HUNGER
Lisa took the volume, wiped a strand of hair from her glasses and read its title. In gold-embossed letters were the words, Fast Majicke. She'd been studying American Wiccans for her doctoral dissertation and had read repeated references to this book. But she'd never seen a copy 'til now.
"Hear there's a school of white witches that live by this li'l tome," he said. "Want to understand the core of their magical beliefs, this is s'posed to be the book!"
She flipped through Stu's gift; the pages were thick, as if they'd spent the last ten years boxed in someone's damp basement. There was a faint whiff of mildew, but as an inveterate bibliophile, Lisa was undeterred by it.
"You're right," she agreed, lifting her eyes from the pages long enough to smile at her lover. "Probably wouldn't have paid any attention to you if you'd shown me this last night. Or to the luscious meal you made." The latter was a regular joking theme in their life - she sometimes got so involved in her studies that she entirely overlooked dinner.
This could be seen in her slender waifish build. Tall with straight blond hair, she looked like a singer from a soft rock music video: a thoughtful girl/woman with thin arms, wide bespectacled eyes and an overbite. Look at her and you expected to see her holding an acoustic guitar, singing dewily into the video camera.
"Well, you've got all day now to dive right into it," Stu smiled. "Just don't forget to eat. Bought the fixin's for sandwiches yesterday; it's all in the fridge."
"Yes, dear," she grinned, as her fiancé bent over to kiss her. She'd opened the book to something called a "Transmogrification Mantra." What the heck is that? she wondered, barely hearing Stu as he walked out the door of their apartment. Lisa read the words through once, then a second time. They had, she thought, an interesting cadence. She spoke the words aloud. . .
. . .then bent down to fire up her computer. While she watched the monitor run through its opening routine, she began to feel uncharacteristically peckish. Neither she nor Stu typically did much in the way of breakfast. But there was nothing wrong with putting together a sandwich or two, she decided.
Dropping Stu's thoughtful present on a nearby coffee table, Lisa walked into the kitchen to slap together a Dagwood. Stu hadn't been kidding when he said he'd bought "all the fixin's" for a good sandwich: the drawer was stuffed with cheese and cold cuts. She quickly pulled a slice from each package and built a towering sandwich.
As she bit into it, a wave of unbelievable ecstasy coursed through her body, so powerful it seemed to illuminate the entire kitchen. This is wonderful, Lisa thought. She stood over the sink, sandwich dropping bits of lettuce and tomato onto the porcelain surface, and quickly took a second - then a third - big bite. Halfway into her sandwich, she grabbed a gallon of two-percent milk and a bag of Fat-Free chips and alternated between them and her Dagwood.
This did not, surprisingly, assuage her unusual morning hunger.
Finishing her sandwich like it was a cheese and crackers snack, Lisa returned to the Frigidaire to make a second. She used everything remotely sandwich on this second helping - a loaf of sweet Italian bread, pounds of cheese and cold-cuts, two tomatoes and at least a cup of mayo to start with - then sat on a stool by the sink. Midpoint into her mega-Dagwood, she finished her milk and chips, replacing them with a two liter bottle of Pepsi and a box of Triscuits.
It all tasted fabulous.
Each flavor, each nuance, was so clear and distinct it was like she was a child tasting adult food for the first time. Every bite made her want to take five more; every moment without something in her mouth was a moment without this exquisite sensation.
She untied the string of her sweats, barely noticing how her belly spilled over the top of her waistband. Her breasts strained the cups of her brassiere; her once-slight hips had spread to cover the seat of her stool. The more she ate, the tighter her clothing became. Lisa paid no attention to the changes her body was undergoing, just kept on munching.
She kept it up all morning, pulling everything she could from her cupboards and fridge, munching on pre-mades, while she cooked anything heatable. A dozen scrambled eggs, a loaf of French toast, close to a pound of bacon, baggie after baggie of microwaved leftovers - it all found its way into the young woman's mouth. She was close to running out of her stock when the doorbell to her apartment rang.
Mouth full of Ritz crackers, Lisa kicked her way through the discarded packages on the kitchen floor and squinted through the peephole on her apartment door. Her sizable paunch was completely uncovered by either sweats or top - it pressed against the cold metal door as she peered at the figure in the hallway.
It was the delivery boy from Quik Wok, standing in the hallway with two full shopping bags. Stu'd done this before, she realized: phoned a lunch delivery as a means of surprising her. Every week or so, he'd order for them both and return for a long work break. "You're skinny enough as it is," he'd tease, plunking a sack of fast food sandwiches on top of her computer keyboard. "Can't have you wasting away into nothingness." Ain't gonna happen today, Lisa happily thought as she threw open the door.
Mouth watering, she grabbed the nearest sack. The scent of hot and spicy sauce reinvigorated her hunger. Unconsciously, she licked her prominent lips in anticipation. Dropping the sack on the living room coffee table, she gestured for the second to be placed beside it. Pulling out her checkbook, Lisa turned back to Mr. Quik Wok. He shook his head and said, "Already paid." Yeah, Stu'd made the order.
She barely noticed the kid's departure; she was too busy pulling out Styrofoam encased meals and setting 'em side by side on the coffee table. When she reached Stu's present, she brushed it aside to the floor. It fell on its back, opening to the last pages she'd been reading. But Lisa wasn't concerned with that now.
With the last carton out, the table was covered. Ten lunch specials - Kung Po chicken, Moo Goo Gai Pan, Hunan beef, Szechuan beef, hot and spicy beef, roast pork egg foo young, twice cooked pork, shrimp chow mein, plus two orders of General Tso chicken. In the bottom of the second bag were a dozen fortune cookies and some plastic forks.
The second General Tso had to be Stu's, she decided, as she opened a carton and took her first satisfied bite. It tasted so stimulating she could hardly stand it. Two more forkfuls, and she decided to exchange her plastic fork for a decent-sized serving spoon. Rising and eating at the same time, she made her way to the kitchen and returned with a more suitable utensil. She didn't spill a single bean sprout.
By the time she got down to Stu's carton, it was way past his lunch hour. Something must've come up, Lisa thought, her much-grown paunch bumping into the coffee table as she reached for the final lunch special. Though it should've been cooled by now, the meal tasted even better than the first - the broccoli still crisp, the chicken coating still crunchy. Lisa finished it in record time, then sat back to crack open her fortune cookies.
They'd given her a dozen, but amazingly enough, every one had the exact same fortune. Popping open the first, Lisa read:
It was a little irritating to come across the same fortune twice. But by cookie number five, it'd just gotten funny. "A 'wondrous transformation,'" Lisa chuckled to herself, chewing on the ultra-sugary cookie fragments, her chin lines deepening as she did. Before she could fully consider what this meant, a second knock could be heard.
It took Lisa a bit more effort to get off the couch and across the room. The once-waifish scholar was close to three times her old weight - just ounces shy of Stu's old flame: a super-sized redhead who taught in the same department as her dissertation advisor. . .
Lisa'd first met Stu, stepping out of Lily's office. Engrossed in what turned out to be a relationship-busting argument, he'd backed right in front of Lisa, knocking her papers to the floor in the process. "Stu!" the super-sized professor had shouted, rising from behind her desk. From the floor, the three-hundred-plus pound redhead had looked even more imposing. She was new to the department, Lisa knew, but already had developed a reputation among the undergrads as a tough teacher. "You okay?"
"I'm fine, Lily," Stu'd replied, kneeling down to help Lisa re-gather her paperwork. He'd looked, she remembered thinking, both intense and sensitive: more professorial than her own advisor, in fact. He was medium build and stylishly casual, with deep blue eyes and a heroic looking jaw. That such a handsome young man could be involved with a woman Lily's size, she remembered thinking, was a mark of his ability to see beyond superficial appearances.
To apologize for their accidental meeting, he'd invited her to lunch. The onetime anthro student had gotten a real world job as a restaurant supply salesman and had an in at all the area restaurants: over lunch, he'd proved charming and stimulating. He still maintained a hobbyist's interest in the realm of primitive belief systems and had met Lily at a public library lecture on the subject. He was particularly fascinated by those large-sized goddess figures so popular in early agrarian cultures. . .
Lisa was nearly a physical double for one of those heavy-breasted Venuses. More of her new weight loomed ahead of her in chest and belly than anywhere else, though she'd really gained all over. Her hips had spread to maximum capacity of her sweats; her once slender thighs rubbed and frayed her inner pantlegs. Waddling to the front door took her breath away, but when she saw what was waiting for her, Lisa happily swung the door open.
"Speedee Pizza," the delivery girl announced, opening the first of three padded carrying cases. This time, Lisa didn't even question where the order'd come from; she just led the delivery girl into the kitchen and had her pile boxes on the counters. If the girl noticed the debris-strewn floors, she gave no indication. The full order turned out to be a baker's dozen of family-sized pizzas - plus a bag of garlic breadsticks. After letting Speedee Girl out, Lisa grabbed the bag of breadsticks to fortify herself and went into the bathroom to wash up.
She didn't notice how round her face had gotten as she wiped her chins. She returned to the kitchen, wearing a sleeveless bright red dress she'd found hanging on the bathroom door. It was loose and flowing, much more comfortable than her ruined sweats and top. If she'd thought about it, she might've wondered how the thing had even gotten in their apartment. But Lisa wasn't at that stage yet.
Grabbing a sturdy kitchen chair, she hiked her new dress up her massive calves and sat down to her between-meals snack. First pizza was a deep-dish ham and pineapple. She'd never really gone for them before, but it tasted divine now. Holding the box in one hand, Lisa turned in her chair to reach the refrigerator door, then grabbed a half-gallon of chocolate milk. Stripping the little plastic ring off the cap, she drank straight from the bottle, washing down large bites of pizza as she did.
Flavor was a wave. Each pizza bite had an optimal moment - the instant you bit and released all the deliciousness. Every time she passed that peak, she couldn't wait to re-experience it. It took four gallons to wash down the pizza, but, happily, the once emptied fridge had somehow gotten re-stocked while she was changing clothes.
When she finished, her once loose dress was no longer roomy. Designed to cover a super-super-sized figure, it wasn't quite stretched by Lisa's quarter-ton frame. But it didn't leave much to the imagination either: every bulge and hang was discernible within its lightweight fabric. Seated, her dress' lower hem rode up to reveal the twin mounds of her growing lower belly. Lisa's limbs had swollen and developed deep creases at her elbows, shoulders and knees. Her breasts draped atop her paunch like two fat cats resting on a cushiony piece of furniture.
By now, she half expected another knock on the door, so she hefted herself out of the chair, momentarily wobbly from her unfamiliar width, and slowly returned to the entryway. At one point, Lisa considered stopping to pick the cartons off the floor. But she was still too unsteady to bend over. Just as the next delivery person was about to knock, she opened the front door.
A middle-aged man in a Zip Burger hat: she'd never heard of a burger place doing home deliveries before. He doffed his ball cap, then followed her into the living room, a banker's file-sized box full of take-out sacks in his arms. When Lisa gratefully collapsed back onto the couch, a chorus of springs loudly protested.
The delivery guy took in the table and floor, shook his head and said in a soft-spoken voice, "Need to make a little room." Placing the box by the door, he handed Lisa a take-out sack from the top row, then pulled a plastic garbage bag from his windbreaker pocket. While she unwrapped her first two double-cheeseburgers, Herr Zip Burger swept the debris into his sack. It was like watching a circus clown car act in reverse. You never would've thought he could've gotten all that crap into one bag, but, somehow, he managed. After tying up the sack, the deliveryman pulled a second from his jacket and pinned it to the side of the couch, plucking her first empty burger bag off the arm and depositing it in the trash bag.
"Should give you something," Lisa mumbled between bits of her second bag of burgers, but the man shook his head.
"Glad to do it," he said. "I've known Stuart for years, and I'm delighted to finally meet his fiancé. You remind me of my wife in a lot of ways." He leaned over one last time to retrieve the hardback from the floor and respectfully placed it on an end table. "I gave him this book, you know," he said - just as Lisa had taken a deep bite into her sandwich - then slipped out the door before she could speak.
He stuck his head back in once more and added, "Leavin' the door unlocked, 'cause there should be an express delivery comin' by." And then he was gone for real.
Lisa ate more slowly this time: where before she'd been focused on the peak moments, ravenously gorging to grasp each one, now she savored the whole process. As she grew, her sensory and mental capacity had also developed. Though she hadn't been outside since yesterday, she knew, for example, it was a beautiful outside. Her acuity had swollen tremendously.
Lisa recognized what was happening to her. Somehow, in reading that mantra aloud, she'd sprung a spell that'd already been within Stu's book. Was it set for her specifically or just a part of the book's magic? It didn't really matter, she decided.
Each sack had a different trio of wrapped sandwiches: from traditional fast-food cheeseburgers with lettuce and tomato - to sirloin steakburgers slathered with guacamole. Midway into her eighth sack (three bacon cheeseburgers and a large box of fries), Lisa grabbed Fast Majicke from the end table. As a stick-thin young doctoral student, she'd frequently lost herself in research, so much so that she wouldn't remember to eat. When she'd first discovered the joys of sensual eating, she'd totally given into it and shut out everything else. Now, she was capable of juggling thought and sensual feeling. She devoured the text as avidly as she did the food that'd been brought her.
When she finished, Lisa was more than double her weight again and less inclined to get up from the couch. Sometime during her extended sandwich binge, the wooden legs on her couch had given, dropping her a good six inches and making it even more of a struggle to rise. Her dress had bunched most of the way up her belly, folding into the space between her voluminous breasts and paunch, making her look like a sideshow version of some navel-baring pop star top. With couch and body so much closer to the floor, Lisa's belly grazed the thick-weave carpet.
She thought back to Stu's old girlfriend once more: she was at least twice the woman's size by now. Once she'd asked Stu about his ex-, nosing about to uncover the reasons for their sudden breakup.
"She couldn't be happy with herself," Stu had answered. "There are some people who - no matter what you say or do for them - wear you down over time with their refusal to believe anything good about themselves. Lily exhausted me."
"She ever go on a diet?" Lisa'd asked at the time, and Stu had uncharacteristically smirked when he replied.
"'Diet'?" he'd echoed. "Not hardly. . ."
Her memories were interrupted by the delivery that Herr Burger-meister had told her was coming - FM Shipping with a dolly full of boxes. When the guy knocked, she simply hollered, "C'mon in," then told him to place them on the table.
She'd been sent a full selection of holiday gift snacks: gourmet brownies, petits fours, Dobash Tortes, caramel apple pie, baklava, old-fashioned fudge, macadamia nuts and strawberries dipped in chocolate, half a dozen boxes rich milk chocolate bars. Cocoa ecstasy, she thought, popping two petites fours between her fleshy lips. Why had she ignored this for so long?
She sat back and savored her dessert, getting to know her new body as she did. Every move Lisa made, she could feel some part of her waxing and shifting. Each time she brought a new delicacy to her mouth, she rubbed against her protruding lowest chin.
When she finished her final delivery, Lisa was so wide she covered most of her couch. Reaching for the book that'd resulted in all this, she found it hard to lower her arm enough to make the end table - her sides and hips were almost as wide as the length of her arms. She had to lean her voluminous body in the direction of the waiting tome; as she did, Lisa heard her taut dress rip somewhere between her bulging upper arms and body.
Once she got close, though, it was almost as if the volume leapt into her hand. Her final box of chocolate cashed, the newly mega-sized scholar turned her full attention to its text. She was halfway into it - and once more famished - when her boyfriend Stu finally returned from work.
First words from his mouth: "You look wonderful." But what especially intrigued her was the wheeled cart of serving trays he was pushing into their apartment. A flock of baked chickens, a large glazed ham nestled within piles of au gratin potatoes, large raviolis stuffed with ricotta cheese, a school of fried catfish. Mouth watering, Lisa shoveled her serving spoon into the nearest tray as soon as it came within reach, coming up with a heaping mouthful of potatoes. Stu started slicing into the ham, whistling happily as he did.
As she ate and ate and ate and ate, her fiancé told her about his day. Because she'd waited so long - at least a full half-hour - for dinner to arrive, she barely heard him, though at one point she half caught some reference to some gourmet club out in the boonies. By her second tray, Stu offered to feed Lisa himself, and though she initially shook her head no, eventually she leaned back to receive her lover's offerings. Eyes shut, jowls happily quivering, she felt her massive body growing as she continued to feed.
Her hunger didn't cease 'til they neared the end of the final tray. And when she opened her eyes to see show little was left (two or three plates of channel cat), Lisa decided to finish it all, anyway. Shame to waste it, she thought, as Stu stabbed a fork into the side of a particularly plump catfish. When she finished, Lisa could feel her stuffed stomach - a rock-hard center 'neath walls and walls of body fat - but it was a tiny discomfort compared to the glory of her billowy flesh.
She'd grown, she realized, too wide to leave by the front door of her apartment, too fat to rise from her couch without help. Her weight crushed the furniture, so she was inches from the floor; her hips and rear had joined her belly into drooping all the way to the carpet. Lisa's paunch pushed all the way along her inner legs, forcing them apart and seeping through the space inbetween. It forced her to lean forward, her breasts and chins following suit. The position gave her an air of perpetual anticipation - or more obviously, hunger - as if she was eagerly waiting for the next full plate to be brought within reach.
"And how was your day?" Stu asked, as he straightened up the depleted cart. There was a look in his eyes Lisa'd never seen before, and she realized that her first impression of Stu had been just a wee bit wrong. She'd thought his attraction to his former lover meant that he wasn't focused on appearances. But from the looks he was giving her now, it was clear she'd misread this.
"Transforming," she giggled, once more picking up the book that had worked its Fast Majicke on her. I know everything that's in this, she suddenly grasped - and, more importantly, every word in her dissertation had somehow assembled itself inside her brain. All she needed to do was sit at her computer and commit it into print.
Even with her face so changed - she could feel her bulging cheeks smearing against the lower part of her eyeglasses, knew each chin crease and dimple that'd developed on her pear-shaped visage - the familiar academic's expression had come over her. She itched to get to her p-c, but was unsure if she could even cross the living room to the corner housing her computer station. Even if she could get up on her office chair, she wouldn't be able to fit between the armrests.
"Looks like you've got some writin' to do," Stu said, as he pulled out his cell phone and pressed the redial button. "Could use some help here," was all he said, and he turned to Lisa to tell her, "They'll be here in five minutes." He smiled lovingly and stroked her full face. "Never seen you look more beautiful," he told her. She nodded and even this small act made her lower chins rub against her neck, made her cheeks more prominent.
She knew he'd expected her to change, but she wasn't sure if he expected her to change this much. So she asked, "Did you know it'd be like this?"
"Not precisely," he answered. "The effects of Fat Magic vary. All I knew for sure was that you'd gain knowledge you'd been looking for - and a little weight to go with it."
"'A little weight,'" she repeated. She was, Lisa realized, fifteen times her old stick size: somewhere in the mid-1600's - way past normally charted weights, into the realm of the supra-normal. "How'd you know how much food to order?"
"My friends've been keeping tabs," Stu told her, as a knock at the front door came on cue. He opened the door to let in the Zip Burger deliveryman and a woman she recognized as a larger Lily. Bedecked in a provocative gown cut to emphasize the curves on her bottom-heavy 800-pound frame, she carried a navy blue spaghetti strap dress that'd been quickly sized to fit the new Lisa. When the transformed doctoral student raised her arms to get her old dress off, their upper hang still kept it pinned to her body. Only way they could get her old garment off was to cut it away in pieces.
Lily had also brought a pair of ultra-wide flats for her feet. Once Lisa donned them, she let the trio help her to her feet. It wasn't as difficult as she first thought it'd be - she had much more strength in her legs and back than it appeared - more a matter of getting her started than anything. When she was up, Stu and his friend pushed the broken couch out of the living room and into the hall. As they cleaned up all around her, Lisa stood and considered herself from this new perspective.
Even without mirrors, she could see herself from all angles: one more aspect of her increased awareness. Her belly hung majestically within her dress, inches from the swelling tops of her feet, her dress draped against it just the right length to keep her lowermost inches of flesh covered. Even standing, her hips and torso spanned the lengths of her arms. Relatively speaking, her breasts were small, 'til you realize how huge they needed to be to still be noticed on her body.
She was upright, alright, but could she move her fat self across the room? Lisa tentatively slid her right foot forward, and her drooping forefront pushed back. She needed to lift her leg off the floor, use her arms to gain waddling momentum, if she wanted to get anywhere. No half-assed measure would do. Nothing I do in the future can be tentative, Lisa realized. A bit of a change for someone accustomed to the quiet life of the scholar, but she'd adjust.
Ahead of her, Stu had pushed her old desk chair away and replaced it with a sturdy padded bench. When she gratefully settled her wide rear onto it, she saw the computer was logged onto the "Fat Magic" website. "Hello, Lisa," the screen greeted her over a photo collage of other mega-sized women and men. Some she recognized by name, though she'd never seen 'em before. All, she realized, were suffused with Wiccan energy, though not all them knew the full extent of this power.
She hit "Enter" and was immediately confronted by a menu of intriguing options. Stu placed a tray within reach, filled a bowl from some two-pound bags of M&M, and returned to his two friends. "She'll be busy for a while," he told his former lover.
"A lot of doors've opened for her," Lily agreed, eyeing the mountainous beauty with no small degree of envy. "And for you." Lisa rapidly zipped from page to page; each time she stopped to read, she grabbed a handful of candy and packed it into her mouth. "Just been added to her dissertation committee," Lily continued. "Looking forward to reading it." As fully attuned as this girl had grown, the academic realized, she likely was the one to complete that long-dormant project, a fully annotated edition of Fast Majicke.
Stu sure knew how to pick 'em.
Heading for the door, she linked her companion's nearest arm and bid goodnight to the significantly transformed couple.
"Back in the morning," her companion said, and Stu nodded knowingly. The apartment was gonna require some remodeling to meet its tenants' new needs.
Lisa, he knew, would be up most the night at her computer. He followed his friends outside to retrieve some cartons of pre-packaged snacks; they'd taken up the whole back seat of his Chevy, but even now there was a chance that the stock wouldn't be enough to satisfy his fiancé's expanded appetite. We'll just have to see, he thought, smiling at the sight of his mountainous lover, hunched over her voluminous forefront, steadfastly entering data into her computer.
The bowl of candy was nearly empty, Stu saw, as he placed the boxes in a convenient corner of the room. Overeating had become second nature to Lisa, as much a part of her as the hunger for knowledge. Pulling open the top carton, he grabbed a bag of Hershey's Kisses and used it to refill Lisa's bowl. She smiled at his attention, chins happily punctuating the expression, grabbed another handful and returned to her dissertation. His fat lover's day, he realized, was far from over . . .
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