I'm feeling nostalgic this month - and what sparked it was reading some inflation fiction on Luther Kane's website.

If you haven't read any inflation stories yet, lemme give a brief description. These are fantasies devoted to the sudden expansion of their (typically female) protagonists. They differ from weight gain fiction in that the growth in size is not equated with a comparable growth in weight. If anything, their heroines' expansion is accompanied by the characters becoming lighter than air. Human balloons, they grow to outlandish dimensions and in the most extreme revenge tales, suffer the fate of all overblown balloons.

I'm not a big fan of this form of transformation tale. I like solidity in my sexual fantasies, while the dark note on which some of these tales end runs counter to my own desire to elevate fatness as a Good Thing. But I admire the skill with which some of its practitioners lay out their own particular fantasy. It was while reading one of Mr. Kane's own opuses, in fact, that I was reminded of a nifty bit of fiction that managed to combine both inflation and weight gain fantasies.

Name of the story was "The Wonderful Day" (original title: "Miracle on Main Street") by Robert Arthur, a prolific pulp writer who did fantasy and detective fiction throughout the forties and fifties for the story mags. Arthur's tale first appeared in 1940, but I recall first seeing it in one of a series of Alfred Hitchcock children's anthologies back when I was in fifth grade.

In it, a small-town boy is granted a series of wishes that affect the lives of several townsfolk. One of these, a snooty matriarch named Mrs. Norton, is made to swell up like a balloon, floating up until she's snagged in a tree. "Full-bodied" to begin with ("well-built," her character describes herself), she grows so fat that another character has second thoughts about his attraction to her daughter ("And Betty Norton is going to look like that one day!")

Her growth is meant as a physical manifestation of her sense of self-importance; once she is sufficiently humiliated, she begins to sink back to earth. ("As if influenced by the remorseful thoughts," Arthur writes, "she began to descend slowly.") She's still balloon fat, but now she has the weight to go with it.

Though not written as an FA fantasy - Miz N.'s transformation is only one of a series of poetic comeuppances, after all - the power of the story's imagery remains strong. Arthur describes his character's expansion with only a few descriptive flourishes (rings cutting into her swollen and puffy fingers, laces of her corset giving way, seams of her dress ripping), but each was plenty for this incipient FA. When the ballooned matron comes down to earth, chastened by her experience, we can't help but think she's become a better person fatter.

Arthur's story stuck with me, of course, and it influenced the first of my FA fantasies, "The Balloon Lady." In that tale, a Jane Fonda type figure is inflated into super-size by the presence of an inflatable doll double. Though her growth is tied to the blow-up doll's, it's also connected to a binge eating sequence that has absolutely nothing to do with lighter-than-air. What can I say? I still prefer solid to gaseous.

Still, it's the only one of my tales to take advantage of the inflation metaphor - and for that, I have to thank Robert Arthur.

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---Wilson Barbers