by Wilson Barbers
Mona wasn't fat. But she'd always felt like she was.
Blessed with the kind of old-fashioned curves that would have gotten her wined and dined by any number of eager young men a century ago, the young round-faced secretary was a woman out of time. She cursed her plump body daily. No amount of dieting or aerobics seemed enough to help her shrink her frame, and no amount of encouragement from any of those young men who were genuinely attracted to her could convince Mona that she wasn't too fat to be alluring. She saw their compliments as laced with hidden scorn (or, worse yet, pity), and so she didn't really hear them.
Obsessed with the desire to shrink her body, Mona spent most of her time after work at a nearby health club, one of those glossy suburban franchises where the thin or muscle-bound went to admire each other. She felt like hell the whole time she was there. All the other club members made their svelteness look so easily attained that she just knew she was a loser for remaining so chunky. The plump girl resented her failure, and, in time, she resented her club-mates for reminding her of that failure. Not that many of them bothered her or made any derogatory comments (for, in truth, the majority barely noticed her). They didn't need to: Mo had plenty of effective fat-girl put-downs resonating inside her.
One Wednesday at the end of work, though, the young girl found an item that would change all that. As she was closing up her desk, she caught a glimpse of movement in the hall, what looked to be the portly form of Don Numont in a hurry. A personable computer programmer, Don had made a few unsuccessful stabs at carrying on a sociable conversation with Mo, but she'd typically shut him out - feeling so self-conscious about her size, there was no way she could let herself be seen in public with someone as fat as Don.
What caught her attention was the sound of Don dropping something as he passed. She stepped out in the hall, scouting around for the programmer, but he was nowhere to be seen. At her feet, though, was the discarded item. A book.
It was a heavily-thumbed paperback, emblazoned with colorful lettering and the title Fast Majicke (author anonymous). Funny, she thought: Don didn't seem like the kind of guy to be into such nonsense. She fanned the pages absently, and as she did, a small notecard fluttered out.
Stooping over to retrieve the card, Mona examined Don's bookmark. It was covered with nearly crabbed handwriting:. Along the top was the legend, "Caloric Cookies;" below the title was a recipe. From the look of things, it was obvious that Don didn't spend much time agonizing about his rotundity. High-calorie cookies, indeed! How high could they be?
Down the hall, the elevator bell loudly rang. Mona backed into the office and quickly slipped both book and card into her coat pocket. She didn't remember the card until she got home from the health club.
Jenny, her lanky siamese, was yowling for dinner when she entered her studio apartment. The cat had an appetite that seemed boundless and a slinky frame that made Mona envious. "I hear you," she groused at the begging feline, as she scooped out a dish full of Science Diet. With the cat happily scarfing down its dinner, Mo grabbed a Diet Dr. Pepper, threw her coat on a wide rattan chair and plopped down on the couch to stretch her aching calves. Peaking out of the pocket of her coat was a corner of the recipe card.
Groaning loudly, Mona reached for her coat and retrieved the recipe. The instructions looked pretty simple; the thought of cookies for dinner was uncharacteristically tempting. It wasn't the most nutritional fare perhaps, but there was nothing on television and she deserved to reward herself after the workout she'd just been through. All she had in the freezer was a selection of Lean Cuisine.
Ignoring her legs' protests, Mo groaned off the couch and made her way to the kitchenette. A quick scope showed that she had all the fixings for the cookie mix. Okay! she thought. Carefully measuring, Mona meshed them together in a bowl with an old Hamilton Beach hand-held. Then she turned back to the directions. At the bottom of the card was a line she'd missed the first time through, a three-word sentence that appeared to be in some foreign language. The plump girl read the words over several times in her head, phonetically spoke them aloud once. But they resisted her attempts at comprehension.
She hoped they weren't an important step.
A sound from the counter distracted her. Jenny had apparently jumped up to check out the cookie mix, a definite no-no. The cat had her head in the bowl and some flour on her whiskers. Clapping loudly, Mona shooed the siamese out of the kitchen, checked the bowl for cat hairs and began spooning dough onto a cookie sheet.
It wasn't until she pulled her first tray out to cool, that Mona got a true idea of what she was dealing with. Since she'd scared Jenny off the counter, the cat had pulled a vanishing act. That in itself was rather unusual: generally, the siamese loved to get underfoot when Mo was fixing food. Perhaps Jen's one sample of cookie dough had been enough. That didn't say much for the recipe.
Just as she was setting the timer for tray two, her pet made a reappearance. Waddling into the kitchenette, her body so round that it dragged the floor, the formerly slim siamese looked like she was modeling to be the Bride of Garfield. In a matter of minutes, the cat had grown obese! Mona stooped to lift the corpulent kitty - she must've weighed close to forty pounds - and get a closer look. Jenny purred happily.
Mona let her go. Huge body aside, the cat seemed totally unhampered by her sudden obesity. She moved around the kitchenette with her usual feline nonchalance, neither panting heavily nor showing any other strain. Even her flea collar seemed to have grown to fit. Mo was so absorbed in the sight of her fat cat that she was caught off guard by the sound of the oven buzzer. Her second sheet of cookies was ready for cooling.
Pulling the tray out and placing it on the counter, Mona considered the facts before her. Fact one: the only new thing her cat had eaten was the uncooked dough. Fact two: the only other item that Jenny had gotten was her usual helping of Science Diet. This sudden bloating had nothing to do with science. Don's recipe had to be something magical. Perhaps that paperback wasn't so nonsensical, after all.
She examined her baked handiwork, so round and appealing, the epitome of homemade cookieness. There was no way that she was going to bite into any of these incredibly fattening items - as appealing as they looked - but the idea of giving them away was worming its way into her head. What would they do to those stuck-up fitness freaks at her health club?
She decided to find out.
Next morning, she called in sick at work and went to the health club at opening, two plastic-wrapped platters full of cookies in hand. Emma, the statuesque red-headed receptionist raised a quizzical eyelid at the proffered plates. Every time Mona signed in, she felt Emma's judging eyes on her. "Snacks?" the receptionist said, as if the very word were anathema to her.
"Yup," Mona answered, unveiling the plastic wrapping, "high in fibre, too." Among other things, a voice in the back of her head added. In the light of the reception area, the cookies looked so appetizing that it was only a matter of seconds before the busty receptionist was picking one up and sampling it. Must be part of the magic, Mona realized.
"Pretty good," Emma pronounced, already on her second cookie. "Better take 'em away before I eat 'em all, though." Mona complied. After all, she wanted to share the wealth. She left her plates on the benches outside both dressing areas, strategically placed to be instantly noticed. Then she dressed in her swimsuit and hit the pool. She was one of the first ones in.
It wasn't long before several other swimmers joined her: a pair of svelte executrix types in skin-tight one-pieces, a thick-necked habitue of the weight room and his big-boobed girlfriend. She wondered if any of them had sampled her cookies. From her experience with Jenny, it took time for them to be properly digested. All she could do was hang back and wait, see if they really worked.
The first one to blimp up was the weightlifter's girlfriend. She'd swayed her buxom body over to the jacuzzi and was resting in it, childishly playing with her suit as she laid back. The tub bubbles ballooned her suit above her, creating the illusion of fatness. And yet when she sat up in the tub, the illusion turned real. Her body had suddenly grown to three times its original size. She looked at her boyfriend, a smile on her multiply-chinned face. Mona turned to take him in.
The man had grown huge, all trace of musculature vanished from his great ball of a body, his tong swimsuit totally obscured by the hang of his gut. Behind him the lady executives, now grown fat and matronly, were unconcernedly chatting as they dangled their fat feet in the pool. Perhaps it was the magical nature of their growth, but not a single one of the foursome seemed concerned by their new size. The sumo-sized body builder jumped into the pool, sending up a geyser of chlorinated water. Mona had to see if her cookies had worked on anybody else.
They had. She walked past an aerobics class full of corpulent club members, their leader a formerly Fondaesque brunette who'd continually been urging her students (Mona included) to "go for the burn." Now with the class leader carrying three-hundred-plus pounds on her frame, she was leading her troupe through a low-impact routine, sounding for all the world like she'd always been this low-key. Back in the weight room, a group of portly pumpers were working to develop their back muscles. "When you've got a bay window like this," one of them was bragging to a companion, patting his spreading paunch for emphasis, "you need to work to support it!" His friend nodded his jowly head in agreement.
And so it went for the rest of the morning. Each club member would come in, find those tempting plates of cookies and grow round under them. The plump girl began to clock individual members: it took about ten to fifteen minutes for the cookies to take effect, she discovered. By noon, both plates were depleted.
Out in the foyer, Emma called to Mona as she passed. Wedged behind her desk, her four-hundred-plus pound body spilling around the arms of her chair, the widened receptionist was working her way through a large-size Pizza Hut deep dish. As with the rest of the club members, her clothes had grown to accommodate her voluminous form (much like Jenny's flea collar had grown to fit her), but, unfortunately, the rest of the club's furnishings weren't as adaptable. "I seem to have gotten stuck in my chair," she said nonchalantly, her voice softened to match the rest of her. "Had to have my lunch delivered." She shrugged her globular shoulders, then continued. "Do you have the recipe for those cookies?" she asked. "They've marvelous!" Behind Mo, a lunchtime regular came in, nodding at Emma as if he saw nothing untoward in her new vastness. He passed around the weightlifter and his blubbery blond girlfriend as they came out of the club together, flabby arms affectionately intertwined.
"If you like, I could be back with some more," Mona gleefully promised, watching the corpulent couple waddle out in to the streets. This was great! She rushed back to her apartment, exhilarated by what she'd done. It was only a five minute drive from club to apartment. On her way, she saw three more formerly thin club members on the sidewalk, two of them eagerly noshing at a corner hot dog stand. She pictured herself, the thinnest member in a club full of enlarged exercisers, and laughed.
She was careful to follow the recipe exactly on her second batch: the only hard part was repeating that three-word incantation properly now that she knew what it was. Just to make sure, Mona read the line out three times with different emphases.
She was arranging her first plate of cooled-off cookies when the doorbell rang. Stepping around Jenny, she went to answer it, plate in hand. Standing in the hallway was the pudgy form of Don Numont, a concerned look on his face.
"I heard you were sick," he said, insinuating himself through the doorway. "I was in the neighborhood at lunchtime, so I thought I'd stop and see how you were." He smiled nervously at Mona, then took in the plate of cookies she was holding. "Looks like you can't be feeling too bad if you've still got your appetite," he said.
"These?" she said. "I'm baking for some friends." She couldn't decide if she felt pleased or awkward by the computer man's concern, so she took refuge in her usual mode of suspicion. Was he here to get his recipe card back? There was only one way to find out: she held the plate in front of him. "If you'd like one, I've got more in the oven," she said, fully expecting Don to back away. Instead, her co-worker reached for a cookie and quickly bit into it before she could change her mind.
"Pretty good," he said, echoing Emma's early judgment. "Mind if I have another?" Too numb to argue, Mona watched as Don devoured a second Caloric Cookie. You aren't supposed to give this to somebody who's already fat, her inner voice chastised. She pulled the plate out of reach and led Don over to her couch. The least she could do was let him stay until the cookies took toll.
They sat in the living room for close to an hour, but nothing happened - at least nothing in the way of sudden growths happened. But as Mona sat and made small-talk with her would-be suitor, she began to find herself surprisingly attracted to him. Don had a whimsical way of looking at the world around him that she found appealing, a bright counterpoint to the angry way that she typically viewed life. It was refreshing.
Mo was so charmed by Don's presence that she wasn't even bothered by the cookies' apparent failure. She must not have pronounced the incantation properly, she thought, as she finally gave in to the lure of her baked wares. They did taste particularly scrumptious, and before long she'd devoured almost half a plate's worth. "I'd better put these away," she said, wiping her fingers on her sweats, "before I eat them all." Smiling at her guest, she excused herself and stepped into the kitchenette.
When she returned, she discovered the cookies worked, after all.
There was Don, swollen to well over a quarter of a ton, crushing the cushions of her couch, a vast sphere of a man who made the sumo-sized weightlifter look svelte. Jenny had managed to climb onto his prominent front and was purring appreciatively, as he scratched her behind the right ear. The fat siamese rested between his shirt and specially tailored King-Size sport coat. "The cookies," she gasped, reeling in shock at the mountainous figure before her. How many had she eaten?
"No more thanks," Don answered. "I'm still full from lunch. Takes a while for me to digest anything." He rubbed a fat finger under the cat's jowls and looked up at Mona. "I'm glad to see that you're well, but I probably should be getting back to work"
"Don't go!" Mona cried, and in that moment of unabashed openness, her body gave way to the magical forces inside it.
She felt herself swell as layer upon layer of avoirdupois accumulated around her. With her growth, the bands of her sweatsuit lengthened to encircle her spreading torso. Mo stood in the center of her living room, as her belly stretched further in front of her, clenched hands separating by the force of her inflation. Before her, Don sat and looked up at her, waiting for her to finish her thought.
It was over so quickly that if she hadn't been dreading the moment, she might never have even noticed her transformation. She dwarfed Don now, looking down at him and knowing without even looking at herself that she was more than twice his weight. This was Guinness Book of World Records size, the ponderousness of men or women grown so massive that they couldn't even walk. Yet as she took a tentative step, her bulky bod quivering, she discovered that her life of exercise had paid off. She was mobile, as mobile as a woman her size could be in a studio apartment, anyway. She'd be slow, but Mona could get around, a half-ton-plus of waddling womanhood made that way by misdirected magic.
But the most amazing part of the whole package was this: Mona felt good about herself in a way that she never had before. She supposed it was one more characteristic of the magic which kept everyone else from even noticing their fantastic weight gain, but that didn't matter. What mattered was the fact that she felt great and that Don was looking at her with an appreciation that she never could acknowledge when she was merely plump.
"Yes?" the computer man finally said.
"You dropped your book yesterday," Mona said. Breathing heavily, she made her way to the closet and her coat. "I wanted to return it to you with your recipe card." As she lifted the coat, she got her first glimpse of herself in the closet mirror: the way her chins and cheeks creased as she moved her head, the beach ball breasts that hung to both sides of her swollen belly, her fat-ringed wrists and sagging upper arms. And she'd thought she was fat before!
"What recipe card?" Don asked, as she squeezed her way into the kitchenette, her belly shimmying beneath her sweatsuit, the hang of her belly swaying. She looked all over the counter (which was covered with at least three times the amount of cookies than she remembered baking), but she couldn't find the card. In her hand, Don's paperback was sporting a different title, Home Modeling for the Super-sized Couple.
"I must have been thinking of something else," she said sheepishly, handing Don back his book. In the interim, the computer man had switched seats to give Mona the couch; she'd clearly outgrown the rattan chair, which was crackling seriously under Don's new weight. "Looks like you've got some big plans," she said, indicating the book in his pudgy hands.
Don reddened noticeably. "Oh, I dream," he said. "My folks left me some money that I've never touched. When the time's right, I intend to use it building the right home for myself and the woman I love." As he said it, Mona knew without a shadow of a doubt that the woman he was talking about was her. The thought was more than sweet; it was damn sexy.
"It's a nice dream," she said, settling back in the couch. She felt herself surrounded by cushiony fat, had the urge to trace each roll and fold of her body.
"I need to get back to the office," Don said. "Maybe I could come by later?"
"Great," Mona said, already anticipating Don's return. "I'll fix dinner for us." She'd have to get some real groceries delivered: something good and meaty. "Would you do me a favor?"
Jenny was rubbing her roly-poly form against the cumbrous computer man's pant leg. "Sure," he said.
"I promised I'd drop off some cookies at my health club. It's on your way, if you'd be willing to do it."
"No problem."
"And why not take a plate to work?" she considered. "I think the folks at the office would enjoy some."
"I'm not so sure about that," Don replied. "Most of the folks in my department are pretty diet crazed. The company doctor was giving me grief about my weight just the other day, in fact."
"Bring 'em in, anyway," Mona said. "You'd be surprised at all the people who go for these cookies. Give a couple to the company doctor."
"Why not?" Don shrugged, pulling on his trench coat. Balancing three plates' worth of cookies, he smiled at Mona and backed out of the apartment. She thought of the cookies working their magic on her co-workers, and she smiled. The early feeling of bitterness that had so filled her life was gone. Now all she wanted was to share this feeling of fat happiness. With luck, there were enough cookies to leave in the lobby for her neighbors; when Don returned, she'd ask him to take a plate downstairs. If nothing else, it'd made the maintenance man less nasty when she called down to get her front door widened.
But for now she sat back, luxuriating in her size, dreaming about her future life with Don
in a community of fatness. . .
Revised version copyright (c) 1998 - Oakhaus Designs
