By Wilson Barbers
Illustrated by BeakerFA
(Click each graphic to super-size it!)
They tell a lot of stories at the clubs and restaurants where devotees of Fast Majicke gather. The mega-sized women and men who frequent such establishments are big believers in the oral tradition. And, besides, when most of your evenings are spent dining in the company of others, storytelling helps pass the time between main courses.
One of the newest tales currently circulating concerns a nascent fat admirer named Nathan and a plus-sized wizardess called Felicia. A short (5'2”) round brunette who worked alongside Nathan at Mass-Mart, Felicia'd been waiting for her co-worker to step forward and declare his interest for over six months. She knew he was drawn to her, had seen him furtively watching her walk the aisles; she'd likewise watched him surreptitiously ogle other plus-sized women who'd entered the store. (Like many megalo-stores, M-Mart had a good-sized section devoted to affordable BBW fashion.) But Nathan was still too uncomfortable with his preference to openly acknowledge it.
Our hero - it should be charitably noted - was an idiot. For Felicia fit the sobriquet Big Beautiful Woman without straining either adjective. She had a spherical pixy face that made her look younger than her twenty-four years and a womanly lushness that was perfectly proportioned to her 300-plus pound body. In addition to this, she was a genuinely lovely person.
She was not, happily, a woman willing to wait forever for Nathan to get it together by himself. Delving deep into her personal library of spells and glamors, the young sorceress found a means of enchanting her not-yet-boyfriend that'd work to both their benefits. She saved it for a Saturday, since she needed the store at its most crowded to maximize the spell's full effectiveness.
They both arrived at seven a.m., an hour before the weekend shoppers began to arrive in earnest, meeting as they often did at the in-store bakery for coffee and some miniature Danishes. Nathan was two years younger than Felicia and still had an adolescent air about him. In his M-Mart vest and cotton gray dress slacks he managed to look like a first week trainee - even though he'd clocked in over four years of retail experience.
"Have a fun Friday?" Felicia asked, as she finished her first cheese Danish, though she knew the answer to that 'un already. Too shy to do the singles scene, Nathan had spent the evening at home, watching Shallow Hal on DVD and slo-moing all the scenes with a full-sized Rosemary.
"Nuthin' special," Nathan admitted, mentally admiring the way his co-worker's forefront forced her bright green vest back. "Caught some teevee, did some web-surfing." Nathan's Internet experience was primarily limited to the occasional plus-size fashion site; he had not yet summoned the nerve to even test the size acceptance sites. It was almost as if he were afraid the pictures on the monitor would come alive and shout accusingly, "I know what you like!"
"Did some reading myself," Felicia told him, and she smiled as she watched his hazel eyes do their usual dance between looking at her full-faced and averting his gaze. One advantage of the young man's reluctance to look at her openly for too long: it made it easier for her to slip the necessary charm into his vest pocket.
"New J.K. Rowling book's out next week," Nathan noted. They'd first met in Books where he'd been flipping through a trade edition of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
"I don't know," Felicia responded, taking up a discussion they'd begun at the time. "I've read the books, but they always seem to make magic seem so mundane. The whole idea of a school for wizards; it's kind of like expecting to come across a magician or sorceress working in Mass-Mart!"
"Perhaps a sorceress'd be able to balance the register at the end of her shift!" Nathan grinned. With that, they rose to head for the Electronics Department on the west side of the store. Felicia had Nathan primed, but she held off speaking her incantation until late morning, when the outside parking lot was nearly at maximum capacity.
"Could you get some more change from Customer Service?" she finally asked Nathan, who was straightening out a bin of bargain DVDs. He smiled agreeably. Customer Service was on the opposite end of the store, with women's clothes along the way. "I'll finish here," she said, as he grabbed three twenties from her. Soon as he was out of earshot, she muttered four short words.
(At this point in the telling, at least one of the diners in attendance will typically interrupt the narrator. "I've heard this tale before," they say between large spoonings of lime sorbet. "Every woman Nathan comes across suddenly grows magically fat. Pretty soon he's so surrounded by gorgeous fat women that it changes his point-of-view forever. End of story."
(Wrong, the storyteller, tells them. That wasn't the purpose behind Felicia's spell. Here's a guy who seemed perfectly content to sit back and watch the fat world go by. Why make things easier on him by placing more BBWs within his vicinity? No, Felicia's spell was designed to expose the negative effects of Nathan's silence, not complicitly reward it.)
And so our hero started his trek across the super-store. When he got to the edge of Women's Clothes, Nathan ventured off the main path and walked through the display racks. His ultimate goal: Plus-Sizes.
Felicia had chosen a prime day for her life-transforming spell. Wednesday's Mass-Mart circular had advertised a large clearance sale in Plus-Sizes, starting that Saturday. There were plenty of examples of fulsome womanhood for Nathan to eyeball.
But before he reached the BBW's section, he passed a family of three - husband, wife and gurgling infant - on their way to Baby Furniture. The woman was a youngish blond who appeared to have gained about twenty-five extra pounds through the course of her pregnancy. It showed in her belly, hips and thighs, which were structurally assaulting her pre-pregnancy jeans.
Nathan smiled at the threesome amiably, and when they passed, he stopped to take a quick look at the woman's dimpled backside. Very pretty, he thought, and he swiveled back toward his original destination. As he did, the woman's thighs began to lessen in size; her rear and paunch grew less emphatic. For the first time since she'd discarded her pregnancy clothes, the young woman felt comfortable in her old jeans.
Nathan missed this change, however. Slipping between a rack of swimsuits and sweatpants, he was too busy checking out two teenaged girls. Both were average size and wore the requisite navel-baring tops, which meant they each also displayed a noticeable bit of midriff bulge. What do their mothers think about this? Nathan couldn't help wondering, as he grabbed his quick mental snapshots. But between the second and third glimpse, something astounding occurred: both girls' torsos flattened, their teengirl babyfat seemingly melting away in an instant.
Nathan paused to rub his eyes. The two were still obliviously chattering away, holding up one-piece swimsuits that covered their fronts and hid their diminished frames.
Vaguely unsettled and backing away from this mysterious transformation, he suddenly felt the corner of a shopping cart nudge against his side. "Oh, I'm sorry," a sweet voice apologized.
"It's my fault, I wasn't looking where I was go - " Nathan began as he looked toward the owner of the cart. She was, Nathan saw, a matronly black woman in her forties, apple-shaped and full-breasted, somewhere in the range of 450 pounds. She was wearing a brightly colored sleeveless cotton dress that he knew hadn't been sold at M-Mart, using her shopping cart to help her walk the Mass-Mart acreage. Trailing behind, two young teens who could only be the woman's daughters - they each passed 275 in the weight department - were politely viewing the proceedings.
He cast his eyes toward the cart; it was packed with sales clothes, probably for the woman's daughters since even the Mass-Mart Plus-Size selection didn't go as high as her. "Young man, you okay?" the woman asked, and he nervously smiled back to reassure her. She was not, he suddenly saw, the same woman who'd bumped into him.
Standing behind the cart stood a slender fortyish black woman in a cool cotton dress that showed off her lithe frame. Behind her, the woman's two slim daughters were suspiciously eyeing him as if to warn, "Better keep away from our mama!"
"I'm okay," he managed to mutter, "just was a little startled, is all."
The woman nodded and went on her way. All the clothes in her cart, he noticed, had been replaced by smaller replicas. But because they weren't on sale this weekend, there were only half as many.
What the hell just happened here? In the blink of an eye, the woman had shed 300 pounds or more from her body, while her daughters had each dropped 150 pounds apiece. Had he imagined it? He'd been heading for the BBW's section: since he was mentally expecting to see some plus-sized babes, perhaps his brain had temporarily placed some kind of visual overlay on these women. Or maybe his eyes were simply going?
Unnerved, Nathan quickly hustled over to the Plus-Size Department, eager to replace this disturbing moment with a look at some true BBWs.
(Around about this time, some diner - or their FA lover - is apt to grouse out loud: "Fat Magic is all about abundance; sounds like you're describing a spell that's taking away this great gift. What's the point?" To which one of the cannier diners replies from their table, "Just wait for it.")
Nathan's hopes for a well-packed Plus-Size section were met. Throughout the racks, close to a dozen women - ranging in size from fourteen to twenty-eight - were happily rummaging the racks for something they liked in their size. It was a visual feast for any male fat admirer, and Nathan happily indulged.
He watched a bottom-heavy redhead bend over to reach the largest sized panties in the lowest possible row, then he moved onto a woman nearly as large as Felicia who was checking out sundresses. When a plump belle in culottes caught him gazing at her belly, he quickly looked aside - and, with that one move, every fat woman within eyeshot was transformed.
They now, Nathan saw, were all model-thin. To a woman, they shuffled away from the plus-sized section, distastefully looking at the displays as if it were unimaginable that they could ever be like that. A few flashed him unpleasant looks in passing that said, "What are you gawking at, Buster?"
It was strange; it was disorienting. Maybe I should just go home, Nathan thought, until whatever this is just passes. Then he recalled the trio of twenties in his vest pocket. He bee-lined for the Customer Service counter, running into to three additional plump-then-emaciated women along the way. Behind the counter, a super-sized woman named Bev oversaw the office safe.
When he got to the desk, a quartet of well-fed customers stood in line ahead of him. Jeez, he thought resentfully, you'd think that every fat person within fifty miles had driven to Mass-Mart. When the closest woman present - a zaftig blond with close-cropped hair - dropped in size, he quickly turned and fled, leaving both the bills and Felicia's charm in his vest.
But the parking lot, too, had more than one ample eyeful: a voluptuous coed in a form-fitting tee-shirt and skirt, a waddling mother in a pair of pink sweatpants that accentuated her pendulous paunch, a round-faced Hispanic woman of indeterminate age. The lot was so crowded it took ten minutes to get to the street, and each minute brought another full-sized femme into view. If he were asked to ballpark, Nathan would have guessed at least six-hundred pounds of womanhood disappeared in the parking lot that day. Somehow, he realized, he was making all these women lose weight, whether they wanted it or not.
He sped back to his apartment, and would've made it without running into any more big woman had he not hit an intersection by a city bus stop. There, seated on a bench was a woman with a belly that hung past her knees and halfway down her huge calves. She was reading a BBW magazine that morphed into a more generic fashion mag once she, too, was transformed.
In panic, Nathan floored the gas and ran the light, now desperate to get home. Once he was in his first floor apartment, he zipped into the bedroom and collapsed onto bed. Away from so much scarily shifting reality, he was able to consider what'd been going on around him. Somehow, horribly, every gal he considered attractive was losing that attractiveness right in front of him. Absently, he felt the bills in his vest pocket - and the charm alongside them.
What's this? Pulling out the bills, a small hard figure had fallen onto the bedspread. He quickly held it to the light: it was made of a milky translucent stone and appeared to be a round primitive female figure. As he held it in his palm, the stone shrank, and its form turned pole thin.
"Where the heck did this come from?" he wondered out loud, and a voice from the bedroom doorway gave him the answer.
"I gave it to you," Felicia answered, standing there with an amused expression on her face. (Had he locked the apartment door behind him? Nathan couldn't remember.) She'd changed out of her workclothes, he saw, and was wearing an overlarge navy blue housedress that buttoned all the way down the front. "The sorceress from Mass-Mart."
Nathan looked her up and down - in that moment, she'd never been more beautiful, and as he realized this, he felt a sharp twinge of horror. Avert your eyes, fool! he warned himself. Or you'll change her forever!
"What's wrong?" Felicia asked, working to keep a straight face as he yelped and hid his face in a pillow.
"You," Nathan gasped. "I can't look at you! You're so lovely, and I can't even look at you!"
He felt her pudgy hands on his, prying the pillow from his grip and cupping his chin so he'd look her way.
"You think I'm lovely?" she asked. Her round face glowed with a happiness that made her look even lovelier.
"Yes, I do," he responded, and with that simple declaration a surprising sense of relief washed across him. Why hadn't he told her this before? "I've been thinking this ever since I first saw you. I should've said so sooner."
"Say it now," Felicia advised him. "Again."
Something in her voice made all his fears vanish. Lowering the pillow, he looked at this fulsome BBW and said, "You're beautiful, Felicia, and a wonderful woman as well. I've been watching you for months, never getting up the nerve to tell you. But I'd love to get to know you better."
"That's easily done," she told him, and with that statement Nathan realized the super-sized beauty had remained unchanged. She leaned across the bed to kiss him, sending currents of excitement through him as she did. I've been such an idiot, he thought, waiting so long to kiss her. "Now, come on," she said once they'd separated. "You need to get back to work."
"But the charm," he protested, holding up the slender goddess figurine. "How do I keep it from wreaking further havoc?"
"You already ended that part of the spell," she told him. "It was primed to work as long as you kept denying your own desires, as long as you kept your appreciation of women like me hidden." She took the stone from him, then stepped out of the somewhat bedroom. "You have no idea how much even an open admiring glance can be appreciated by women who've spent most of their lives being told they're fat-&-ugly," she explained. "Every time you denied them even this small experience, you helped diminish them.
"But in speaking out what you've always felt, this reduction ceases. It's as simple as that."
"And the women who changed? What about them?" Nathan asked, as he followed her into the living room.
"Those who were happy with their lives, who were meant to be the size they were, are back to their former selves - with no memory of a different experience. The others? Well, thinness is no guarantee of personal happiness, but at least they'll get to experience it for a time." She paused and then quietly requested, "Hug me, Nathan, while you still can get your arms around me."
"What are you talking about?" he said, as he complied, feeling her soft round body press against him.
"Last part of the spell," she explained. "Just keep on holding." She kissed him a second time, squeezing the goddess talisman into her hand. Nathan felt his new girlfriend start to grow between his arms.
It first became apparent on her forefront, as her breasts and belly started thrusting against him more firmly, then on her upper arms, which grew fuller and softer. Puzzled, Nathan looked into Felicia's eyes; they sparkled with amusement. Her already round cheeks bulged more insistently, and her chins were drooping further down her neck.
"What's going on?" he gasped, but Felicia was too lost in the experience to be able to instantly answer. She grew fatter by the second within her dress, which no longer looked loose on her. Her belly pushed further forward and began to hang lower and lower toward the floor; her breasts kept up with its growth. She raised her massive arms to allow him to still hold onto her, and he felt her backside similarly grow beyond his grasp. Smiling, she stretched her arms and in an instant grew two hundred pounds fatter, shoving Nathan to the floor as she did.
Scooting back, he sat and watched her enlarge at a slower rate. The swelling sorceress unbuttoned her maxed-out dress, revealing a white bikini top and turquoise exercise shorts that had somehow managed to keep up with her phenomenal expansion. She was three times her old weight, a puffed-up reiteration of everything he'd memorized about her looks. Her double chin had quadrupled; her belly had developed dual dropping bulges; both her rear and back upper thighs were also starting to follow the dictates of gravity.
She's gaining all the missing weight, Nathan realized, the weight that isn't returning to the women I changed. And as she continued to reap the rewards of her Fat Magic spell, Nathan wondered just how much poundage that would be. By his guesstimate, she'd already added more than six hundred pounds to her body. How much weight was still unaccounted for?
Quite a lot, as it turned out. For when the spell abated, and Felicia had claimed all there was to gain, she'd ballooned to six times her former weight.
She stood provocatively before him - and when you thought about it, just the act of standing had to involve some heavy mojo - somewhere in the realm of 1850-pounds, a mega-sized version of her former self. The new Felicia was nearly as wide as her outstretched arms could reach; if it weren't for her more malleable breasts, she probably wouldn't have been able to even move her arms forward. Her belly thrust four feet ahead of her, nearly touching the floor, and while her shorts had somewhat kept up with its enlargement, only a couple of inches of it managed to cover her front. Between it and her breasts was a yawning outstretch of pale jiggling paunchfat that quivered with every deep breath she took. From behind both sides of her massive belly apron, you could see her widened hips and the deep folds where her rear and thighs met each other. At some point she'd kicked off her shoes; her fat feet were barely visible in the shifting gap 'tween paunch and carpet.
"What d'ya think?" Felicia asked the stunned Nathan, and though he never would have guessed he had it in him, he found himself even more entranced by the massive beauty. And while he wouldn't have been capable of doing it a day before, he immediately spoke what was on his mind.
"You look stunning," he said, and he'd never spoken truer words.
"Glad you think so," Felicia grinned. "Just remember this," and she gestured to indicate her mountainous body, quivering with the demonstration, "when you're back at the store. I can't return for obvious reasons, but I told Bev you'd be coming back."
"You did?"
"Yup." She gently lowered herself onto the living room couch, taking up all but an inch space between the arms. Her lower belly popped out of her shorts to settle on the floor. "If you don't, the register won't balance," she giggled. "Besides, somebody's got to bring home the bacon." She drum-rolled her fingers against her wide sides for emphasis. "And I've grown to like a lot of bacon."
Nathan tentatively moved forward to initiate his first kiss. Felicia pulled him down into her cushiony body. She felt so soft and sensual, so erotic and exciting, that it was a struggle for him to get back up and go to work. "I'll still be here," she told him, "don't worry about that. I'm not going anywhere." She pointed toward the apartment's entrance and said half-teasingly, "Gonna take some work getting me through the front door."
Felicia was engaging in a mild deception, of course. Her command of Fat Magic rendered such seeming obstacles meaningless: with her growth had come new power that made her mistress of much on the material plane. But she wouldn't reveal that little detail to Nathan yet. There's only so much info an initiate can take on the first day, she knew - even if he has read the full Harry Potter oeuvre.
She watched her boyfriend reluctantly take his leave, then mentally reached for the phone by the couch to call her friend, Bev. It was Bev who'd told her about Nathan, Bev who'd gotten Felicia the job to work alongside him. The manager had been married to a mega-sized warlock for over twenty years and was very attuned to the presence of neophyte fat admirers.
"Finally finished," Felicia told the Mass-Mart manager. "Nathan's on his way back to the store."
"So how's it feel?" Bev asked. In the background, you could hear the sounds of the crowded superstore. She wouldn't miss it much, Felicia thought. "Is it all that you hoped?"
(At this point, the storyteller frequently stops to let his audience answer that question for Felicia. "Of course it is," some mountainous gourmandizer will shout, patting their well-fed self proudly. And the rest of the banquet room will chorus their agreement.)
"Starting to get a mite peckish, though," Felicia concluded (looking down at her spreading forefront with much the same sense of pride that our storyteller's audience will display.) "You got my order ready?"
"Sure do," Bev told her. "Same lunch my Theo's been eating for years. Should tide you over 'til your boyfriend returns." Flicking on the intercom, she called to one of the boys in Grocery. A five bag load of roasted chicken, cheese and cold cuts plus a variety of salad tubs had already been placed into the boy's beat-up Toyota. Bev handed him a twenty and said, "There's an extra twenty for you if you make it in under fifteen minutes." When he arrived at Nathan's apartment, Bev knew, he'd only see the Felicia he'd always seen. He'd never stop to ask why she refused to get off the couch.
Which is where our story concludes.
Nathan returned to his apartment that night to find a well-fed Felicia finishing off her last tub of pasta salad. "See you've been busy," he said, surveying the empty plastic cartons and sandwich bags that were neatly piled in their delivery boxes. Though he had no way of knowing for sure, it almost looked like she'd grown even fatter over the afternoon. "You still hungry?"
"More for you than any food," Felicia answered, and with that our storyteller discreetly ends his narration.
Sometimes (though not always), one of the listening diners asks what became of the young couple. In answer to that query: Felicia left her job to devote her time to at-home studies, but any gap in salary this might've created was quickly corrected by Nathan's promotion to a night management position. The two married soon afterwards, in a private ceremony attended primarily by Felicia's practicing acquaintances. To this day, they're a happily married couple. And, yes, Felicia continues to grow larger - not through magic, just through eating.
Nathan became a far less enclosed man than he used to be. He was even known, at times, to tender a compliment to some of his fuller-sized female co-workers. And when he happened upon a certain super-sized patron and her two fat daughters one day, the Mass-Mart manager made a point on complimenting her outfit. The smile all three gave him for this inoffensive act of observation made the rest of his workday.
They tell a lot of stories at the clubs and restaurants where devotees of Fast Majicke gather. All of them are true, and most of them have happy endings. Which is as it should be: who, after all, wants to hear a tragedy at the dinner table?
Would that the rest of the world worked so neatly. But if it did, there probably wouldn't be any need for magic - fat or otherwise - would there?
