by Wilson Barbers
When she heard about the family, Sharon Prowller knew she'd found her ticket to the ultra-bigtime.
Said ticket came in the form of a letter sent to her teevee production company. Ms. P. was the star behind one of the nineties' biggest exercise/weight loss programs -- a syndicated series entitled No More Self-Hatred - but she was looking for something that would bring her out of syndication and into greater mass consciousness, something that would make her synonymous with Weight Loss That Worked. Tall and leanly muscular with a short-cropped punky white hairdo and strikingly assertive good looks, Sharon looked like something out of a futuristic Sly Stone movie. She knew this severity undermined her chance for success with mainstream America, but she had no desire to change her carefully wrought personality. What she wanted was a way to sell herself without compromising her image.
This family seemed to be the key, if they were indeed as described. A husband and wife who had both grown too big to leave their home -- it was a veritable p.r. bonanza. Look at all that Dick Gregory had done with one Walter Hudson; look at the good press Richard Simmons continued to get by barging into the lives of the super-obese? Here she had a lead on a housebound married couple untouched by the media; she'd be a fool if she didn't jump on it immediately.
She sent one of her people over to the letter's address and was baffled when they returned with nothing. They'd found the letter's author, alright, but now the guy wanted nothing to do with Sharon Prowller Enterprises.
"Got nuthin' to tell ya," Les Mannix said, when Sharon herself showed up at his office. "I must've been drunk when I wrote that letter; I wouldn't have sent it to ya sober."
That last was easy to believe, for Lester Mannix (of LesMan Investigators) was as seedy a specimen as you were likely to meet this side of a gangster flick. Unshaven and disheveled, with the red-eyed blurriness symptomatic of a night's hard drinking, Mannix was not the kind of man she'd ordinarily trust. If she'd come across him trying to sell the whereabouts of this fabulous couple, in fact, she'd have kicked his ass out the door. That he was trying to shove her out of his office had her thinking there was really something to the story.
"You want this couple to yourself, don't you?" she accused, prodding him back with a steely finger. "You've got someone else on the line, haven't you? Who is it? Gregory? Simmons?"
"N-n-nobody," the p.i. answered. "And if yer smart, you'll leave it at. These aren't yer usual talkshow geeks; this family is somp'n else!"
"You're drunk," Sharon decided.
"B'lieve what ya want," Mannix said, ducking and weaving to the other side of his desk. "But I know what I know no matter how soused I am! If you're smart, you'll stay away from 'em!"
"What? Two fatties unable to leave their own home?"
"Don't say I didn't warn ya," Mannix shrugged. He made a sudden dash for the door, and though she could've caught him, Sharon let him go. It made things easier.
She found the file she was looking for behind two bottles in his desk. Mannix had apparently been hired six months back to find a couple named Ira and Robin Garner; Ms. Garner had been the beneficiary of a nice inheritance, but the estate had been unable to contact either the wife or husband. Their last known address was over a year out-of-date; the husband had apparently quit his job without telling anyone what he planned to do next.
Mannix found 'em, though, and from his description in the files, it was obvious how they'd been spending their time. The couple had grown obese in the year and a half since their disappearance. While the p.i. had omitted any numerical guesses, he made it clear that they'd grown too big to budge from their new address. With rapid weight gain like this, that could be anywhere from 400 to 500 pounds! Not Walter Hudson range but still pretty impressive.
Who took care of them? she wondered. But that was the question you always asked when you heard about these housebound types. There usually was some codependent helper on the scene, typically a spouse or a parent, to foster their addiction. She'd deal with 'em when she got to the house; she was confident she could handle these bozos.
Taking the file, Sharon headed for her Grand Am and the address on the last page. She found it in one of the swankier neighborhoods, a two-story edifice that looked like a chateau. The gate was open, so she went right in.
The front door opened before she could even knock; they'd obviously seen her coming. Sharon sized the woman in the doorway up: mid-thirties, somewhere in the mid 200s, barefoot in a form-fitting sundress -- a cow but still too small to be Robin Garner. Sharon decided to get straight to the point.
"I'm here to help Ira and Robin," she announced. "I'm Sharon Prowller."
The fat woman blinked at Sharon, took a second to adjust her dress, then stepped aside to let her into the foyer. "I recognized you," she said. "Scanned past you one day on television. You say you want to help Ira and Robin? What makes you think they need it?"
"This file," Sharon told her, waving it under the woman's nose. "According to this, neither one of 'em is able to leave the house because they've grown too fat."
"'Too fat'?" the woman echoed, a trace of a smile on her plump lips. "How fat is that?"
"You tell me," Sharon answered. "Or better yet, maybe the Garners can tell me."
"Maybe they can," the fat woman said. "I'll let them speak for themselves." She led Sharon across the hall of the great building, which looked even bigger inside than it did outside. The house was simply, but sturdily furnished, and every person Sharon saw looked like they required their furnishings well built. They passed a pair of sleepy-looking women seated in a matching set of loveseats, both of them wide enough to fill each sofa, a large bowl of Tootsie Rolls between them, two waste cans brimming with wrappers. Looked like all that anyone did in this joint was laze about and eat!
"My twin sisters," the fat woman said. "They've been serving the Garners this week, so naturally they look a bit tired. Takes a lot of effort to keep those two full!"
Before Sharon could respond to that last, they arrived at a pair of French doors. The fat woman pushed them open, not looking to see if Sharon was behind her, and loudly shouted out, "Hey, you two! Got someone who wants to meet ya!"
"Really . . .Jenna?" a deep feminine voice puffed. "How . . . intriguing!"
And then Sharon got her first look at the Garners.
That first was insufficient to take them in. All she could manage was the impression of quivering pink flesh, of yards of lightweight green fabric, of massiveness so overwhelming that you had to step back to get a grip on the two people swimming within it. This was fatness beyond anything she'd ever seen, like something out of her most surreal nightmare.
The woman was closest, so Sharon focused on her first. Seated on a two-foot-high platform three yards wide, she came close to spilling over both sides. She was wearing an open robe that covered her breasts and little else in front, though even here it took more cloth per mam than it would to cover two Sharons. To get to both breasts, you had to look past her paunch, no mean feat in itself. It hung past her platform, flattened on the floor and rose to Sharon's eye level. Somewhere beneath or behind it were the woman's feet, but they weren't immediately apparent; her hips managed to swell past her front's greatest width, though.
Both her arms rested at a rising angle by her sides, uncovered, incapable of going any lower. Her upper arms were so fleshy they'd grown indistinguishable from her bulging shoulders; they surged over her massive forearms several inches past the elbows. Her lower arms similarly came close to swallowing her palms. Within reach of her right hand was an all-purpose remote; she used it to mute the big screen set on the upper wall.
It made sense that the teevee set was raised so high. Looking straight at her, Sharon could only get a glimpse of the woman's face between her humongous mams. A flash of chins piled on top of each other like rings on a Playskool toy. A tip of pugged nose. Two bulbous cheeks that hid her eyes. The only way you got a good glimpse of her woman's face was in the reflecting ceiling. Her features looked even tinier framed by so much fat, yet they were lively and even girlish. The swell of her chins pushed her head back, and her ears flared out against the back of her neck. Though her eyes were forced to squint, they gleamed mischievously. Her blubbery lips -- incredibly -- were smiling.
Her rear spread back almost as far as her forefront. Covered by her verdant robe, it looked like a breathing hill. Her whole body spread to a width that surpassed her standing height by at least a yard - if she could stand, that is.
Her husband was equally vast, though more of his weight rested on the lower half of his torso. If he was wearing anything, Sharon couldn't see it. His face was more accessible, clean-shaven with jowls that shifted like his great draping paunch. He was placidly sipping on a two-liter bottle of Cherry Coke as she eyed him up and down.
"Interesting . . . haircut," Robin Garner panted. "Thought of . . . something . . . like it once . . . but I like . . . to let . . . my hair grow."
"Along with . . . everything else," her husband said, chuckling around his straw. Robin tilted her head in his direction and smiled lovingly, then she focused back on their visitor.
"That's why I'm here," Sharon announced. "Perhaps you recognize me from teevee. I can help the two of you lose weight." She moved closer between them to give them both a better view of her muscular physique, took off her jacket to show off her spandex clad body. Over her head a teevee chef was showing off his recipe for double dark chocolate chip cookies.
"Lose weight?" Robin said, sounding genuinely puzzled. "Why'd I . . . want that?"
The response left Sharon flabbergasted. "What're you talking about?" she shouted. "You've grown too big to walk, for Christ's sake! Don't you want to be able to get around again? Lead active, healthy lives!"
"What are . . . you talking . . . about?" Ira Garner asked, dropping his drained liter bottle to the floor. "We're active." He brandished his arm-length straw and aimed it at Sharon. "We eat . . . and grow . . . fat . . . and healthy."
"Healthy?" Sharon sputtered. "This is obscene! How can you talk like this?"
"It's how they live," a new voice behind her said, and Sharon turned to see a cleaned-up Lester Mannix standing with his arm on Jenna's shoulder. "They don't recall any other life, and they love the lives they've got together. Makes ya kinda envious when ya think about it."
"Envious? Not fuckin' likely!"
"Maybe not you," Mannix agreed. "But when I met Jenna and the Garners, I knew I'd stumbled onto somp'n special!" He leaned over Jenna's left shoulder and kissed her on the cheek. "And Jenna, incredibly, saw somp'n in me! I've been living in the house with her the past three months, and let me tell ya, the Garners here are not the family's fattest recipients!"
Behind the p.i. and his fat lover, the twin sisters were entering the room, pushing two wheeled carts stacked with buffet casserole trays. The scent of lasagna filled the room.
"Recipients?" Sharon asked.
"Jenna and the rest of her family have the ability to share their weight with others," Mannix explained. "It's some form of genetic mutation. Ira and Robin were their last lucky recipients. As Jenna's new husband, I get to be another!" He patted a twin on the rump, as she reentered the room with her second cart.
"Husband?" Sharon echoed.
"Cleans up well, doesn't he?" Jenna said. "The problem is with him here, we needed a female recipient - and none of the boys were old enough to consider getting serious yet."
"This is unreal," Sharon said, which was when she noticed that the hall outside the room had grown full of folks. Every one of them were fat, and they all were smiling at her.
"Guests. . . for dinner," Robin panted, as the sisters arranged two rows of carts before them. Then to her surprise, the first of Jenna's sisters popped up in front of Sharon and touched her lips with two fingers.
"Works quicker when there's actual physical contact," she explained, backing off, her belly the last part to still have contact with Sharon. Before she could say anything, Sharon was hit by a wave of hunger so overwhelming that there was nothing to do but try to assuage it.
Someone rolled a chair up to the first wheeled tray, and she quickly dug in. First buffet tray was pasta salad with sour cream and chunks of cheddar cheese. It was scraped clean in a matter of minutes. She'd never tasted anything so heavenly in her life!
As she dug into her meal, lost in the sensation of eating, her body started to fill out. Her muscular definition was quickly smoothed over; her breasts started to grow, her hips to widen. By the time she'd finished her second tray (three-bean salad in a creamy sauce), she was near 190 pounds. Her figure had grown into an hourglass 42-32-42; her face had lost its gauntly fearsome look. Even her hair had started to grow out.
Two trays down, Jenna's sisters were filling up the Garners' second plates. They fed the weight-stranded couple, as Sharon continued to binge. Off to the side, Jenna and her boyfriend watched her progress. Then Les gave his bride a kiss, walked over to the doorway and prepared to receive what the men in the family had to give him. Soon he was seated at the second row of trays, happily eating his way into husbandly obesity.
Into her fourth tray, Sharon had a flash of what was happening to her. She'd grown as big as Jenna, with an hourglass close to 45-38-46. Her belly shelved over her vulva and had developed single creases on both sides; her butt had widened past both edges of her seat. Her hair had grown long enough to curl womanishly. What had they done to her?
When she looked up and saw Jenna grinning at her, she almost went for the fat bitch. But before she could translate thought into action, the second twin stepped between them and blew a kiss Sharon's way. She quickly redoubled her efforts on her buffet trays.
By the time she'd made her way through two trays of main course (lasagna and tortellini with meatballs), Sharon was up to 300 pounds. Her 45-inch breasts had upped two letters, while her once smaller waist had grown past 52. Her spandex pants had slipped under her belly hang; her upper paunch was textured with an array of lightly colored stretchmarks. Her hips had grown even wider than the rest of her.
"Too bad the whole family's not here," Jenna was telling her. "We don't usually meet as a family this soon after bringing in a couple like the Garners. But sometimes love can change your well-planned schedules." She walked over to her husband, who was working his way into his third tray. "Les was miserable in his old life," she said, patting his paunch affectionately. "He'd grown cynical and was on the verge of becoming an alcoholic. When we met, it was like something magic and wonderful. For both of us.
"Now we'll grow together," she concluded. She leaned over to kiss her husband as he crammed his mouth full of spaghetti salad. She backed off, swallowed several noodles, and pulled up a chair opposite him. "What's yours is mine," she intoned, as she started working to keep up with him.
Behind all three, the rest of the family had entered the room. They brought more carts and stayed with the growing trio until they'd given them as much as they could.
When Jenna rose from her last canolli, she let out a satisfied belch. She wasn't the first family member to marry an outsider, but she was the first to fully merge in some time. Their physiological legacy was a strong one - as most mutations had to be - and already it was taking hold of Lester's body. In time, he'd be able to give just like the rest of the family.
She smiled at her husband, as he settled back in his reinforced chair. He weighed in the area of 600 pounds, with a waist close to seventy inches. As he loosened his belt, he gave her a puzzled look and said, "I can still remember what's up. I thought it didn't work that way."
"You're family now," Jenna told him. "Not blood, but family just the same. There was no need to do any tampering there."
"And you've got half of my extra weight," the p.i. marveled. "I didn't think men and women were compatible."
"They are when you're in love. We've merged as man and wife - which binds us in a way few married couples will know," Jenna assured him, and she slowly rose to give him a full view of her 800-plus pound body. Her sundress had risen as her body widened, lifting past the lower hang of her eighty-five inch belly, showing off her triply bulging calves. Her legs were fully spread to support her size, and her inner legs hung and swayed towards the floor. Her upper arms were each close to forty inches in width; her breasts were almost lost atop her fabulous paunch. She looked even lovelier than he could have imagined. Hefting himself off his seat, he embraced his supersized wife, great bellies mashing against each other. In the doorway, their much reduced family members applauded. Ira and Robin intertwined their neighboring hands and sighed romantically.
The scene might have lasted but for Sharon Prowller. At the end of her last tray, she too was coming down from her binge. Clattering her forks against her empty tray, the former fitness guru would have been appalled to see herself - if she had any memory of the way she'd once lived. With no one to share either food or weight with, she'd added close to twice the weight of either Les or Jenna.
Seated, her belly came close to resting on her shoes, spreading her legs to their maximum to make way for it. While her breasts had passed 130 inches, they still appeared small in comparison to her paunch, which was vast enough to keep her hands from ever meeting each other again. Her head was pearlike with her chins widening to spread against her upper chest, and if her hair had remained short, the effect might've been unfortunate. But with it grown out to its natural color, shoulder-length and curly, her jowls were framed quite nicely. Her spandex outfit looked like a translucent set of skintight bicycle shorts and tube top, revealing most of her blubbery majesty. Her calves had segmented into four bulges, the lowest covering her ankles.
"Where am I?" Sharon asked, running her fingers through her hair, her upper arms shifting in answer to the call of gravity. At their widest, her bulging arms exceeded the capacity of the average measuring tape.
"Home," said Jenna, "and almost in time for dinner."
"Good," the new Sharon decided. "I'm famished."
It took four of the men in the family to help her to her feet and slowly walk her out of the room. "We'd like you to make a couple phone calls first," one of them said as he edged his shoulder into the crook of her upper arm.
"Fine by me," the former fitness guru panted, as she made her first swaying step, her body jiggling all around her. "Long as I get something to eat!" She really did feel famished.
"So," Les asked his wife once she'd left the room, "when does the rest of your family return home?"
"They'll be back for the holidays," she told him, "but let's not talk about that now. I wanna spend some time getting to know your new body. And mine. Haven't been this big in a long time, so I might as well enjoy it until the rest of the family gets back." With that, they both waddled out of the room and off to dinner.
Ira and Robin watched them go, then turned the mute off the television. It'd be a few minutes before the sisters returned with their dinners, but it wouldn't be too soon for either of them. With all the focus on their guests, the Garners had gotten somewhat shortchanged in their last meal.
Still, what they'd seen had been pretty interesting.
Ira said as much to his wife. "You see," he gasped, "how the . . . family members . . . shrunk?" He paused, then pursued his alien thought. "You think . . . we could . . . do it?"
"You sound . . . as crazy . . . as that . . . skinny girl," Robin said. "Why'd we . . . want to?"
"Damned if . . . I know," he decided, and he turned his attention back to the television. Their mouths watered at the sight of the gourmet meals on the screen.
Sharon Prowller called her office and her bank and severed her ties with a life she no longer remembered. Led to her own bedroom, she gratefully collapsed onto her bed; her entire body was covered with sweat from the exertion of walking. They sponged her down with witch hazel as she happily picked her way through a five pound box of Fannie Mays.
And so Sharon Prowller settled into the life that she'd tried to change for Ira and Robin Garner. She seldom got up from her adjustable bed, content to lie back, eat and grow larger as the family served her. It was almost as if the old assertiveness that had fostered her TV success had evolved into near constant appetite. Where other recipients knew short periods of restiveness between their hunger, Sharon didn't. Fortunately, two of the younger male family members were eager to cater to her needs.
Her belly rose to a height even taller than she'd been standing; with the rest of her grown so fat, it seemed like almost every additional pound was now accumulating onto her paunch. She'd lie with her bed at a forty-five degree angle, legs pried apart by a bulging underbelly that drooped to mid-calf, her arms squeezed into limited movement by her settling breasts and spreading backside. Her torso grew huge and spherical; her limbs were like protruding afterthoughts. Beneath her sagging calves, her feet were barely distinguishable; only her crowded toes and heels were immediately identifiable. As for her trademark face, it was unrecognizable. Her eyes were nearly Oriental looking due to the rise of her cheeks; her broad chins took up more space than the rest of her facial features combined. Her severe looks were replaced by ballooning femininity.
She didn't get up much and rarely needed to: like all the other recipients, her body had grown healthy in the process of receiving, attuned to endomorphic extremes. When the holidays came, Jenna and the rest of her sisters gave all they could to her. Sharon barely noticed when she passed the 2000-pound mark.
The former fitness guru had become the very antithesis of all she'd once held dear. And in doing so found both tranquility and satisfaction that she'd never before known. She grew close to the family and lived the rest of her life in a world of bounty and comfort.
Sometimes, it's better to receive than give.
Revised version copyright © 2000 - Oakhaus Designs