let her left hand fall away from her belly, leaping from mild to acute disgust at the layer of fat that enveloped her. She took a breath and moved on to the next email.

9:02 PM

Subject: Bar crawl

Hey,

So O’Toole’s finally reopened last week, and I think it’s time we had another proper bar crawl. We’ll start there (can’t miss those amazing pretzels) and see how far we can go--

“Hey, Elena, you see my email about the bar crawl?”

It was Stephen, the author of the email. He was a fit, muscular twenty-nine-year-old who spent his weekends--and sometimes work weeks, apparently--binge drinking the night away.

“Yeah, I was just reading it!”

“All right, so can I count on you to come?” He winked. “I know I can always count on you for a night on the town, you’re such a foodie.”

Elena wanted to stab Stephen. “Foodie” meant something very different when addressed to a fatty like her than to one of her many skinny coworkers. Instead, she just smiled politely and said, “Of course!”

“Awesome!” Stephen pumped his fist, and Elena rolled her eyes inside. “We’ll get together at 5 in the lobby and just leave from there. See you then!”

He popped out of Elena’s office, and she was left alone with her roiling stomach and shame-flushed face. She’d probably eaten 3000 calories for breakfast alone, she felt like she was going to vomit, and the last thing she needed was a bar crawl. But as much as she hated Stephen, and as much as she loathed herself in this moment, the pretzels at O’Toole’s were incredible. She knew she couldn’t resist the invitation, just as she knew she would be back at the front desk for another donut within the hour, and would be hungry for lunch by 10:30.

It was 5:45, and the group was wrapping up at O’Toole’s and preparing for the next stop, a beer and burgers place called Bubba’s. Elena had torn her fifth pretzel into soft, steaming halves and was dipping one into mustard sauce. She’d barely touched her beer; she was here for the pretzels.

Her phone buzzed with a reminder: DOCTOR @ 6:15.

“Fuck,” she whispered. She hesitated for a moment--maybe she could put the appointment off?--but this was already the third time she’d rescheduled, and she was only a half hour out. She’d gone three years without an annual physical, but she was making a trip to Jamaica in the summer and had to go in for a vaccine booster. The doctor's office had persuaded (coerced?) her into scheduling an entire physical, and she was dreading it.

Elena stuffed the rest of the pretzel in her mouth all at once and said “Gotta go” through a mouthful of food. She slipped off her bar stool and jiggled her way out the door, leaving her coworkers unable to figure out her sudden departure.

It was already 6:20 when she walked into the sterile, pastel waiting room of the doctor’s office, huffing and puffing. “Elena...Vasquez…” she introduced herself.

The stick-thin receptionist glared at her. “The doctor has been ready for ten minutes,” she said.

“I’m...I’m only five...minutes late.”

“You’re also the last appointment of the day, and I’m ready to go home.” The receptionist looked over her glasses and down her nose at Elena before getting up and letting her through the door. Elena was astonished by how skinny this woman was--it was a miracle her scrubs didn’t just fall right off her. She let Elena into a waiting room, and the fat woman struggled onto the table to wait for her nurse.

Every step of the process was agony. The nurse took her blood pressure--”138 over 90,” she said, and Elena winced. That sounded bad, but she wasn’t sure. Her heart was racing, and and as the nurse took her pulse Elena tried to explain that going to the doctor made her nervous. The nurse ignored her, continuing to type into her medical record. Her temperature was normal, at least.

Eventually she saw her doctor, a blond, middle-aged man with rectangular silver glasses named Alex Vasiliev. He stethoscoped her flabby back and chest, asking her to breathe deeply, and searched for the lymph nodes beneath her double chin.

“Let’s talk about your history,” he said, and Elena’s heart rate picked up even more. “Do you smoke?”

“No,” she sighed. The harder questions were coming.

“How many drinks a week?”

“One or two, max. I’m not a big drinker.”

“That’s good…” Dr. Vasiliev murmured. “How many sexual partners in the last six months?”

“None,” she whispered, flushing.

“Ok….” She could see him writing a big, fat zero on the sheet. “How about fruits and vegetables. How many do you get?”

“I could...do better….”

“Yes, but try to quantify it for me. How many per day?”

“Well, some days I...I mean, it depends on…”

The doctor just stared blankly at her, waiting for her to finish.

She sighed, and half a dry sob escaped her. “Honestly, it’s the sauce on my pizza and the toppings on my burgers. That’s about it.”

“Mhm.” Another zero. “And exercise?”

“None….” She felt herself deflating, losing what little definition she had left and melting into a pile of pure fat and shame.

“Oh-kay,” said Dr. Vasiliev, ostentatiously checking something off, “time to weigh you. Don’t know why the nurses didn’t already do this, but anyhow: hop on the scale.”

Elena slid off the examination table and trepidatiously approached the scale. This was the very thing she had spent over a year avoiding, but here it was. She couldn’t turn it away.

“Please step on.”

She put one foot on the scale and then the other, feeling the weight of her ponderous belly against her thighs with each step. The doctor walked over and messed with the slider on the top, and Elena just stood there with her eyes shut, unwilling to see the number.

“Let’s see here….” It felt like he was dragging it out deliberately to torture her. “Three...hmmm...looks like it’s threeee...seventy-six. No, three seventy-nine. But bear in mind these scales tend to be under by five pounds or so.”

Elena’s eyes shot open, and her heart was being through her chest. “I thought they were over by five pounds.”

“I’ve never heard of that before,” said the doctor. He gestured back to the table. “Please, have a seat again.” But all Elena could do was collapse into the chair next to the table.

“All right,” said Dr. Vasiliev, “I’ll be frank. Your heart right and blood pressure are not as bad as I’d expect them to be for someone your size, especially someone who’s gained so much weight so fast. But they will be soon. Elena, you’re only five foot three and you weigh almost four hundred pounds--and you’ve gained about one hundred fifty of those pounds in the past three years. That’s tremendously distressing, and by the time you’re thirty--at the latest--it will have fully caught up with you. I’m talking diabetes, high risk of heart attack, the works. You can’t continue like this. You need to make major changes in your diet and start exercising regularly. I’ve got a few pamphlets that will help you get started, but I recommend you contact a nutritionist and schedule…”

Elena didn’t hear the rest. Her head was swimming and she was shaking, barely able to process how fat she’d gotten, and how quickly. She was only 27 years old and on the verge of weighing four hundred pounds. How much would she weight at 30 if she kept this up? 600 pounds? It felt like she was eating more and more every day, like she was a freight train that was only speeding up, that she could never slow down.


She didn’t remember leaving the doctor’s office or driving across town, but by 7:15 she was sitting in the parking lot of a gym about half an hour from her place. That wasn’t the best location for forming healthy new habits--this gym wasn’t close to home or work--but she wasn’t thinking clearly. She had simply decided that enough was enough, she was going to turn her life around no matter how hard it was. Her love of food could not be the thing that controlled her.

It occurred to Elena at this moment that she hadn’t brought any workout clothes. After unwedging herself from the steering wheel, she dug around in her trunk for a moment and came up with a white t-shirt and gray sweatpants. She didn’t remember how they’d ended up in her car, but they would do.

Elena walked in and registered, paying the hefty initiation fee out of the funds she’d been saving for a new car. (She figured she wouldn’t need a new car if she managed to lose some weight.) She changed in the locker room and took a long, hot shower--an entirely unnecessary step that just helped her procrastinate. And she stepped into the gym, her t-shirt, one size too small, continually riding up her belly.

Elena didn’t know much about working out, but when she had still been in the habit years ago, she would typically walk on the treadmill for a while. So she headed over to that machine, set it to the second-lowest speed (a reasonable place to start, she thought), and began to walk. It wasn’t so bad at first, but she was deeply self-conscious about the fact that her belly kept poking out of her shirt (even though there were maybe three other people in the entire gym right now). The stress stoked her appetite, and she found herself fantasizing about the burger she could have had if she’d continued on to Bubba’s. One burger turned to two as her fatigue and stress mounted, and not three minutes after she’d stepped on the treadmill she stumbled off, leaning against it while she caught her breath.

Maybe weight lifting was a better idea. She couldn’t do all that walking if she didn’t build her strength first, right?

Elena ambled over to a leg press machine and laid back in it. Her legs had always been strong for her size, so she hoped this was a good place to start. But as soon as she engaged the weights (just one--the lowest setting), her legs gave out entirely. The only thing that prevented the machine from slamming back into her was her huge belly, which stopped the machine and her legs before they could pick up much momentum. Her t-shirt rolled up substantially at the impact, exposing her entire bottom belly.

At this, seemingly out of nowhere, a little boy ran up and started slapping his hands on this fat roll, and she flinched and tried vainly to turn away.

“Belly belly belly!” he squealed with glee. “How did you get so FAT, lady?”

“Arthur, WHAT are you doing?” An extraordinarily fit woman with a large but toned ass walked up to this child and tore him away. “I’m so sorry,” she said to Elena, though she couldn’t hide her disgust at Elena’s exposed blubber. She hesitated and then turned back to the pinned fat woman. “You know, I’m a trainer here. If you ever need anything, just ask for Nina at the front desk. It’s so good that you’re making the effort to take care of yourself, and the last thing I’d want is for you to fall off the wagon.”

She turned and walked away, dragging her son behind her, leaving Elena still pinned by the machine. Elena’s cheeks were red with fury and exertion and embarrassment. “If you want to help me so much, why don’t you help me out of this?” she whispered. “Bitch.”

* * *

It was 8:00. The sun was setting, and Elena was driving across town, shaking a little from hunger and rage. She was so fat and lazy she couldn’t do something as simple as spend more than 10 minutes at the gym. Her stomach whined like a cat, and the white t-shirt rolled a little higher up her belly, stopped only by the steering wheel.

Elena flipped on the radio to distract herself. It was Marky and the Toad, a local talk radio show with extraordinarily obnoxious hosts. “So today I was watching the Hopra Winnipeg show--I know, normally I would never watch Hopra, but my buddy called and told me I had to switch it on. Turns out one of these six-hundred-pound fatties that glorify obesity, one of these bullshit body positivity gurus or whatever, was on there chewing out a doctor, to the point that he walked off the show. I don’t blame him--that woman was giving him so much shit, screaming in his face. I don’t understand why females like her just don’t--”

Elena didn’t have to find out what the Toad wanted to happen to such females because the radio was interrupted by an incoming call: it was her older sister Daniela.

“Hey, Dani.”

“How are you, Lena?”

“Oh my god, I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s talk about you. What are you doing?”

“Not much. I’m at mamá’s--just came by for dinner tonight.”

“Shit, please don’t tell her you’re on the phone with me.”

“She’s in the other room, don’t worry. Seriously, though, what’s wrong? Is everything ok?”

“I really don’t want to talk about it.”

“I’m worried about you, Lena. We rarely talk, and mamá hasn’t heard from you in--”

“I’ll tell you, just don’t tell her, ok? I went to the doctor and it was terrible.”

“Wait, that’s good! You haven’t been in such a long time.” Daniela’s voice was a swirl of concern and condescension. “You know you need to take care of yourself, and this--wait, no, mamá, es mi amiga…”

There was an indistinct tussle as the phone came away from Daniela’s face, and then Elena heard her mother’s voice on the phone. “Mija?”

“Hola, mamá.”

“Elena, you need to stop avoiding me. We have to talk: you have let yourself go too long, you need to lose weight. Do you want to die an early d--”

Elena just hung up, tears leaking from the corners of her eyes. This was why she avoided her mother whenever possible, why she rarely even talked to Daniela anymore. She could not get a moment’s peace. And the worst thing was that she agreed with everything they had to say.

At this point, though, she was undone. She felt like a worthless pile of gluttony and sloth, incapable of rising above it all. Nothing mattered anymore: it wasn’t worth trying to reform herself because she knew, deep down, that she wasn’t capable of that. Her greed and laziness had always been beyond her control, and her self-discipline atrophied more and more every day in the shadow of her vices. Her tears dried, and she felt the steering wheel rub against her belly while she made an abrupt left. She felt nothing now--nothing but a consuming hunger.

8:41. The sun was down, and Elena’s car sat in the driveway, lit only by the front porch light. An empty container was just visible in the passenger seat of her car, a greasy carton that had once held a couple jumbo spring rolls. The locks were up, too--she hadn’t even bothered to lock the car doors when she arrived.

Inside, an empty boba tea cup sat on the counter of her tiny kitchen. Orange crumbs, dropped from fortune cookies hastily consumed mid-meal, traced the path from her kitchen to her bedroom.

The bedroom door was cracked slightly, and through the crack anyone could have glimpsed Elena on her bed, stripped out of her restrictive clothes down to her panties alone, her belly spilling out between her splayed legs, shoveling drunken noodles with beef into her mouth, nonstop. A mostly consumed box of panang curry sat to her left, a hot, fresh, untouched pad thai to her right. Her eyes were closed, less in pleasure than in fervent, obsessive focus, as she piled the noodles into her mouth, pausing occasionally for a long drag off a thai iced tea. And when she was done with the drunken noodles, she laid into the pad thai, managing to finish about three quarters of it before falling back onto the pillows behind her, letting her swollen belly slosh roundly on top of her.

Elena’s self-loathing still lingered, but it was pushed to the back of her mind. The food was so good, and she was so full and so tired, that she didn’t have room to think about much of anything else. More than anything, she was tired. And as she lay there, clutching her belly in pain and anger and satisfaction, she wondered whether the world could ever be different for her--different for a fat pig who couldn’t manage anything but to get fatter.



Part 2 of 3

Luisa’s alarm went off at 7:30, but she’d already been up for twenty minutes, awakened by the hunger within her that never slept. Her enormous body was propped up against five pillows, and she was popping tiny cookies from a tray on her nightstand into her mouth while she scrolled through instagram. The alarm emanating from the small, white nub on her nightstand--a personal assistant in the cloud that was synced to devices throughout her house and to her mobile devices--transitioned to a sort of morning briefing.

“Good morning, Luisa. It is 7:30 am in Mountain View, California, on Tuesday, May 16, 2051. The temperature is currently 79 degrees Fahrenheit, with a high of 88.”

Cooler than usual, she thought, as she popped another cookie in her mouth and chewed it pensively.

“The weather will be sunny all day. In the news, the school lunch program has become a surprising political football as President Tubbs tussles with Congress over what will be served…”

Luisa’s attention faded as she put two cookies in her mouth at once and continued to scroll through the posts on her razor-thin, extremely strong, glass-only mobile phone. An ad for plus-size lingerie rolled by on the screen, followed by a food pic from a friend on vacation (a hulking double cheeseburger for dinner for the third night in a row), and then a throwback photo of her and some friends from early high school. Luisa shifted her bulk a bit, adjusted a pillow, and thought wistfully back to that time. We were so small then, she thought as she looked at a photo of several three-hundred-pound teenagers.

The morning briefing caught her attention again with a pop culture update. “Bunny Black is still making headlines, this time with a bikini photoshoot posted to her instagram account. Ms. Black started as a pop music idol seven years ago but began to stir controversy late in the decade when she rapidly put on weight. Her fan base was divided down the middle: half embraced her as an icon of body positivity, the other half attacking her for what they saw as a slide into gluttony and a loss of self-control. The pressure forced Ms. Black out of the public eye for years, until she re-emerged late last year, bigger than ever and proudly body positive--even fat positive.”

Against the backdrop of this narrative, Luisa navigated to Bunny Black’s instagram page, finding the photoshoot post and even having her phone project a video into the air in front of her face. Bunny Black was a short, curvaceous woman of Asian descent--half Korean, half Indian--who’d backed up her stage name by always wearing black--nothing but black. Since she’d returned, however, she’d repudiated her former identity by dressing in bright colors, and here she stood in a skimpy, red bikini that clung to a tremendously fat body. Luisa figured Bunny must be over five hundred pounds by now--bigger even than me, Luisa mused. Bunny’s trunk-like calves and thighs, her barrel of a belly, her huge, round ass and tremendous breasts rendered the bikini almost invisible, and yet amidst all this fat, her figure was still remarkably well defined, as was her bone structure. High cheekbones and a defined jaw somehow stood out amidst ballooning cheeks and a massive double chin.

Nothing like my figure, Luisa thought, pulling back the crumb-littered bedsheets to look down on her own prodigious, naked body. (She always slept naked in the summer.) Everyone always told her she looked like her mother, Elena, though Luisa knew she was a bit more shapely than Elena, had a bit more in the hips and ass department. But her belly was still tremendous and almost pyramidal, much larger in the lower belly than the upper. Her stomach growled, and she patted the dark brown skin of her belly. She’d have to have a proper breakfast soon, but fist she propped her phone on the sheets and turned it to selfie mode, using it as a mirror while she put herself together a little bit. Her titantic upper arms hang heavily as she pulled her black hair into a ponytail. Her striking features stared back at her: full lips, a long strong nose, a round face with a broad, deep double chin, dark green eyes under strong, arched black eyebrows. She slipped on the slightest of crop tops to look presentable and then dialed her mother on video chat.

Elena appeared in moments, filmed by a mobile drone camera that hovered in front of and slightly above her. “Good morning, my heart!” cooed Luisa’s mother. She was seated at her kitchen table, with two and a half plates of scrambled eggs, toast, and bacon laid out in front of her. “I’m just starting breakfast.”

“You mean second breakfast?” Luisa thought, but she said nothing. She knew her mother never slept in past 6:00, simply because she was too hungry.

“How are you, Lulu? Everything ok? You never call me this early.”

“No no, I’m fine, I was just thinking of you, mamá.”

The morning update droned on the background, ignored by mother and daughter and automatically lowered to a whisper because of the phone call. The anchor contextualized his earlier story with some statistics. “The Bunny Black controversy plays out in an America in which 40% of Americans are overweight and another 50% are obese--and this after the CDC moved the goalposts in 2040, after studies indicated that the former “overweight” range was actually the sweet spot for many health outcomes.”

“Mamá,” asked Luisa, “how big were you when you were my age?”

Elena seemed a little taken aback by the question, halting a huge forkful of eggs and bacon en route to her mouth: they rarely spoke so directly about each other’s size. That was more from Elena’s discomfort than from her daughter’s--she had grown up in a less tolerant time, after all, and her total inactivity after her early twenties had led to decades of high blood pressure and shortness of breath. These days, at the ripe age of 60, she weighed 413 pounds, and she moved her bean-bag-chair-shaped body around thanks to a strong, nimble mobility scooter. Even that only solved so many problems--her belly was so big, for instance, that she could only scoot so close to the kitchen table.

“Why do you ask, Lulu?” she ventured.

“Just curious….” Luisa was clearly bashful, and it softened Elena’s heart.

“Well, it’s funny you ask--I can’t forget it. When I was your age, maybe a year older, I went to the doctor for a physical and they weighed me for the first time in, god, I can’t remember how long. I was three hundred seventy-nine pounds. Maybe even more--the doctor said the scale was usually low. I hated myself. It was the worst day of my life, and it just made me eat more. I gained 75 pounds by Thanksgiving that year. I barely left the house at Christmas, didn’t even go see your abuelos, may they rest in peace. Next year, of course, I met your father, and things started to get better. I still can’t believe he’d been the security guard at the front door every day I’d walked into work, and I’d never realized that he had his eye on me--that he loved me just the way I was! Thank goodness I lost everything I gained before I got pregnant with you.”

Luisa couldn’t stop giggling as the story went on. “You’re crazy, mom.” 379 felt like nothing. Luisa had hit that number by the end of college and then gained over 25 pounds a year each year after that. Now she was 26 years old and within ten or fifteen pounds of the big five hundred, and it only phased her so much.

Elena frowned. “What, crazy? It’s nothing to laugh about--it was terrible! And I can barely walk now, thanks to it.”

Luisa shrugged, her giggles fading. “I just can’t imagine people feeling so bad about their weight. I mean, I know, there are still plenty of people who are fatphobes, but that much? It just doesn’t make any sense. Why would anyone care that much?”

“I just can’t tell you how much the world has changed over the years. ”

“Why do you think it’s so different?” asked Luisa, popping another tiny cookie.

Her mother tsked. “You need to eat a proper breakfast, my heart, not just sugar. But, honestly, I think people just got fatter. There’s more rich, sugary junk food now than there was when I was young, and believe me, even then there was a lot. I think people changed their minds because they gave up. Fat people just weren’t going away. Our country was cursed to be huge, so people started to get used to it.”

“Ok mom,” said Luisa, popping another cookie and eliciting more tsking. “I gotta go work out before I got to work. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Good, good. You’re getting so big, you have to slow down.” This drew out a frown from Luisa. “Bye bye, Lulu.” Elena stuck a bite of bacon in her mouth, and her camera winked out.

Luisa stood outside her apartment building under the nearly 80-degree sun, clad only in the crop top she’d thrown on earlier and short gym shorts that amounted to little more than a black equatorial band that wrapped around her tremendous middle. She was inhaling a couple toaster pastries--hardly the nourishing breakfast her mother had encouraged, she would readily admit, but more than most Luisa was a sugar junky, and she planned to eat a better breakfast after she worked out anyway.

She stuffed the pastry wrapper in a slight gym backpack slung over one shoulder while she continued to wait for her ride. In the 2050s Bay Area, private cars had become a thing of the past, and taxis, ridesharing, and buses had merged into one huge, semi-public service known as BayRide. It was tax-funded and free at the point of service at the most basic level (effectively, buses and vans that strayed little from pre-defined routes), and at higher subscription levels riders could access smaller, more private cars and personalized routes and destinations. As a BayRide employee, Luisa had complimentary access to the second-highest level, which meant no more than one other passenger in the same car at any given time. And BayRide was the only reason she and many other people bothered to keep track of their weight and measurements at all: the service needed that information to ensure cars that were spacious and strong enough to carry their passengers.

Her car finally pulled around the corner and up to the curb in front of her, but she was surprised to see another woman already inside, someone substantially larger than Luisa herself. Luisa wasn’t used to seeing women larger than she was--five hundred pounders were hardly unprecedented, but they were a minority, and rarely seen in urban environments like the Bay Area. The woman, pale and of Asian descent, had a huge, round belly stuffed into a sundress. It looked like a giant, sagging water balloon, and it took up over half the seat inside. She just looked at Luisa coldly and skeptically as the Hispanic girl cautiously set foot inside the car, but the car began to tremble rhythmically, and her electronic wristlet dinged as a pleasant woman’s voice spoke from it. “Weight limit exceeded. Please update your weight in the app and request another car.”

Luisa stepped back, embarrassed, as the car’s passenger pulled a chocolate bar out of her purse, her face still expressionless. The car pulled away. Luisa pulled up the app, which said she weighed 484 pounds. I guess I haven’t weighed myself recently, she thought; the app, linked to her scale, should have updated her weight automatically. She manually overrode the number and put in 495--she didn’t know if it was right, but she wanted to play it safe. Within five minutes a yellow sports car, mercifully empty, pulled up, and as the door opened the interior of the car rearranged itself--the seat even became slightly wider--to accommodate its tremendous passenger. A sweaty Luisa flopped herself on the seat inside and let it take her to the gym.

She thought back again to her mother’s youth while the car drove. She couldn’t imagine the era Elena had told her about, when you had to drive your own car and when fast-gaining women risked outgrowing their vehicles all the time. In the age of BayRide, vehicles always personalized to riders’ size and weigh, and door-to-door service, no one had to worry about that. It probably accelerated the weight gain of lazy people like Luisa: they didn’t have to walk anywhere if they didn’t want to. This trend led to a virtuous circle, too: the fatter the passengers, the more padding they had in the event of an accident--a sort of built-in airbag. It allowed the engineers who designed the vehicles’ software to slightly favor injury to passengers over pedestrians in the event of an accident, when vehicles had to decide what to do in crisis situations--though there were fewer and fewer passengers anyway. These were benefits to full-blown population obesity that few had foreseen.

Still, Luisa wasn’t totally unconcerned about her weight. Her mother’s jabs about her size and her diet pissed her off, but she didn’t entirely disagree, either. Her mind drifted back to the health classes she’d taken since the days of the hippy middle school she attended (when she already weighed over 200 pounds), which stamped in her mind and the minds of her classmates a simple acronym: HAES, or Health At Every Size. It didn’t mean that everyone was automatically healthy, regardless of their size, but that just about anyone could be healthy if they engaged in some kind of physical activity. It didn’t have to be much, and it didn’t have to be all the time: the idea was to find something an activity that felt good and to practice it with some regularity. For Luisa, that meant swimming. She loved being in the water, and it was a lot less taxing on her knees than anything else. But it was never just about pleasure: as with anyone who exercised, however much they professed the gospel of HAES, the fear of illness and premature death if they ever slacked always lingered in the background.

Luisa looked down at another package of toaster pastries that she’d removed from her bag entirely unconsciously while she worried. Her fears didn’t stop her from eating them, but she did nibble them a little more cautiously than usual.

The car dropped Luisa right at the door, but she wished she could tell it to circle the block for a while before letting her out. A handful of protesters stood outside, hoisting homemade signs and hurling slurs. A tall, muscular man stood at the door locked in an intense discussion with a chubby man just trying to enter the gym, while the other two quickly moved toward Luisa’s car. One, a round young woman, had a sign that said “Stop killing yourselves--suicide is Illegal” (Luisa wondered for a moment whether it actually was), and her partner in crime, a stocky, effeminate man with greasy hair, had a pendant around his neck that said “Thinspo.”

“Would you get the fuck out of my face,” Luisa hissed, heaving herself onto her feet.

“Fat chance, fatty,” said the man, leaning in and giving Luisa no extra room to stand up. “You’re so deluded that this is the only way you’ll ever realize that you’re digging yourself an early grave.”

“Why the fuck do you care? I know you work at the X-Fit gym up the street--doesn’t matter whether you’re wearing your uniforms, we all know that. The only reason you guys go around harassing people at HAES gyms is to get more business for yourself. You’re gonna lose this job in a week anyway, you fucking moron. Just let me go kill myself in peace.” The man was still in Luisa’s face, spewing invective, the round woman egging him on, so Luisa shoved him. He didn’t budge.

“Ha!” he spat. “Can’t even defend yourself. If you came to X-Fit you’d be stronger in a week than you’ve ever been in your whole life.”

Just now Luisa spotted Liam Kim, the potbellied young assistant manager at her gym, scurry out of the building to drag inside the member who’d been trapped at the door. He reemerged to fetch her. She looked over at the greasy man’s companion and poked her round little belly. “Aren’t you worried about an early death, too?”

“At least I care enough about myself to do something about it,” the woman sneered.

By now Liam had made his way to Luisa, and he escorted her inside amidst further abuse from the protesters. She’d dealt with protesters like this one or twice before--there were more of them in the Bay Area than most places--but she was still unnerved. She didn’t notice, but her hands were shaking a little.

“Fucking fringe lunatic motherfuckers,” Liam muttered as she stepped behind the front desk, running a hand through his short, bristly black hair. “I’m so sorry. I called the police, I have no idea why they’re not here yet. I can’t believe there are still people like that in 2051. Especially in California, of all places.”

“It’s always been a place of extremes, I guess.” Luisa felt her hot, sweaty body cooling under the AC, and she placed her trembling hand on a scanner to check in. “I mean, you’re right, most people aren’t crazy like that. But they used to be, right? My mom tells me about it all the time. Why do you think society has changed so much since then?”

“I mean, it’s the force of progress, right? Ever since this country started we’ve gotten more fair and equal. Sometimes it takes a while, but we get there. These wackjobs are on the wrong side of history. Give it twenty years and they won’t exist anymore. They’ll be dinosaurs.”

Luisa laughed with a little relief and a little anxiety. “That would be amazing. Really, thanks for helping me, Liam.” He nodded and smiled as she made her way to the locker room. Luisa wanted to think he was right, that people like that were a dying breed, but right after having them yell in her face for several minutes straight, it was hard to imagine them disappearing. It still felt like that man was screaming at her. She could practically feel spit flying from his mouth to her cheeks, and she rubbed her face reflexively. Even if Liam was right, 20 years felt like an eternity.

In the locker room shower, small rivulets traced unpredictable paths over her vast naked body, running between folds and rolls, neatly covering breasts that looked small on Luisa but would have been huge on any skinny woman. That helped calm her nerves a little. She struggled into what passed for a one piece--the only thing that kept it from being a bikini was a strip of white fabric that ran the length of her torso, connecting the “top” to the “bottoms” of the white swimsuit. She stepped out of the room, her fat shifting and jiggling left, right, left, right with each step, and picked out an empty lane. (There were a couple other women, curvy and several hundred pounds lighter than Luisa, doing laps, but otherwise the pool was empty.) She walked up to her lane and slipped into the water as gracefully as possible, though she still displaced a huge amount of water, sending waves crashing over the edge of the pool.

Luisa found swimming amazing--it melted away stress, and she quickly forgot about the encounter outside the gym. Being in the water also felt like hundreds of pounds had been lifted off her nearly quarter-ton body, leaving her light and airy, and it quickly cooled a body so prone to overheating under its thick layer of fat. But as she’d grown, swimming has also become more difficult--her body was less hydrodynamic, and the more buoyant she became the harder it was to propel herself forward (to say nothing of the fact that she had more and more mass to move all the time). As a result, over the last year she’d spent less and less time actually swimming every time she went to the pool, though she wasn’t paying enough attention to notice--she simply swam until the beginnings of fatigue crept up on her, and these days that moment arrived quickly. Today, after less than ten minutes in the pool she bounce-walked her way over to a set of stairs and walked out of the pool, slowly and ruefully feeling her full weight return to her as she climbed out. This less-than-impressive swim satisfied Luisa’s very liberal interpretation of the standards of HAES.

Luisa snagged one of the very large towels off a shelf and wrapped it around herself as she waddled into the next room: the snack bar, which sat at the center of the gym, attached to the rest of the workout spaces like the center of a wheel to its spokes. The bar served everything from fresh veggies and healthy smoothies to milkshakes and candy bars--whatever the gym’s patrons may have craved after a workout. Luisa settled into a broad, roomy chair that floated above the ground thanks to a magnetized base, which then raised itself to the level of the bar.

“What’s up, Ivy?” she greeted the “bartender.”

“Not much, Luisa, how you doin’?” Ivy was Liam’s younger sister, fresh off her first year of college and working the bar as a summer job before she returned to campus in the fall. Even at this young age, though, she already rivaled Luisa in size: Luisa guessed she was pushing 450 pounds, most of it concentrated in her belly and legs. It felt like kids were getting fatter and fatter at a younger and younger age these days, Luisa mused, though Ivy’s summer job didn’t hurt: every summer for the past four years, she’d worked the snack bar, licensed to eat as much of the food as she wanted. She didn’t even have to stand: she sat on her own magnetized chair, and which she could direct to the storage above and below the bar counter with a small joystick. She never had to pop into a back room--the bar was restocked automatically by small robots and conveyor belts. She was currently munching on a “fun size” Snickers (which, 30 years earlier, would have been the regular size.)

“Pretty good. Could you get me an extra-large plate of nachos?”

“That’s all?”

“And...two cinnamon buns?” she said bashfully. Even if she was going to get some veggies and protein from the nachos, she couldn’t leave out the sugar.

“You got it,” said Ivy, her grin pushing folds into her shapelessly fat face and neck. She navigated her chair around and worked steadily, letting Luisa work her way through reheated cinnamon buns before the nachos were ready. Luisa, normally a slow but steady eater, was always ravenous after swimming, and she inhaled the cinnamon buns, tearing off hot, sticky chunks and stuffing them in her mouth, licking every last bit of icing off her fingers. She felt the sugar rush in her and leaned forward a bit, emboldened.

“Ivy, I never do this, but...could you just give me the icing? No bun, just whatever the icing comes in?”

Ivy giggled and acted like she wasn’t sure if they even had that, but she produced a packet of icing in no time. “I snack on these on slow days,” she confessed quietly. Luisa, too, giggled conspiratorially and sucked the icing from the packet, feeling her heartbeat tick up in exhilaration. By the time her nachos were ready all the sugar had spiked her appetite, and she devoured them, leaving only the jalapeños on the side of the plate (she couldn’t handle spicy food). She leaned back and sighed.

“Hey, Ivy?” She loved playing coy, like Ivy didn’t know another food order was coming.

“Yeah?” asked Ivy, suppressing a giggle.

“Could I get some toaster pastries for the road?”

“Sure, but it’ll cost extra.” They both burst out laughing at the joke. All the food at the gym was complimentary--it was a standard HAES gym perk that kept customers coming back

Luisa hustled squatly through the front door of her building, scanning her hand to enter (the days of human security guards were long gone) and standing in front of the elevators waiting for her floor (there were no stairs--everyone took the elevator). In the elevator car, she used her phone as a mirror again, wiping pastry crumbs from her lips and reapplying her lipstick. She’d slipped into work clothes, which in 2051 were casual by the standards of 2018: she wore spandex pants that vaguely resembled work slacks and a close-fitting white top with panels that crossed each other in the front. The pants were tight enough that if she didn’t pay attention, her shapely ass would begin to pop out the top, its uppermost fat jiggling like a water balloon as she walked. She was constantly pulling the back of the shirt down and the pants up, trying to contain her vastness.

As she stepped out of the elevator she was assailed by her friend and coworker Jaye, a five-foot, three-hundred-fifty-pound white woman with a black-haired ponytail who was all belly--it looked like she was constantly struggling and stumbling around under the load of her tremendous tummy. She waddled up to Luisa as quickly as she could and yelped, “You’re late!”

Luisa waved her off. “What do you mean, ‘late’? It’s 2051. Nobody’s ever late--you come in and leave whenever you want as long as you get your work done. Why am I even explaining this to you?”

“No, we’re late for the board meeting--I’ve been waiting for fifteen minutes! You must have been at the snack bar this morning.”

“Shit,” hissed Luisa. “Maybe I was. Doesn’t matter--let’s go.” The two women waddled down through the halls as fast as their legs would carry them. Luisa and Jaye were on their branch office’s Joint Board, a management and policy board composed 50% by managers and 50% by regular employees. These boards were a standard arrangement in the growing semi-public sector that BayRide existed in and had even sprung up at a few of the larger private corporations.

Eventually Luisa and Jaye stumbled into the meeting room, but they realized, panting, that they were hardly late: most of the attendees were still snacking and chatting, and the handful who were videochatting in from home seemed pleasantly distracted by other online activities. A dozen or so people were munching on donuts, chocolate croissants, and bagels, their bodies of various degrees of hugeness spreading to fill wide, floating, magnetized chairs. Managers and regular employees were indistinguishable, though the regular employees tended to skew fatter. Only one person, a man carrying some mixture of muscle and a bit of fat, sat without food or conversation, displeasure flickering on his face. Luisa picked up two long, cream-filled, chocolate-frosted donuts and sat down with Jaye so they could catch their breath, though constant, cream-filled bites slowed that process.

No sooner than they were seated did the displeased man speak up. “Can we get started now that everyone’s here?”

Martha, the branch supervisor, popped one final donut hole in her mouth and directed her magnetized chair to the space next to the man. She looked taller than he was, which may or may not have been true, but the effect came from her tremendous ass, which boosted her a few extra inches in her seat. She actually was dressed in something like business casual, and her pants were packed so tight that her ass, too, peeked out in the space between her pants and her blouse. She brushed a strand of hair from her bob haircut away from one of her very round, pale cheeks, finished chewing the donut hole, followed it with a few glugs of sugarmilk (the fad drink of the year), and called the meeting to order.

“Thanks, everyone, for joining us for this month’s meeting, including those of you who are vidchatting in. I’d like to introduce Max Jimenez, a consultant from Johnson, Johns, and Johansen, who’s here to discuss cost-cutting measures with us.”

There was some grumbling around the table, and one woman with especially flabby arms--a union rep--set them to jiggling as she angrily spread cream cheese onto a bagel.

“Now, listen,” Martha assured everyone, “we’re not a for-profit entity, so the point is not cost reduction for its own sake. We’re not here to cut to the bone. We just know that we have some inefficiencies that we have no reason not to tighten up. Max, why don’t you walk us through them.”

Individual, virtual screens of Max’s presentation appeared in the glass table in front of everyone, but Luisa quickly tuned out, feeling a little grumpy and very hungry as she began to come down from her initial sugar high. She prolonged it by chomping through the rest of her donuts and, at one point, gliding her chair over to the back table to pick up more--she grabbed just a couple donut holes, but before she could pull away she added two more, and then another, and finally a chocolate croissant. She was being even more indulgent than usual, and she wasn’t even sure if she’d be able to finish all of this. Maybe it was the stress of the morning’s encounter that was making her so hungry. But there was no point in questioning it or fighting it: she popped donut hole after donut hole and then leisurely stripped away buttery, chocolatey strips from her croissant, lowering them into her mouth and letting them practically melt on her tongue. Contentment spread through her, and she sank back heavily in her chair. At one point she looked over at Jaye, whose belly was so disproportionately large she could barely sit up in her chair. She had to sit at angle so her belly wouldn’t block her view of the presentation, and she continually sipped on a tall glass of sugarmilk, which she refilled at the back table whenever it ran dry. In fact, it was rare that everyone was at the table--one or two were usually back restocking at the snack table.

“Ok,” said Max Jimenez, “this next one should be easy, but we’ll see how it goes. We need to talk about the company’s meal policy, such as it is.”

Everyone at the table, including Luisa, perked up at this.

“This company follows the same cockamamie--I’m sorry, but it’s true--policy that every other non-profit does…”

“Why does this guy talk like he’s from the 2020s?” Luisa whispered out of the side of her mouth, and Jaye smirked.

“...of providing unlimited food to all employees at all times. You don’t even distinguish between snacks and meals. Anything anyone wants, they get, anytime. It’s a huge drain on your finances, and it doesn’t make any sense.”

“Mr. Jimenez,” Luisa interjected, “I’m sorry, but you sound like you’re running a prison camp. It’s 2051. No one is hungry anymore. America has enough food to feed the entire country, maybe even the whole world. We don’t have to cut back on food! It’s like you said--every modern workplace follows this policy. That’s because it makes sense. Do you want to be on the wrong side of history?”

The room chuckled, but Max frowned. “No, this is exactly what I’m talking about. You don’t actually need all this. There are compromises: you could keep unlimited snacks but just serve three square meals at appointed times of the day.”


“Hah!” the union rep burst out, stuffing a huge bite of cream-cheesed bagel in her mouth, her arms jiggling furious. The room snickered again.

“No one would go hungry!” insisted an increasingly exasperated Max. “I can’t believe any of you is ever hungry as it is…”

“Just make sure no one gets rid of the cheese bar,” said a portly brown man in a too-tight t-shirt and an unbuttoned button-down. “I can’t work without the cheese bar.”

“Or the charcuterie counters,” said a top-heavy, olive-skinned woman with long, curly hair. “I move around the office all day, and it’s important to me that there be a charcuterie counter in every major division.”

“And we need to make sure we keep making pizzas and calzones,” said another man. “If we don’t have pizzas and calzones, how can we call ourselves a civilized workplace?”

“The same could be said of milkshake dispensers,” said a tall, heavy black woman, whom Luisa was pretty sure was a high-level manager.

The litany of essential foodstuffs continued to unfurl, and Max simply buried his face in his hands. Eventually the stream of comments petered out, and several people, their appetites invigorated by all this talk of food, directed their chairs to the back of the room to pick up a few more snacks. Luisa was resting her hands on her belly, and she felt her generous bellyfat jiggle as she laughed quietly to herself.

Eventually Max looked up again at Martha. “You’re the boss around here,” he said. “Feel like exercising a little discipline?”

“I don’t know how things work at your consultancy, Mr. Jimenez,” said Martha, pulling her hair again behind her ear and showing off some of the most impressively round cheeks Luisa had ever seen, “but that’s not how a Joint Board operates. We have the voices of both labor and management here, and we make our decisions together. I’m afraid my hands are tied. The food budget will remain at current levels.”

Carried by the mood of the room--or maybe her sugar high--Luisa leaned forward excitedly in her chair, feeling her belly bunching and slowing her down as she moved, and said, “Actually, could we get some more funding for the milkshake machines? I’d love to get some extra flavors and the attachment that dispenses toppings.”

“I’m sure we can find some room in the budget,” said Martha, smiling warmly. Max Jimenez slumped down in his chair, defeated.

After the meeting, while Luisa and Jaye were walking back to their desks, Jaye floated an idea: “Want to grab an early lunch today?” Luisa enthusiastically assented, and while passing through their division they picked up their friend Simone. Simone was a reasonably tall black woman with a shaved head, a respectable neck roll, round arms, and a small, soft belly, but she stored most of her impressive bulk in her ass and legs. Each ass cheek was tremendous, each huge thigh pressing tightly against the other, and every step she took sent an ass cheek rolling and shaking and undulating. Today she wore black skinny jeans and that showed off every curve and a gray t-shirt that hugged her torso, allowing the slightest bit of belly to peek out at the bottom.

The trio settled on Indian for lunch, but since that restaurant was at the far end of BayRide’s fantastically large campus, Jaye called a small shuttle that would drive them over in about five minutes. The seats inside rearranged to accommodate the more than half a ton of human flesh the van was about to transport. The shuttle took them over old, bumpy roads that needed repaving, and the women’s bodies were not prepared for this: the bumps sent them sliding and scrambling in their seats. Luisa and Simone kept pulling down their shirts as they rolled up, and while dress-clad Jaye had no such problem, her belly had so much inertia she seemed dragged around the car by it as they flew over bumps.

“Why can’t we magnetize the roads like we magnetize our floors?” said Jaye, her double chin billowing out as she slid down in her seat.

“You’re the one with an electrical engineering degree,” said Simone. “Why don’t you figure it out?”

“Seriously, though,” said Luisa, “I hear they’re gonna do that. It’s not about the technology, it’s about the economics.”

“I’m sure Mr. Jimenez would tell us it could’ve happened yesterday if we cut back on our eating,” Simone said dryly, and Luisa rolled her eyes.

“Why do we even bother with these jokers?” said Luisa.

“It’s just to please Oakland,” said Jaye, referencing the city where upper management’s offices were located. “You saw Martha--she doesn’t care about cutting the food budget. Those cheeks don’t come from self-denial! She’s happy to let the employee reps do all the talking and act like her hands are tied when the food budget would be the last thing to go if it were up to her. But you know she wants charcuterie bars in every room as much as Alessandra does. All of management does.”

Their shuttle pulled up to the Outreach Division, where the Indian restaurant was housed, and the three friends hobbled out of the van and into the restaurant--which was almost empty, since it wasn’t even 11:00. They sat down at a table with magnetized floating chairs, and Luisa settled so heavily into hers that it sank and trembled for a moment before levitating up to the proper height. At BayRide and so many other restaurants these days, the tables even had slight, concave indentations in the tables so larger-bellied customers could sit comfortably close to their food. Luisa ordered an extra-large masala chai, to which she added four extra shots of sugar from a dispenser in the center of the table before downing the entire thing. Even Jaye and Simone looked on in awe as Luisa fed her sugar habit in such dramatic fashion, after which she ordered a second chai of the same size (this one for a more measured sipping). The servers, uniformly short, chubby, taciturn Hispanic girls, also set out a few baskets of butter naan--not because the friends had anything to eat it with yet, but because customers of their girth had become accustomed to munching on naan by itself while they contemplated their order.

“Something’s been bothering me today,” said Luisa, sipping on her chai.

Through cheeks stuffed with naan, Jaye said, “What’s that?”

“Well, Jimenez felt so out of step with things, and this morning some X-Fit nutjobs yelled at me outside my gym--”

“Oh fuck no, how dare they,” Simone began, but Luisa cut her off.

“It’s fine, I can handle it. The point is there just aren’t that many people like those X-Fitters anymore, and people like Jimenez can’t be more than, what a third of the population? 40% max? But they used to be normal. Jimenez probably would’ve seemed like an indulgent fatty when my mom was a kid. So what changed? That wasn’t so long ago.”

“I don’t know why you torture yourself with these questions,” said Jaye, tearing off another buttery strip of naan and stuffing it in her mouth. “You’re always asking ‘why,’ but you have a good life: this is a good job, you get paid well, you go can out on the town whenever you want, you eat well. Why ask questions?”

“No, no,” said Simone, “she’s right. It’s important. If that’s the way things were 40, 50 years ago, that’s not such a long time ago. If we’re not careful, things could always slide back to that again.”

“I doubt it,” Jaye sloppily opined through a big bite of naan. “It’s not like America’s getting any skinnier. There’s a girl in my building, high school girl, maybe a junior, who’s 550 pounds.”

Luisa’s eyes widened. “No. That’s not possible. How do you even know?”

“They asked for help with their BayRide app when it wasn’t working, and when I was in her account I saw it: 552 pounds. I remember it so clearly--she was so huge. My point is, there aren’t going to be any X-Fitters anymore because there won’t be any skinny people left to judge fatties. We’re all just getting fatter.” As if to punctuate her point, she was caught by surprise by a huge, resonant belch.

“That’s what my mom thinks,” said Luisa distractedly.

“I don’t think that’s quite right,” said Simone, leaning forward and exposing even more of the top of her ass to the light of day. “You know what the answer is? Martha.”

“Martha?”

“Of course. As long as folks like you and me are fat and the people in power are skinny, they’ll find a reason to hate us. It was when the elite started packing on the pounds, too, that things started to change. Being fat didn’t tell you anymore who was smart, educated, rich, powerful, and who wasn’t. I mean, it still kinda does, but not like it used to. That’s when things started to change. I think the last holdouts are celebrities, but even there things are changing. Look at Bunny Black! As long as people in power stay fat--as long as Martha’s fat--we might all be ok.”

Luisa nodded vigorously about Bunny Black, and while she wasn’t sure if what Simone had said was true, it kept spinning around her head. For the first time, at least, she felt like someone was actually thinking about her question. She appreciated this about Simone. Luisa had always been curious, but Simone was the smartest of the three friends.

They eventually placed their orders and moved on to talking about other things--office politics, celebrity gossip, a coding dead-end Jaye couldn’t work herself out of--until their food came. Their table was loaded with samosas and pakoras, curries and potatoes and several new varieties of naan. Luisa had her fill of chicken curry, Jaye polished off the samosas on her own and placed an order for more, and their conversation shifted from their lives to the food in front of them to nothing at all: each woman only had room in her mind for the food she was shoveling into her mouth. Luisa quickly moved on from her entree to dessert. She started with a bowl of Indian ice cream to cool down, ordered two small bowls of gulab jamun and let the syrup coat her throat as it followed big, doughy bites, and she finished by slowly working through a bowl of sweet rice pudding. The sugar kept her mood up, and it kept her hungry--she wouldn’t have been able to eat like this without it.

Luisa only returned to her desk after 1:00, nursing an extra-large cup of sugarmilk with a shot of caffeine (a sort of inverse coffee drink). She hesitated at one of the nearby snack counters, casting a discriminating gaze over the selections before plucking a handful peanut butter cups out of a cup. At her desk she unwrapped them distractedly while she scanned the messages she’d received while away, one of which told her that a report needed to be finished by 2:00. She popped a peanut butter cup in her mouth and set to work, gradually munching through her snacks and sipping on her drink as she wrote. Snacking like this was what kept her going through most the day, helping keep her focused and energized.

An IM came through from her boss: she’d actually need the report by 1:40, as Newark had pushed up their meeting. “Fuck, ok,” said Luisa, and she worked away even more furiously. At a moment she had the urge to stand up and grab more peanut butter cups, but she barely had the time to finish the report: the snacks would have to wait. As 2:40 crept closer, she became increasingly nervous, and she started making typos and simple transcription errors, which she would swear about under her breath. By 2:39, when she sent off the final report, her sugar high had almost entirely worn off, and she felt harried and testy.

And then a reminder popped up on her screen: “Schedule doctor’s appointment.”

“FUCK,” she screamed, and she slapped her desk, silencing the small conversations around her and bringing nearby work to a halt. Her face was burning now, her expression a mix of consternation, embarrassment, and ongoing frustration. “Sorry…” she murmured lamely. Doctor’s appointments were Luisa’s major sore spot, as doctors were one of the segments of society that had most firmly clung to the fatphobia of yore. She hadn’t yet found one who wouldn’t chew her out for being supersized, and none of them approved of the HAES paradigm that so many laypeople had embraced. The last doctor she’d visited had told her she was pre-prediabetic. Luisa didn’t even think that was a real thing, but being slapped with the label had left lingering worries.

Fuck that guy, she thought to herself as her coworkers returned to their tasks. I don’t need any fucking doctor. She pushed herself away from her desk abruptly, stood up, and walked down the hall to the in-house bakery, and in minutes she returned to her desk carrying an entire pumpkin pie loaded with whipped cream.

“You got us pie?” asked her neighbor expectantly.

“I got me pie,” she said, plopping down in her chair and unveiling a fork. “This is all for me. I don’t need any fucking doctor.”

Her neighbor clammed up and eyed her warily as she dug into the pie, shoveling forkful after forkful into her mouth. She felt the pumpkin filling slide down her throat, felt the whipped cream melt as it touched her tongue, and the sugar rush returned to her. She sighed and shuddered a little as she redoubled her efforts, moaning quietly as she forked heaping bites of pie into her mouth. Even for the standards of the 2050s, this was a bit much, and it drew some curious, judgmental stares from her neighbors. She ignored them, relishing the feeling of sugar in her blood and dough and filling in her belly.

It wasn’t until she had scarfed down about a third of the pie that Luisa noticed all the attention she’d drawn to herself, and the sugar high stoked anxiety as much as it did elation. So she picked up the pie and waddled away, forking bites into her mouth as she walked. She wandered out of her department, as far away from others as she could get, pacing uneasily and taking the pie one, two bites at a time. She needed a private space--and then she realized what she could do with a private space. The one thing that never failed to calm her nerves.

Luisa steered around a few different corners, waiting for two particularly portly young men to clear a hallway, and then hastened toward a bathroom door, jiggling as she went. She burst through the door, slammed it shut and locked it, let the pie land on a shelf, and while still shoveling it into her mouth with one, bare hand she desperately pulled on her pants with the other. Under the pressure of her belly they rolled down easily, and she reached desperately toward her pussy--an almost impossible task given the magnitude of her belly, but she reached it. Her face was contorted in effort and pleasure and desperation as she rubbed herself with one hand, struggling constantly to push away her belly and reach her clit, and with the other literally shoving pie in her face. The pie filled her mouth and her belly, the sugar coursed through her, and her body stiffened as an intense charge built up between her legs. She shoveled in a bite, then another bite, then another, barely giving herself time to swallow before smashing in the next one, and then it was like a river had overflown a dam as she came, her yelps muffled by the pie, and her knees collapsed and she slid down to the ground on her bare ass.

She panted a few times, eyes closed, letting the orgasm flow through her, and momentarily she felt peace. But quickly the anxiety crept back in, now accompanied by shame and a sudden, acute stomach ache that stabbed so badly it made her eyes water. Luisa let out a single, dry sob and felt the burning cold of the tile floor on her ass, saw the pie splattered on the walls, the whipped cream dripping below it, and felt for a moment like she was looking in a mirror. What had happened? She never felt like this much of a mess. What a fucking day it had been.

Eventually Luisa gathered herself, pulling up her pants and pulling down her shirt. She ripped out of a few paper towels to clean the wall, tossed the mostly empty pie tin in the trash, and washed her hands. She walked back toward her desk, hesitating over the peanut butter cups again before finally settling on a tray of chips and cheese dip, the better to settle her stomach. She placed it on her desk and sat down, organizing her hair and tugging her shirt down again. She set back to work.



Part 3 of 3


In Livermore, California, on a balmy March morning, a sleek, orange BayRide taxi glided smoothly above the magnetized road and pulled up in front of the Restful Touch massage parlor. A door opened slowly from a hinge at the top, and the car leaned right heavily as its solitary passenger shifted to step out. First a remarkably round foot emerged, stuffed into a strappy brown sandal and supporting a ham hock of a calf. The other foot followed, with massive thighs above spread somewhat but still pushing against each other. And then, with one heave, and then two, and finally a third, the passenger rose to her feet, revealing the most impressively fat part of her body as the car rocked back into an equilibrium. Her upper body was segmented into roughly three parts, as though someone had stacked three fatty inner tubes around her. Her lower belly hung heavily to her thighs, and her bulging upper belly wrapped around into back rolls. The fattest part of all sat above her belly, a continuous layer of back fat and sideboob (her actual breasts were fairly small, relatively speaking) that blended seamlessly into massive, sprawling, flabby upper arms and the largest triple chin most people had ever seen.

Mo Woodson gathered herself for a moment, her ample chest rising and falling at the effort it had taken to lift her tremendous body into a standing position, a slight breeze rustling the sleeveless maxi dress she wore. The dress was woven of blue, gauzy material, semi-translucent to the point that an observer could almost make out the details of Mo’s body beneath it. The material was scientifically designed to protect its wearer from UV rays--Mo used an SPF 120 moisturizer to cover the exposed remainder of her brown skin--yet light enough not to weigh down its wearer in pounds of fabric. It was all the rage these days, and Mo loved the gilt trim on this particular dress, too.

Mo waddled ponderously to a bench in front of Restful Touch, seeking shade under the front awning as her driverless taxi pulled away noiselessly in search of other passengers. Mo was lucky--as a government employee of a certain status, she was entitled to a private ride whenever she needed it, and at her size that was pretty much always. These days her work kept her on the East Coast most of the time, to the extent that she hadn’t been home since the Christmas season before last. But today she was in Livermore on business, having taken the hyperfast, cross-country Tube train and pulled into Livermore Station about 30 minutes ago. It was just for one meeting, so she could take the unscheduled hours of the day to catch up with her family. She was waiting for her mother and sister to arrive right now.

Of course, as always, they were late. Mo tapped her wristlet twice, and a light, crystalline voice read out the time: “9:05 AM.” Rolling her eyes, Mo reached into her bag and pulled out a one-liter water bottle filled to the brim with sugarmilk, green tea matcha flavor with a hint of caffeine to help keep her awake after her early rising and four-hour train ride. She took three or four long, deep pulls off the drink and stuck it back in her bag, wiping sweat from her forehead and making sure her black hair, pulled into a bun, was still in place. Her arms wobbled regally as she moved. Every movement sent fat jiggling all over Mo’s body, and no motion was easy anymore--even the smallest required at least a little exertion. But she was used to it by now, and she didn’t think of the energy she was expending as she looked out from her hilltop view toward downtown Livermore, more sprawling and built up than even two years ago.

It wasn’t until twelve after that another taxi pulled up, a small van that emitted first her mother and then her sister. Her mother, Joanna, was a massive woman of middling height, tremendous girth and Pacific Islander descent who’d grown up in the Bay Area before the Revolution. She wore an opaque yellow maxi dress than made her seem even larger than she was, and she had long, black hair with gray streaks that fell to the middle of her back.

Joanna beamed at her daughter. “Momona, my baby, it’s been so long. More than a year!” They hugged, which in the case of these two enormous women meant smashing their bellies together and vainly attempting to wrap their arms around each other.

“You know how hard it is for me to get off work, Ma,” said Mo bashfully, “especially with--”

“No no,” Joanna interrupted, “we won’t talk of such things. This is a happy visit. Come, say hello to your sister.”

Mo’s younger sister Nui had lingered in the taxi, savoring the A/C as long as she could, but she was finally emerging from around the other side of the van. Good god, thought Mo as Nui waddled over, she’s huge. The last time Mo had been home, Nui was clocking in around 620 pounds, and she looked noticeably fatter now--no mean accomplishment at such dizzyingly high weights, and on a body six years younger and five inches shorter than Mo’s, to boot. Her figure was nearly spherical, with a round ass sitting atop packed, round thighs, which were obscured by a massive, sagging, overblown beach ball of a belly. Her back fat was almost comically voluminous, and she had a single double chin that looked twice as large as her round, chubby face. She grinned a lily-white teeth grin, and pressed her body against Mo’s, wrinkling her outfit of pants and a slight crop-top woven of the same fabric as Mo’s. Nui stood back and winced, lifting her feet slightly and bending her knees.

“My god, Nu,” said Mo, “you still haven’t gotten the surgery?”

“I mean,” said Nui guiltfully, “I just--I’m the shortest one in the family, you know that, I’m only 5’3”. What if I’m still going to grow another inch or two? They can’t give me bone implants if they know my bones are still growing.”

“Nu. You are 24 years old. You’re not getting any taller. Listen, I replaced both my knees with the implants four years ago, and both hips a couple years after that. I don’t get sore anymore. No more pain. I don’t understand why you’re putting yourself through this.”

That was only half-true. Mo didn’t want her sister to suffer, but she envied her, too. There was pride in Nui’s refusal to get the surgery, in her insistence on suffering all while continuing to gain weight, and it was...hot. It threw Mo for a loop. Nui had always been the awkward younger sister, and Mo had always been taller, fatter, more ambitious and more accomplished. But no sooner does Nu graduate from college, thought Mo, than she starts putting on weight like a hippo, learning to do her makeup, putting off the surgery. What the hell.

Nui acted like she hadn’t heard anything Mo said. “And the surgery’s so new…”

“Nu, they’ve been doing it for 10 years! They know what they’re doing. You’re going to fall and break a bone one of these days, and then what are you going to do? How much do you weigh now, anyway?”

“I honestly have, like, no idea.” Nui looked off to the side, affecting indifference. She knew how much this meant to Mo, and she relished the opportunity to tease her. “I guess I’ll find out when they weigh us inside.”

“It’ll be a big number,” said Joanna, nodding approvingly. “Your sister just eats all day.”

“I graze,” said Nu, examining at her nails.

“I can’t do that,” Mo said abruptly. “I can’t snack. I need to eat meals.”

“Yeah, like six of them,” said Nui. “And you drink that sugarmilk all day. You don’t call that snacking?”

“And you don’t call your ‘grazing’ inventory theft?” Nui had managed a local grocery store since graduating from college a couple years before, and her constant access to food could only have fueled her accelerating gain.

“You fucking jealous?”

“Girls, girls!” said Joanna, trying to keep teasing from turning into a full-blown spat. Mo and Nui looked over and saw her dripping in sweat, even in the shade of the awning. “You’re never like this. Let’s just go inside and get a massage. This is supposed to be a happy day. Mo’s come all this way. Let’s just have a nice time.”

A truce cemented, the automatic doors parted to allow all three to waddle inside.

There wasn’t a group massage room big enough for this family, so they split off into private rooms. Inside, Mo encountered her masseuse Charlotte, a belly-heavy brunette who had been a casual friend in high school. The women cooed in greeting and exchanged the typical smoosh of a hug, Mo’s body overwhelming Charlotte’s comparatively measly one (400 pounds tops, Mo guessed).

They exchanged a few pleasantries before getting down to business. “All right,” said Charlotte, “first off we have to weigh you to see how strong a table we’ll need.” She gestured at a large, black rectangle flush with the floor, which Mo waddled onto. After a beat, Charlotte’s wristlet pinged and pronounced Mo’s weight in a husky, feminine voice. “You are,” it said, “759 pounds.”

Mo’s heart quickened, and she felt her clit throb, but she steeled herself and tried to maintain her composure. She loved having strangers (or near-strangers) tell her how fat she was, and moreover she’d gained five pounds since Christmas. The weigh-in would automatically update her bioprofile, and Mo fantasized for a moment about having her wristlet repeat her weight aloud over and over again while she pleasured herself. She blinked twice and tried to focus.

“...so we’ll need the triple-reinforced table,” Charlotte was saying, and as she tapped a glass screen on the wall, said table began to emerge from the floor. “Now, I only say this because you’re up 40 pounds since the last time you were here, but I want to let you know that our tables only accommodate clients up to 800 pounds. If you get any bigger than that, we may have to...make some kind of special accommodation.”

“I understand. Will that be difficult?”

“Honestly,” said Charlotte earnestly, “we’ve never had to do it before, so, yes, probably.”

Mo’s heart beat still faster.

“Ok, time to strip down and get on the table.” Mo painstakingly removed the dress, her fat heaving and shaking as she worked, leaving herself in nothing but her wristlet and a bra and panties that were too small and partly devoured by her belly and backfat. Jiggling with each step, she approached the table, which was inclined and allowed her to lean forward onto it. It slowly lowered itself into a horizontal position, the surface rearranging as it moved, contouring itself to fit Mo’s unique shape and to maximize her comfort.

Charlotte approached, and Mo heard the slightly heavy breathing of a fat woman always on her feet and felt Charlotte’s belly press gently into her own flabby side. The masseuse’s strong, confident hands set to work on Mo’s back, sinking into flesh as they sought the muscles buried beneath the flab. Only the strongest hands could actually bring Mo belief, but she trusted Charlotte, and she felt herself relaxing and taking in the pleasure of the experience.

“There maybe a lot of fat here,” said Charlotte, “but I can still feel those tight, tight muscles underneath everything. You get in for massages much?”

“All the time,” said Mo, “three times a week when I can. I just can’t get by without it--you can imagine, in this body, I get so sore…”

Charlotte hummed in agreement. “That’s why we’re here, to keep you going.” She worked in silence for a few minutes, and then her voice took on a hint of anticipation. “You still working at the State Department?”

Mo laughed, sending ripples through her back and her arms. “Yeah, I am. You always think I’m a spy or something, but these days they have me in Arlington, working at the Foreign Service Institute. I’m teaching Vietnamese. If Vietnam really bombs Burma, you know…”

“Well,” said Charlotte, brushing away the somber topic, “you always were good at languages. But I’m sorry you’re stuck in DC!”

“I know. I miss being in the field so much. Hawaii was unbelievable--they had this amazing Portuguese sausage, linguiça. God, I must have had whole breakfasts that were just linguiça, plates of it.” She felt herself salivating. Brunch had better come soon.

Eventually Charlotte had Mo flip over: the table slowly tipped her back on her feet, Mo painstakingly rotated 180 degrees, and she laid back on the table as it returned to horizontal, remoulding its surface to fit the curves of Mo’s belly.

Charlotte rested a hand on Mo’s pillowy shoulder for a moment. “I hope this isn’t too forward, but we’ve known each other for a long time: you just have the most beautiful chest. I love it. So smooth, so plush--it’s what every American girl wants. I feel safe and proud knowing my diplomat is representing America like this.”

Mo laughed warmly and thanked her. Charlotte was referring, of course, to Mo’s upper chest, the place where her collarbones would have been had they not been buried deep beneath a massively fat and cushy layer that blended seamlessly with her fatty shoulders and rose to meet her triple chin. Few were as fat as Mo, but no one wanted even the shadow of a collarbone, which conjured associations of poverty and malnutrition. This was the United American Democracy, after all, thriving in the third decade of its existence, more prosperous and equitable than any nation had ever been. No one suffered. Collarbones, especially on a government official, would have been an embarrassment.

In the lobby, Joanna was chatting with the receptionist while Mo and Nui rested on wide, round, armless chairs.

Mo broke the silence. “So. How much.” She was too curious to maintain her composure.

Nui smiled and waited a beat before announcing: “Seven. Oh. One.”

Mo’s eyes widened and her brow furrowed as she looked away reflexively. Holy fuck, 701? That was a gain of 80 pounds in just over a year. Nobody in the 600s could pull that off. And on top of that, Mo hadn’t hit 700 till she was 27. Nui was absolutely going to hit 800 by 30--maybe even by 27, 100 pounds ahead of Mo’s pace.

“Honestly, it’s not fair,” said Mo. “You don’t even want to gain weight.”

Nui barked out a laugh and stared at her sister in genuine surprise. “You are never like this. Can’t handle your little sister growing up, huh?” She shrugged. “It’s true, though, I don’t really care. I’m just hungry all the time, and I eat what I want.”

Mo wordlessly took out her bottle again, chugging the rest of the sugarmilk, letting it fill her throat and her belly. Nui could just be exaggerating to tease her, but deep down Mo knew it was true. Nui wasn’t a gainer. Almost no one was, and almost no one knew that Mo was, either. Her sister really just was hungry all the time. Mo had always taken her size advantage for granted, so Nui’s rapid growth felt like the spur of a quarter-life crisis. Mo heaved herself to her feet (it just took two tries this time) and approached the desk as her mother went to collect Nui.

“Hey, do you have a sugarmilk bar?” asked Mo. It was a polite question: any business worth its salt had complimentary drinks and snacks.

“Of course,” said the receptionist, “but we’re out of everything but the coffee-chocolate flavor right now. Will that be ok?”

“That’ll be fine.” She handed the receptionist her bottle, and the woman rose from her chair to walk back to the sugarmilk bar. Mo was surprised the woman chose to walk: she could have easily directed her magnetized, floating chair to the spot in question, and walking was clearly a chore for her. She was almost comically shapely, with a comparatively narrow, soft waist exploding into a tremendous, juicy ass, which then tapered to tiny feet in black flats. Her legs shook with each effortful step, the top of her ass jiggling like the sea in a storm in a way that her dress jeggings could barely contain. She placed Mo’s bottle beneath a spigot, which dispensed a brown, sugary liquid to just the right level. And then she returned slowly to the desk. She’s not bad, thought Mo: she had a round face, almost a wide oval, with enormous cheeks and a cute, piggy nose.

She handed Mo her bottle, holding her gaze for a moment. “You’re Mo Woodson, aren’t you?”

“I am,” said Mo, “but I’m sorry, I don’t recognize you.”

“No, that’s ok,” said the receptionist, smiling bashfully, “we were in different grades in high school. But I was on the debate team when you were a senior. My name’s Modesty Penitani. You were an amazing debater. I haven’t seen you around--do you live here?”

“You’re too kind,” said Mo, “but no, just in for the day, visiting family. I’m,” she looked back at the door, her neck fat folding and creasing, “I’m so sorry, but it looks like our taxi is here. We’re meeting my dad and my brother for brunch. It was nice to see you--to meet you, I mean. Ha!” She laughed nervously and lumbered out of the massage parlor, feeling awkward and wondering if Modesty’s eyes lingered on her as she left. Modesty, she thought. What a name.

“The Breakfast Platter,” said the waitress, placing in front of Mo the innocuously named but massive dish: four eggs (scrambled), two pieces of toast, bacon, sausage, three pancakes, biscuits and gravy, and hash browns.

“I asked for a side of biscuits and gravy, too,” said Mo.

The waitress, a rotund high schooler with a short afro (350 at least, Mo mused), paused. “Biscuits and gravy are part of the dish, they’re right there. And they’re...not a side…”

“That’s ok,” said Mo. “I’d like another one anyway.”

The waitress shrugged and wandered off, leaving the Woodson family to eat. Mo had been the last one served, and her family had already dug into various plates of pancakes, omelettes, bagels, bacon, and sausages, circling three pitchers of juice in the center of the table. Mo was silently chomping through her meal while everyone else chatted. Her parents and siblings were eating, of course--chatting with food in their mouths--but no one ate with such singular focus as Mo. She chowed down on sausage, loaded her toast with eggs and lifted entire slices into her mouth, plucked strips of bacon from the plate to crunch between her teeth, shoveled heaping, soggy bites of biscuit and gravy through her lips, slurping up stray rivulets of gravy. The sugarmilk kept her hunger at bay throughout the day, but when she sat down for a meal, the floodgates flew open. She could eat for hours on end, filling her belly with food like each meal was her last.

At one point she reached for a hefty pitcher of maple syrup, but Akea, her 450-pound younger brother, placed a hand on it. She swatted it away and grunted a food-stifled “mmph!”, turning a withering gaze on her brother.

“All this sugar, Mo, you really shouldn’t…”

“I’ll eat what I want,” she said, reaching again for the syrup with flabby, jiggling arms. She drowned her pancakes in even more than usual, just to needle Akea.

“Mo, the last time you went to the doctor...”

She stabbed the huge stack with her fork, ripped off a three-tiered chunk, and stuffed it in her mouth, chewing loudly and setting her chins to dancing.

“Akea, leave your sister be,” said Joanna. “She’s on vacation, let her do what she wants.”

“Why are my grown children bickering like teenagers?” mused Will to no one in particular.

“Mom’s right,” said Mo. “You should see what I eat in Arlington. All sorts of good stuff for blood sugar--avocado, garlic, onions, fish, lots of coffee. Look, I’ll have a coffee right now.” Her arms flapped as she waved the waitress over.

“This isn’t a vacation,” mumbled Akea, “it’s a work trip…”

The waitress soon returned with a half-full cup of coffee, which Mo proceeded to fill with four shots of cream and five shots of sugar from a dispenser on the table. Akea rolled his eyes and looked away.

“I’m telling you,” said Mo between slurps of coffee, “I was just in to see Dr. Chao, and she says I’m doing really well. Yes, I’m pre-diabetic, but she says mass-market insulin regulators are just around the corner--a year, two tops--and when they arrive, controlling diabetes will be just like treating the common cold.” Akea opened his mouth to interrupt her, but she didn’t leave him an opening. “Everything else in my bloodwork came out fine. My heart health is amazing.”

“That’s because you take cytokine blockers every day,” Akea protested.

Mo nodded, her chins jiggling in apparent vindication. “Took ‘em on the Tube on my way out this morning.”

“Those,” said Mo’s father Will, wagging his finger earnestly as he chomped through a large bite of bagel, “are the most remarkable scientific breakthrough of the past century.” Will a 500-pound man with short, distinguished, salt-and-papper hair. “Of course, I’m not much older than they are, of course, but let me tell you, if your Grandma Luisa had had access to that medication when she was young, she might still be with us today.” He sighed. “If your Grandma could have seen you now, Mo, what you do for this country, she would be so proud.”

Mo smiled warmly at Will through mouthfuls of pancakes and sips of coffee, though she noticed her mother silently judging her as she gulped down the beverage. As a devout and observant Mormon, Joanna never touched alcohol, coffee, or tea. Her children were, to varying degrees, less devout.

“Ma, I can’t do this job without coffee,” she protested, but her mother just pursed her lips and looked away. She hated direct confrontation with her children.

Will was still lost in the past. “Those were the days, back when we lived in the Bay, when your Grandma was still around. You know there used to be three airports in the Bay when I was a kid? That was before the sea levels stabilized, when they were still rising. It was a hard choice for your mother and me to move to Livermore, but with all the conservation rules in the East Bay, property prices went through the roof, and this was the next best place….” He sighed, and his reverie became nonverbal.

Mo waved over the waitress again.

“Ready for dessert?” the girl asked.

“Actually, I’d like to see the menu again before we order dessert,” said Mo, and the waitress suddenly realized that Mo had cleaned all of her plates, even as her parents and siblings were still mopping up theirs. “No, never mind, I know what I want: could you bring huevos rancheros and a side of hashbrowns?”

The waitress nodded, dumbfounded, and stepped away to fulfill Mo’s order. After that, Mo did want dessert: an old-fashioned banana split and a chocolate milkshake, followed, of course, by another cup of coffee.


As the sun climbed higher in the sky, Mo once again found herself a solo passenger in a taxi, this one taking her toward the city center. The meeting that had brought her to Livermore in the first place was scheduled to take place downtown, over lunch, though she knew this would be a skimpier lunch than she was used to. Second lunch would certainly be in order.

First, though, Mo needed a change of clothes. She’d traveled only with her current outfit, but the lunch meeting demanded office formal wear, which she would have to order. She spotted a touchscreen in front of her, but it was mostly obscured by her belly, so she heaved her body in a slight counterclockwise rotation and reached forward, her tremendous upper arm straining over her massive belly, until her pudgy fingers gripped the corner of the screen and dragged it to a more accessible position to the right. Those fat fingers went to work on the screen, navigating to an online realtor and then to the suit section of the website, finally settling on a light gray pantsuit that appealed to her. She tapped “purchase,” and a blue-white light on her wristlet flickered as it transmitted her measurements and payment information to the retailer. Finally, the light turned green, indicating that the taxi had built in an intermediate stop at a kiosk downtown where Mo would be able to pick up her order. Retail, these days, was a highly distributed affair: independent shops with access to free, circulating designs (the best ones always floated to the top) fulfilled orders based on which was closest to the customer. They were 3D printed rapidly, based on the customer’s personal measurements, and then carried by drone to the most convenient pickup kiosk. (The only centralized piece left was the online platform, a marketplace for all the independent shops.) Mo couldn’t imagine getting her clothes any other way: in the 22nd century, just about everyone was a different size and shape, and the insufficiency of standard-size, off-the-rack clothes would have left most Americans to walk around naked.

The taxi rolled on through a commercial district, guiding Mo past restaurants, specialty shops, and music venues. In the background she could see taller buildings, the headquarters of solar and wind power companies and the premises of various government labs. She could spotted planes covered in solar panels flying low as they approached the airport. Then Mo’s taxi rounded a corner and pulled up to a squat, golden building. Mo heaved herself out of the car and stomped stiffly toward the building, feeling a ping of pain in the middle of her back as she jiggled forward. I just got a fucking massage, she thought. All of the taxi’s lights blinked gently as it waited for her to return.

The front doors parted to let Mo into a long gallery inside. The space was lined with doors on either side and several conveyor belts that ran the length of the gallery, carrying customers of various corpulence to and fro. “Please step on to the belt, Ms. Woodson,” said a deep, male voice, and she did so, letting it take her about halfway down to a room that displayed her name on the door. She huffed inside, wishing she didn’t have so much armfat and backfat that she couldn’t reach around and address the painful spot on her back. The door closed, a container opened, and her pantsuit appeared. A relatively tall, barely fat white woman (250 pounds?) knocked and entered, greeting Mo and helping her strip out of her dress and don the outfit. Mo worked up a bit of a sweat even as the woman pulled the dress over her massive shoulders and deposited it on a shelf. (The kiosk would package it, vacuum seal it, and return it by delivery drone to her parents’ house.) She stood patiently, perspiring and respiring as the kiosk associate buttoned up Mo’s blouse and pulled the pants over her overstuffed legs.

“Ms. Woodson, are you sure your measurements are...up to date?” the woman asked as she pulled the jacket over Mo’s shoulders.

Mo eyed her warily. “Why do you ask?”

“Well….” She didn’t finish. There wasn’t much extra room in the shoulders, and the jacket just barely closed over Mo’s belly. The single button strained to hold both sides together, leaving her blouse to bulge aggressively above and below it.

“Shit,” Mo hissed. “My measurements are out of date.”

“We can re-measure you here and have a new jacket ready in 20 minutes.”

“I don’t have the time. I have to be somewhere in 15 minutes. This will just have to do.”

“As you like it, Ms. Woodson,” said the woman, excusing herself and leaving Mo alone with her frustration. On one hand, Mo wasn’t mad at all: she loved the idea of outgrowing clothes, which was hard to do in an era of custom measurements and instant production. She hadn’t even realized she needed to be re-measured. Besides, she loved to be imposing in meetings, and wearing clothes that barely fit would definitely amplify her apparent size. On the other hand, she didn’t want signs of her sexuality to be too obvious, and this was the most important work meeting she had attended in months. She let her hands stray to the front of her belly, feeling the shoulder fabric strain as she did so, allowing her fingers to gently caress the bulge of her stomach fat. Her eyes flickered and her chin jerked back slightly in pleasure, widening her chins even further than usual. Walking the line between professionalism and exhibitionism was going to be so fucking hot.

The time appeared on Mo’s wristlet: 12:05. She was late, and this was not a meeting she wanted to be late for. She could not afford to show weakness or imprecision at a meeting like this. But here she was, standing outside the Livermore office of the Department of Defense, sweating while a scrawny soldier waved a magnetic wand all around her massive body.

“Is this really necessary?” asked Mo, dabbing her sweaty, fat neck with a handkerchief. She could feel her blouse soaking up her sweat. “I’m an employee at State. An Interdepartmental Liaison. It’s my job to visit other departments. The background check I did when I applied for this job is supposed to take care of these things.”

“Standard protocol, ma’am.” The soldier was standing on his toes to reach Mo’s shoulder with his wand, scanning for weapons. “Five-star generals get the same treatment when they walk in this door.”

“I highly doubt that.”

The soldier didn’t respond, scanning and rescanning Mo with the wand until she thought he would drain its battery. Finally he cleared her to enter. Maybe all my fat screws up something in the wand, she wondered, and smiled as this small man, oblivious to her fantasies, guided her through a labyrinth of gray, windowless hallways. Occasionally they passed open-plan offices where dozens of soldiers typed away in front of several screens apiece, lean, fit men and women of every height and hue. Poor souls, thought Mo, wasting away under the discipline of military life. But after a trek down a particularly long hall, just when Mo was beginning to lose her breath, her guide palmed a scanner, unlocked a door, and left her to enter. The door slid into its frame and granted Mo passage.

“Ms. Woodson,” said a tall, dark, muscular man with a shaved head and a baritone voice. He was seated at a small, round table in the middle of the room. “Glad you could make it after all.”

“Colonel Morgan,” said Mo, “if your man at the door had spent less time waving his little stick at me, I might have been on time.”

The colonel, clad in a gray, form-fitting uniform splattered in decorations, chuckled. “We could stand to have better scanners, it’s true.” He gestured to the wall. “Please, there’s a buffet station there. Pasta, rolls, some salad, if you want it.” He looked at her earnestly, dark brown eyes betraying nothing, hands folded on the table. He didn’t move.

“You won’t be eating?”

He shook his head once. “Not very hungry.”

Mo fully grasped the dig, but she wasn’t one to pass up a free, unlimited meal. She waddled to the station, picking up a plate and heaping the entire thing with pasta, turning her fat neck back to look Colonel Morgan straight in the eye as she loaded on ridiculous amounts of the stuff. She placed it on the table and and returned for a second full of rolls and butter, and then, slowly, she lowered herself into the armless chair opposite the colonel, feeling her tremendous surfeit of flesh spilling over by a foot or two on each side. When she sat like this, her belly kept her multiple feet from the edge of the table, and here she could feel it pushing her jacket’s button perilously close to the breaking point. The pressure cut into her inhalations, preventing deep breaths, and she felt again a short, sharp pain in the middle of her back. Mo ignored it all, maintaining her composure and drawing up her bulk to its full height. And she steadily began shoveling pasta into her mouth while the colonel sat and waited.

Colonel Morgan didn’t have to wait long: the pasta was consumed in less than two minutes, and Mo spent the rest of the conversation nibbling on butter-slathered rolls. “All right,” she said between bites, “I know you don’t have long, so I’ll be direct. You know why I’m here. If there’s going to be a war inside ASEAN, this government cannot be internally divided. DoD needs to communicate fully and clearly with State. I know you can make this happen. You know who to talk to.”

“Ms. Woodson,” said the colonel, his hands unfolding in a gesture of innocence, “we serve the United American Democracy. We make every effort to do our jobs and follow our orders. I don’t know what you could possibly be accusing us of.”

“Don’t waste my time, Colonel. You know the military is fat-phobic as all hell, and it’s starting to get in the way of carrying out American policy. You can’t ignore the rest of the government just because you think we’re a bunch of lazy slobs.”

“What do you think this is, the 20th century?” Colonel Morgan’s brow furrowed in genuine dismay. “We don’t indulge in any of that moralizing bullshit anymore. The problem is not with the masses who don’t have access to anything but this fattening garbage. The problem”--he leaned forward into the table--“is with people like you who ought to know better, who promote this horrendous lifestyle that only enriches agribusiness, the last bastion of capitalism in this country, at the expense of the health and mobility of the people.”

“It’s always the same, tired talking points,” said Mo, rolling her eyes and twisting in her seat. She felt the button strain, felt her flesh struggling to free itself, and she curtailed her motion. “You know as well as I do that revolution doesn’t happen all at once, and that the big ag corporations don’t sell directly to people, they have contracts with cities and restaurant suppliers. They may not be socialized, but they are subordinated to the needs of the people. It’s progress.”

“If that’s what you’re telling yourself,” said the colonel, leaning back, “then you are not fit to help guide this country, least of all in a war. And that is why you’re having trouble communicating with us. Not because we hate fat people. Because this administration, like so many of its predecessors, is dangerously close to betraying The Revolution and letting capitalists in the back door. You are going do undo everything we have fought for--”

“You didn’t fight for this,” said Mo, her chins and belly jiggling as she let her fork fall to her plate. The button trembled, but she didn’t notice. “The Revolution wasn’t a coup. It was a general strike that made sure the most reactionary presidential candidate in history did not win the election.”

“The people may have led the Revolution, but we will sure as hell defend it if we have to!”

Mo lost it. She propelled herself to her feet, not in three heaves or two, but in one, sending her chair flying back behind her and the table forward a few inches, knocking the colonel back in his seat. As she moved, her button lost the last of its grip and rocketed from her jacket into the corner. She could feel her belly straining her blouse to its limits, could feel the jacket wrapped tight around her massive, flabby shoulders and upper arms, her pants threatening to split at any moment. But her clothes held together, and for a moment she glimpsed something like fear in the colonel’s eyes.

“Do not think,” she said, barely above a whisper, “that this will remain a private conversation.”

Colonel Morgan stared back coldly. “We all serve at the pleasure of the President.”

A young man with a remarkably bouncy bubble butt placed Mo’s order on the table. “Need anything else right now?”

Mo tapped her empty martini glass, raising waves in a sea of armfat while wordlessly stuffing a massive double bleu cheese burger with bacon into her mouth with her other hand. She’d ditched her jacket somewhere on the street, and she was currently sweating through her blouse and letting her lower belly push her pants to their limit.

The waiter was astounded: he hadn’t served her that drink more than a minute ago. “I’ll...I’ll be right back….” He returned with a new martini, but when he told Mo to press the call button on her wristlet if she needed anything else, she just said “Mmph” as she continued to chow down on her burger. A second enormous burger waited behind it, nestled into a large pile of truffle fries with herbs and parmesan, which loomed over two baskets of fried pickles and a few bowls of mayo and sauces for dipping. Mo steadily devoured her burgers, her chins wobbling rhythmically as she masticated the cheese and meats and guzzled a second martini, then a third. It took a lot to intoxicate a woman Mo’s size, but she was determined to do it.

When the waiter delivered her fourth drink, a third shadow darkened Mo’s table, and she was forced to look up at a cute, stupendously bottom-heavy woman in a sleeveless pink top and dress jeggings. “This one’s on me,” she said.

Mo swallowed a bite of burger and rested her greasy hands on her expansive, flabby belly. “And who would that be?”

The woman tsked and took a seat across from Mo. “So rude.” She pointed at Mo’s hands. “You’re getting grease on your belly.”

“Seriously, who are you, and why are you indulging in the inexplicable modern fashion of crashing the meals of complete strangers at restaurants?”

The woman’s eyebrows raised. “I didn’t know that was a thing. More importantly, I can’t believe you don’t remember me. Modesty--from the massage parlor?”

“Ugh, god, I’m so sorry. You did look a little familiar.”

Modesty laughed. “Nice try. You must be having an off day. You doing ok?”

“You have,” Mo groaned, “no idea how complicated and awful it would be to answer that question.”

“Good lord, now you have to tell me.”

“Shouldn’t you be at work?”

“I was just filling in for a coworker this morning. I have the rest of the day off.”

“Well,” said Mo, lifting up her martini with her fat fingers, “then you should have a drink, too, if I’m going to tell you this story.”

At that moment, the waiter returned and handed Modesty a margarita. She took a deep sip and smacked her lips. “It’s five o’clock somewhere, right?”

“Today, I do not give a fuck what time it is. When I pass out from being too fucking drunk, it’ll be time for bed.” She popped two mayo-slathered pickle slices in her mouth. “Do you want something to eat, too?”

“Not that hungry. I just ate lunch.”

Mo shoved a handful of fries in her mouth. “Am I the only hungry woman in this fucking city?!”

Modesty just raised an eyebrow as she sipped her drink.

“Ok, yes, I’ll get to that,” Mo sighed. “So, you know those muscular motherfucking sickos in the military?”

Within the hour, the door to Modesty’s apartment slid open and she and Mo stumbled in, locked in what passed for an effort to grope each other and make out. Mo had a few inches on Modesty, and her belly prevented her from getting too close to anyone, but none of this stopped them from trying. They stumbled around Modesty’s kitchen, the shorter woman fondling Mo’s belly and then, on an impulse, ripping her blouse open, sending a button or two flying and liberating Mo’s belly. Mo sighed as her immeasurable gut surged forth, bursting open her pants button and unzipping the zipper under the pressure. Modesty’s eyes shimmed as her hands worked compulsively over all this fat: she’d never seen so much accumulated in one place. She stepped up on a step stool to better access Mo’s fat face, pushing her lips against Mo’s and unhooking her bra so should could fondle her breasts.

Suddenly she stopped and leaned back. “Get on the counter.”

Mo glanced at the island behind her, folding her neckfat in the process. “What…?”

Without missing a beat, Modesty shoved Mo, harder than Mo thought she could, and Mo tipped back. She shivered as her backfat met the cold marble counter, but she felt herself stabilize as her back came to rest on the marble and her fat legs dangled off the edge. She was panting and wheezing at all the exertion that had preceded this new equilibrium.

“You top-heavy girls are all pushovers,” Modesty punned lamely, and she literally ripped Mo’s pants off.

“Good god, you’re just a repeat offender: first the horrible pun, and now you rip apart my clothes. I bought that outfit today you kn--uhhh.” Mo moaned and flinched in pleasure, her entire body wobbling and undulating, as Modesty ran her finger over Mo’s clit in a single motion.

“Shut up,” said Modesty, and she stepped back from Mo, stripping off her own top and shimmying off her jeggings. Mo could just barely see Modesty’s unreal hips and massive ass jiggling endlessly as she worked. The world’s first perpetual motion machine, she mused.

“Your next move better be getting me food,” said Mo, who couldn’t follow Modesty while she was hidden behind Mo’s belly. But Mo heard the fridge door open and close and then saw Modesty approaching her with a tupperware of tres leches cake.

“You’re so hot, you know,” said Modesty, “when you lie down like this, and your shoulders and your chest pool up around all your chins and push them into your face. You must be drowning in all that fat. You must not be able to breathe.”

“Just give me all that fucking sugar,” said Mo, and Modesty handed her the tupperware. Mo flung off the top and began shoveling the cake into her mouth with her bare hands, the sugar and fat coating her tongue and her throat, the glycemic rush coursing through her. And then she felt Modesty’s hands pushing her mindbogglingly huge belly up and back, and Modesty’s tongue on her clit. Mo kept pushing gobs of cake between her lips, down her throat, barely leaving herself time to breathe between bites, and Modesty’s tongue ran circles around her clit, crossed it up and down, side to side. Mo felt her limbs tense as Modesty worked, felt the pleasures between her legs and between her lips crowd out any coherent thoughts, just let the cake fill her up, push her to her limit, more and more and more until her legs stiffened at odd angles, her arms twisted involuntarily and the tupperware fell to the counter, and with cake still in her mouth and smeared on her cheeks she came, her body shuddering, her arms and shoulders and belly vibrating and flowing. And then she relaxed, swallowed, and licked the cake from her lips. She tried weakly to push herself up, but she was stuck on the island counter, helpless. And Modesty was laughing.

“I have never met anyone like you,” she said, peeking above Mo’s belly with her wide, white grin. “You actually finished the cake.”

Mo turned her fat head to the right, the greatest effort she could muster at the moment. Sure enough, the tupperware was empty. She felt her clit pulse again, and she wasn’t sure if it was from the evidence of her boundless appetite or another strike from Modesty. The latter woman placed her feet against the base of the island, stabilizing herself as she took Mo’s hands and helped the nearly 800-pound woman into a seated position.

Mo shook her head. “You are so incredibly strong.”

Modesty flexed and tapped her flabby upper arm, presumably reaching some bicep buried beneath the fat. “Gotta be when you’re messin with members of the 700 Club.”

Mo slipped forward to the floor, her feet hitting heavily and her artificial joints absorbing the impact. “You know how much I weigh? That’s got to be a HIPAA violation or something.”

“We’re not a doctor’s office, for chrissake, I can look up my clients’ weight if I want to. Would you be able to resist that temptation? And that is a good segue to my next question: can you resist the temptation of Third Lunch?”

Mo could not, and twenty minutes later they were sitting on Modesty’s wide, low, very strong mattress, working their way through two extra-extra-large pizzas. Leaning against a pile of pillows each, they were both totally naked, Mo a hulking heap of corpulence, Modesty a fat torso seemingly placed on a much broader pedestal of thighs, hips, and ass.

“You know,” said Mo, “you could be a ‘Mo,’ too. Short for ‘Modesty.’”

“Hell no,” said Modesty. “You’re suited to that name, I am not. Besides, people don’t know what to do with the name ‘Modesty.’ It makes them uncomfortable, and I like that.”

Mo laughed quietly and took another few bites of pizza. “So you know how much I weigh. How much do you weigh?”

“This isn’t about me. I don’t have a gaining fetish, I’m into other fat women.”

“Please, nobody loves fat as much as you do and then doesn’t keep track of their weight. Come on, what’ve you got?”

Modesty tapped her wristlet, which stated in a deep baritone: “Five hundred twenty-nine pounds.”

“You’re a pipsqueak!” joked Mo, and Modesty blushed.

“Like I said, I’m not trying to gain, I just like food as much as the next person.”

“So, you fuck 700-pounders often?”

“Wouldn’t be my first time.”

“Well,” sighed Mo, “you’re gonna love my sister. She’s a few years younger and just hit 700 herself. At this rate she’ll reach 800 before I do.”

“Stop it,” said Modesty, pulling a piece of pizza back from entering Mo’s mouth. “I’ve had my eye on you since high school, and I know your sister: girl’s got nothing on you. You already had a tremendous figure back then”--Mo rolled her eyes at the bad wordplay, but Modesty persisted--“and you’ve only gone up in the meantime. And, hey.” She scooted toward Mo, rubbing Mo’s sprawling belly and sending tingles down her spine. “If you keep coming around my way, I’ll keep you so well fed your sister might not catch up to you after all.”

“Oh, god, Modesty,” said Mo, leaning her fat neck back and closing her eyes in relaxation. “Lord knows I wish I could. But they keep me busy in DC. Last time I was in Livermore was over a year ago.”

Modesty leaned deeper into her belly rubs and grinned mischievously. “Maybe you need to schedule more meetings with this colonel then.”

Mo’s eyes went wide. “God fucking forbid,” she said, and Modesty cracked up. “The worst thing about this is that there are fat people in the military--more all the time. They don’t advertise it, of course, but every drone pilot is 400 pounds and up. They recruit regular folks to join the military and try to get them to lose weight, and when they can’t, they make them drone pilots. But we need drone pilots. That’s the future of the military. It’s already 25% of our activity. God, I felt so bad at my job today. But--Modesty, you know you can’t repeat any of this, right?”

Modesty had stopped rubbing, simply resting her hands on Mo’s soft belly, letting them sink in gently. She looked Mo in the eye, more serious than before. “If you wanted to, you could schedule more meetings with the colonel, right?”

Mo tried to push herself a little more upright, but she was tired, and her body was enormous. “Modesty, there’s going to be war in Asia. I don’t know where State is going to need me; I don’t know where I’m going to spend the next few months, years, who the hell knows how long. I can’t promise--”

“Shut up.”

Mo didn’t have any problems tolerating Modesty’s bossiness. She saw Modesty lift from the box another slice, covered in sausage and pepperoni and dripping with grease.

“Stop talking about the future. I shouldn’t have asked. Just forget about tomorrow, forget about later today, and let me feed you the rest of this pizza.”

THE END