by Wilson Barbers
Tabulate a list of the Top Ten Gourmands in Show Biz Today, and Winnie Harper would be somewhere in the upper third.
The popular talk show hostess, a former Miss Collard Greens in her Southern home state, was as addicted to food as she was to the limelight. It showed in her abundant matronly figure; it showed in her regular (and frequently photographed) presence at the city's top eateries. It showed in her never-ending pursuit of a Diet Program That Worked.
While she deplored the way her habits had added so significantly to her flesh, Winnie was unable to shed the weight for any length of time. This may have been a boon when it came to cozying up to the housewife audience also unsuccessfully fighting the food fight, but it soured her on herself and anyone else the least bit bigger than average. Falsely assuming that every other fat person was as gluttonous and self-loathing as her, the onetime model saw size as a primary measure of worth. At least every other week, her talk show focused on some new diet or exercise regimen devoted to Smashing Obesity Forever: she diligently tried all but the most abstemious ones herself but typically was unable to stick to them for more than a week.
In a nation where dietary charlatanism continues to be a big moneymaker, Winnie's plight was not unfamiliar. Yet her deliverance came not from any of the expected avenues but a different corner of the world entirely.
It happened on spring after the taping of one of her regular sops to the Flying Saucers Ate My Mother crowd, an hour-long show devoted to self-professed "male witches." She typically loathed these shows (all the while recognizing their audience lure) and had gone into this one with an even worse attitude. Two of the so-called warlocks had been pretty mundane, shaven-head schmucks draped in heavy metal garb, but the third, an attractive fortyish black man in an understated business suit, had really gotten her goat. She hated the image that his kind presented to the world, and she didn't hesitate to tell him so after the taping.
The warlock, whose name was Billy Prism, took her remarks with amazing good humor.
"So what you're sayin'," he answered with a throaty chuckle, "is that my beliefs and simple desire to make a livin' are workin' against the strides Our People have made. That it, darlin'?" They were standing off set with technicians and gophers all around them – yet Prism somehow made her feel like they were all alone.
"You know it is," she said, putting her fists on her ample hips, a stance she'd used to put more than one on-air guest in their place. Behind them, several staffers took note of the confrontation but knew enough to stay away. "Bad enough we've got Hollywood convincing Middle America that every Black they see goes in for this juju man bullshit. We don't need flimflam artists like you adding to the stereotype."
"You think I'm a phony," Prism said, a trace of sadness in his voice. He'd just taken a half hour of jeering audience questions without flinching, yet now he seemed genuinely distressed by her spoken judgment.
"You know I do!"
"Disappointing to hear you say this," he continued. "I've watched and admired you for years, and you always seemed so open-minded. Guess we can't believe everything we see on teevee."
"On my show it's the audience's job to make up their minds," Winnie shot back, "but that doesn't stop me from knowing what's right!"
"Ain't no way I can convince you I'm for real?"
"No way."
"Even if I gave you your deepest heart's desire?"
"Even then!" the tawny talk show hostess snapped. "How could you give me what all the experts in the world couldn't?"
"Easy, darlin'," the juju man said calmly. "All you gotta do is ask!"
Most any other time she would have shut the conversation off right there. But something about the man (perhaps the fact that part of her still found him damnably attractive) made her rise to this challenge.
"Alright, dar-lin'!" she sneered. "I'll ask: I want to be thin! Thin with the kind of metabolism that never gains weight! Think you can do that, Mister White Witch?"
"Piece a cake," he answered. "But why'd you want this?" he asked. "You're one fine woman the way you are!"
That almost stopped her. Staring into Prism's face, unable to tell if he was bullshitting her or not, the talk show hostess felt a flash of unfocused uncertainty.
"Perhaps," she finally said. "But the only way you're ever gonna prove a thing to me is to make it happen!"
"Done!" he sighed, and with that he turned to go.
"That's all?" Winnie said. "No mumbo jumbo? No pyrotechnics?"
"Course that's not all," Prism snorted. "I'll be up half the night workin' on this! Don't worry: you'll see results by mornin'!"
"And then what?" Winnie demanded. "What am I supposed to do in return?"
"All you gotta do is believe," Prism answered as he passed out of sight into a crowd of waiting autograph hounds.
Yeah, right, she thought, and she headed back to her office. She didn't think about Prism's promise until after dinner, an especially full repast that was excessive even by her standards. As she wended her way from the back of the restaurant to the parking lot, feeling massively bloated and uncomfortable, Winnie remembered the juju man's surprising "one fine woman" statement. How could anyone find an ol' hog like her attractive? she thought, groaning as she bent to get into her car.
They couldn't, she verified, as she examined her nude and sagging form in her bedroom. With this less-than-uplifting appraisal, Winnie went to bed.
She woke before the sun. Feeling wired, unable to go back to sleep, Winnie rolled out of bed and headed for the kitchen. She caught her first glimpse of herself in the glass of her pastry cover. Even with the rounded distortion, it was obvious that something amazing had happened to her.
The bedroom mirror verified it. She was thin again! Her body was its old bodacious self, slender-waisted with a pair of firm and impressive 40DD breasts, legs that killed and hips that looked like they'd never known cellulite. This was the Winnie Harper who'd taken the beauty contests less than a decade ago: a honey-skinned knockout! Prism hadn't been a phony, after all
She stood and stared at herself, delighted by the sight. When she finally was able to break away from her reflection, Winnie ran to the phone and dialed Prism's hotel room. It took eight rings for him to answer.
"I wanted to tell you," she panted, "that it worked! It worked!"
"Course it did," Prism yawned over the line. "Didn't I tell you?"
"You did; I know you did!" Winnie continued. "This'll make a wonderful show! Weight reduction that works - you'll have them lining up to see you!"
"Whoa, darlin'," the juju man said. "You think I wanna spend the rest of my life robbing women of their shapes? I did this for you because you asked me. I've got no desire to traffic in weight loss. You wanna explain your new shape to the world, blame it on whatever diet folks you had on last!"
No publicity? This was something totally new to Winnie.
"You said you wanted me to believe," she said. "I assumed that you'd want this on the air."
"Belief's a private matter," Prism told her. "I don't need any public endorsements. I've got enough business. Enjoy your life, Winnie. You've got the body you want, and no amount of eatin' is gonna take it away." With that Prism hung up. He didn't answer when she tried to call him back.
T he rest of Winnie's day was spent phoning staffers, canceling the next two weeks' taping and working up a convincing tale to account for her wondrous weight loss. She kept out of sight for two weeks, holding up in her condo and ordering her groceries delivered. When the talk show hostess finally showed up for taping, dressed in a form-fitting jumpsuit, she was a sensation.
Winnie seized the media attention that her slimmed-down self received, used it to renegotiate her contract (one of the conditions: a moratorium on magic-themed shows) and to snap a deal selling women's running shoes. Her unpaid endorsement for a new liquid diet called Anti-Cal netted that company millions in additional revenue. Overnight she'd transformed from a comedy club fat joke into one of the most pursued women in television.
Her social life similarly flowered: within weeks, Winnie was regularly seen in the company of a European billionaire. Pics of the two of them stepping out became a regular feature in the party photo pages of the celebrity magazines.
The one constant in this life of stepped-up glitz and glamour remained her appetite. Winnie remained her gluttonous self - if anything, the svelte TV star's capacity grew as the months passed. Unfettered by the fear of weight gain, she indulged herself at the dining table with growing abandon - the real binges she saved for the privacy of home, of course. Perhaps it was one more condition of the magic that Billy Prism had worked on her, but she never seemed to be full. Winnie's late nights grew longer as she furtively fed her slender face away from prying eyes.
In no time at all Winnie was at the top of the list of Contemporary Show-Biz Gluttons - though only a select few were privy to this fact. To the rest of the world she was a testimony to the power of dieting, a success story held up to that unhappy majority still stuck with the bodies nature gave them. To her credit, Winnie attempted to downplay her weight loss once the initial hubbub died, though the American audience wasn't likely to quickly forget it.
Five years later and Winnie was up for the lead on a major teevee mini-series (the glamorous matriarch of an assimilated wealthy family) and close to calling it quits in the chat show biz. She was approaching the fifteen-year mark, which seemed like an apt breaking point, and had a primetime special scheduled to commemorate her anniversary. The day of the taping she'd all but decided to announcement her retirement on air.
The show itself was a historical retrospective, the bulk of its footage (in the best teevee tradition) culled from the past two seasons. It was a guaranteed ratings grabber: Winnie's audience was composed of former guests who seemed to enjoy applauding themselves; the public ate up these self-congratulatory bashes. She looked her best, and the segments had been selected to highlight her assets both as interviewer and woman. How could it go wrong?
Winnie found out in the final fifteen minutes of taping. She was standing in front of the audience, setting up the next tape clip, and as soon as it started, she felt a sinking sensation. Instead of the sequence that she and her staff had selected, there was Billy Prism on the monitor! All she could do was stand open-mouthed as they ran through thirty seconds of Prism explaining the roots of white magic. She felt herself get hotter and hotter.
"Dammit!" she shouted up to the booth. "What's that doing on the monitor? I didn't approve that segment!"
"What'sa matter?" someone from the audience bellowed. "Frightened of a little voodoo?"
Winnie turned back to the audience, seeking out the questioner. Somewhere off to her left, another voice shouted, "That's why she doesn't do these kinds of shows anymore. Doesn't wanna risk pissing any magicmen off!"
"No! That's not it!" she protested, as a third voice from somewhere off soundstage answered, "Don't tell me you believe in this shit, do you?"
The whole room, it seemed, had shifted from supportive to hostile once it sensed her discomfort over the Prism tape. "I don't know," she heard herself babbling. "I'm not sure what I think!"
"Then I guess you aren't a true believer," the first voice said. And as it finished, Winnie began to experience something that she hadn't felt in years: a sense of bloatedness, of overfulness. With this came the realization that she'd just broken her compact with Billy Prism. Her statement of uncertainty had undone her.
Sweating, she took off her blazer, oblivious to the audience. Winnie stood in the camera's eyes, tasting her afternoon's meal, as her blouse and skirt grew snug. It felt, she thought, just like the old days near the end of a binge when she'd have to strip out of her confining size twenty-eights to finish dining in comfort.
Looking at herself in the monitor, she saw that that this sensation wasn't illusory. The top button of her blouse was on the verge of popping, while the rest were struggling to hold their place around gaps that widened by the second. Her breasts had swollen out of the DD range and were pushing further out; her waist had filled back in and was holding its own with her mams. The pleats of her skirt had popped; its waistband elastic bit into her rounded tummy.
If this kept up, she'd be back to her old weight in no time! Her face lost its planes, as chin and cheekbone were coated with flesh. This couldn't be real, she thought, and she nervously lifted a hand to touch a bulging cheek. As she did, her blouse gave away in the front, sending buttons out into the audience and smashing any hope that this was all some sort of crazy hallucination. Winnie's belly spilled out in front of her as she heard the seams of her upper sleeves rend.
Pulling off her blouse, she felt her skirt also start to give. Before she could peel her sleeves all the way off, though, the waistband snapped. With that, her skirt slid to the base of her still growing belly. If it weren't for her widening hips, gravity would have taken the garment the rest of the way to the floor. But her thighs were also in on this sudden race to obesity: they thickened and held her skirt until it split. The studio air hit her legs, sent a shiver through her expanding form. Winnie kicked her heels off and assessed herself in the monitor. She was down to panties, bra and a pair of knee-highs striped with runs. None of these were going to be able to hold her in for long.
To top it off, she was back to her former fatness, the Winnie Harper of a thousand fat jokes: a matronly mid-sized black woman in the upper two hundred range. She'd blown the gift Billy Prism had given her. All he'd asked for was her belief.
Winnie turned to head back offstage but stopped as her bra joined the rest of her expired clothing. Wait a minute, she thought, hefting and examining her freed breasts. They'd never been this big before! Shocked eyes lifting to her camera image, she saw her growth was far from finished.
Her chin was more that doubled; her breasts were both bigger than her head. They settled atop her prominent paunch, which had started to develop a crease. Her butt pushed out behind her with equal emphasis; her panties were two white cotton strips within the folds of her dusky flesh. Down below, Winnie's legs had added so much avoirdupois that her knees had lost definition. And she was still growing. Faster!
A familiar smell suddenly assailed her nostrils, followed by a barrage of scents. Winnie belched and tasted a plethora of familiar flavors: reminders, she quickly realized, of all the meals she'd overdone in the past five years. All those calories that she ignored, that had seemingly gone nowhere - with shocked certainty she knew that they hadn't just disappeared, for here they were rapidly manifesting themselves on her body. Without the benefit of exercise or even the metabolic burn-off that a regular day would bring.
She bent down to slide off her nylons, panting with the effort. Her bloated stomach protested, and as if deciding on its own that the only way to become comfortable was to grow even bigger, her belly dropped four inches further toward the floor. By the time she'd gotten upright, the talk show hostess was close to double her old maximum weight. Her panties had parted into pieces beneath her belly apron and sagging butt cheeks and were stuck in the folds. Her legs had grown a series of bulges that made distinction between thigh and calf impossible. Her upper arms widened against her sides, flowed over her elbows.
She couldn't, Winnie saw, easily repeat what she'd just done: her belly shelf wouldn't tolerate it. It draped several feet ahead of her, distending into two draping bulges that cleaved back to her navel. To compensate, her back bulged at the shoulders, her swelling rear blended into her lower back. As she visibly grew before the studio audience, she watched her paunch descend to her knees and finally realized the public nature of her predicament.
"Turn that camera off!" she tried to shout, but her mouth was full and kept her blubbery lips together. Her ass sagged down the back of her thighs, her belly apron past her knees. Winnie's face seemed to be receding between her expanding cheeks and jowls; her chins had quadrupled. She looked, she thought with dismay, like one of those eight-hundred pound blimpettes from the tabloids - though even they wouldn't show a spectacle like her naked.
She had to get off camera before she got too big to even walk! Winnie lifted her right leg, took one swaying step, and felt her whole body quiver around her. This was work! Panting with exertion, she tried the same with her left leg, but it was weaker, and she lacked waddling momentum. Her knee gave out under the unaccustomed weight, and she rolled to her side. Winnie struggled to right herself, but her arm was smothered against the floor, swaddled by her flesh. She was stranded by her weight, which exceeded half a ton.
A group from the audience helped her up. Two body builders and a trio of former Olympians rushed to the weight-pinned talk show hostess and heaved her into a sitting position. Winnie sat on her spreading ass, legs splayed by her mountainous belly, which made its way down to her feet. Her rear didn't go as far back, the monitor showed her, but she was fully as wide as three good-sized fat women - at least 150 inches in sitting circumference. Her breasts, while nearly as large as two medicine balls, were mere bulges in comparison to her belly. Her arms rested atop the swelling rolls of her sides, unable to reach to the floor. Winnie's honey-colored flesh was streaked with light stretch marks, mottled with dimples.
The bloated feeling had left her, Winnie noticed, and was replaced with a fresh hunger.
"Have I stopped growing?" she was able to pant. One of the body builders nodded, and to her surprise, Winnie saw that the man had an observable erection.
As did his companion.
Not everyone in the audience was as aroused by the sight of Winnie as these two, of course. Her core audience had always been as fat phobic as her. But as the studio seats emptied and the show's guests crowded around the ballooning talk show hostess, she noticed more than one look of masculine interest. Why hadn't she seen these when she was her old fat self?
"Because," a familiar voice said, "you were too busy focusin' on the day when you'd be thin!" Trailing his fingers around her uncovered circumference, Billy Prism walked into view. He looked the same as he did five years ago: tall with tinges of white in his short-cropped hair, a neat suit and the air of someone who was rarely surprised by life. Seeing him brought both a fresh burst of hunger and a level of yearning that she'd never known with her billionaire boyfriend.
"How'd you get past security?" she asked, just to have something to say.
"Same way I'm getting' us both out of here," Prism answered, and he raised both arms. For an instant, all her weight seemed to vanish, and Winnie felt herself lifting from the floor. The room blurred. She closed her eyes and shook her head, but when she opened them once more, she found herself in a candle-lit room walled with curtains and festooned with cushions. Her heaviness reasserted itself, and she was once more pinned down by her obesity - only in a much more comfortable and sensual setting.
"Where are we?" she asked, though this time she had a pretty fair idea.
"My place," Prism told her, "in Nawleans." He started to discard his suit and tie. "You hungry at all?" he asked.
Of course, she was.
The juju man snapped his fingers, and a young black man appeared at the door. "Miz Harper is famished," Prism said. The young man nodded, appreciatively taking in her globular form as he backed out of the doorway. "My apprentice," Prism told her, and he kneeled at the base of her massive belly. She felt him orally explore her quivering flesh, as her sexual appetite started to compete with her gustatory one. Mouth watering, Winnie lost all thought of the show she'd been taping as the young apprentice reached across her swollen side to offer her a bite, sauce dripping onto the rise of her right mam. As she bit into, Prism hit her twat with his tongue.
How'd he get under her? She didn't know - she had too much body in the way to get a view of the juju man. But she felt him all right: he'd somehow slid beneath her voluminous belly apron, was lying on his back and exploring her with his tongue. Winnie's arousal grew as he continued to stimulate her without coming up for air. Before she knew it, she'd polished off several dozen shrimp. The apprentice appeared with a second tray - were those fried clams? - and as the luscious scent hit her nostrils, she shuddered with orgasmic ecstasy.
"Just a second," she gasped, struggling to catch her breath.
"As you say, ma'm," the young man drawled, his voice hauntingly familiar.
She continued to shudder inside and finally waved the plate over, devouring the clams even quicker than she had her first offering. Somewhere in the midst of her munching, Billy Prism had gotten out from under her, though that didn't stop her clit from sending throbs throughout her entire form. It was almost as if the act of eating had gained enough erotic force to keep her going indefinitely.
Prism rested against her, his hardened erection pressing into her like a ladle poking into rising bread dough. "Lie back," he told her once she'd finished off the tray.
"I'm not sure I can," she said, but then she was fully resting on her backside, paunch widening and spreading to both sides of her, legs spread and feet unable to reach the floor. Prism stood with her head between his lanky legs and leaned into her cleavage. Winnie tasted the tip of his member and felt herself salivating. As he sank against her, she began to eagerly work on his shaft until he started to shoot. She gratefully swallowed this newest offering and continued to feel her lower parts respond.
They sustained this level of activity into the night.
"Damn," Winnie gasped once they'd finished. "I've never had it as good as that before!" She bit into a cheese Danish, as her mammoth body eased into a state of relaxing sexual warmth.
"Woman as beautiful as you deserves the best a man can give," Prism told her.
"I didn't believe you before when you told me I was fat and beautiful," she answered. "I do now." The juju man smiled, reached for a bowl and a warm washcloth. He took the cloth and started to sinuously wipe off her glistening paunch. God that felt relaxing! "Am I this way for good?" she asked him, not sure what she wanted the answer to be.
"You know how it is with weight," Prism said. "You can always get fatter, but it's a bitch to lose and keep it off."
"Even magically?" she continued.
"You overturned a pretty powerful spell," he said, working his way under her sweaty and pendulous breasts. "No way I could conjure you any lasting weight loss now."
"How about short-term?" Winnie asked. "Something that could get me out long enough to convince the world I'm not dead."
"Never tried it," Prism answered. "But we can give it a go."
So while Winnie went through a variety of full-course breakfasts, the juju man went to work. By noon, the weight-stranded fat woman felt her appetite abating and her body shrinking. When the spiel was completed, she was down to five hundred pounds - almost double her old weight but something she could walk around in.
When she showed up at the studio that afternoon, she was a sensation. Winnie's astonishing growth had been seen by everyone in the studio, but it hadn't transferred onto any of the cameras for some strange reason. Seeing her about a third the size of her final weight had them all doubting their senses.
She announced her retirement from the talk show biz that afternoon. The quarter ton Winnie's pictures appeared in every paper across the country, which had a decided effect on the sales of Anti-Cal. She showed up in New Orleans a week later as half owner of a Cajun restaurant, putting away plates of spicy food like there was no such word as "diet" in her vocabulary.
Whenever the press saw her, she was always in the company of her former guest, the mysterious Billy Prism. The onetime talk show hostess never appeared in public very long (three hours was about the max) or more than once a week, but when she did, she reveled in the city's food and music. As the years passed, she grew even larger in her portable form, no longer obsessed about how huge she looked in the public eye.
How she spent the rest of her time was something only a select few knew.
Revised version copyright (c) 2000 Oakhaus Designs
