~BBW, SSBBW, ~~WG, Stuffing
Salvation
by Benny Mon
by Benny Mon
Molley pulled the hood of her coat more closer her head and tightened the clasp, but the winds of the blizzard cut into her just as viciously. She couldn’t see more than a foot in front of her and couldn’t feel her fingers anymore. As she trudged through the snow, her steps felt less and less sure.
She’d lost a sense of the passage of time when the cave appeared in front of her. She stumbled but caught herself as she walked into it, not expecting the reprieve from the wind and the cold and what little light broke still broke through the snowfall. But it was enough. She sank against the wall and threw her few possessions to the floor: her shotgun, all its ammunition spent, and her backpack. She pulled the last bit of dried rabbit meat from the sack and nibbled on it weakly as she rested.
It had only been three days since she’d left her village, but she wasn’t sure how much longer she would last. Since she’d fled, she’d already eaten what little food she could scrape together in her haste to leave. She was inexperienced with a gun and had wasted many shots before she killed the rabbit she was just now finishing up. Game was scarce in the mountains, and since the blizzard had hit a few hours earlier, she had lost any chance of finding anything else. Her days—maybe hours—were numbered.
Molley was scared, of course, but not desperate, not panicked. She had expected this. She had killed her husband. She had wrested her freedom from a cramped, toxic existence, but she knew immediately that there was no future for her in that village. The deed done, she had scraped together a bit of food, a shotgun for hunting, some boots, the wool coat wrapped around her now, and the pistol with which she had committed the murder. She could glimpse it peeking over the lip of her sack, a faint red glow reflecting off the inlaid silver of its wooden handle. It had two bullets left. It was the only power she had left in this world.
She blinked. Nothing warm or red could reach the cave from the storm outside, so she looked to her left, back toward the cave, and noticed a faint light at a great distance, barely enough light for her to notice. When she’d stumbled into the cave she must have been too exhausted to spot it. Maybe her eyes had not yet adjusted to the darkness of the cave. But sure enough it was there. Someone was there.
Molley pushed herself to her feet, remaining in a low crouch as she slipped the pistol from the sack and replaced the latter on her back. She crept as quietly as she could toward the back of the cave, both threatened and thrilled by the possibility that someone was back there, someone who either made her death more certain or offered her a chance to survive. It seemed she would never arrive: she edged forward for what felt like minutes, the red glow brightening imperceptibly slowly. Her fingers were wrapped around the handle of the pistol, but it hung at her side at an awkward angle. She wasn’t used to this weapon.
As Molley walked, the light shone more and more brightly in her emerald green eyes. The walls came more sharply into view, but she didn’t pay attention: she was fixed on the source of the light. And so she missed the transformation of the walls, too: as she moved, their rough, jagged surfaces gave way to smooth planes, which then seemed to grow an etched grid of rectangles that looked resembled brick. The rocks and pebbles on the ground thinned and disappeared, leaving a packed and orderly brown dirt. The light grew and grew, and with it came noises, faint at first but swelling into the laughing and yelling of a crowd. Entranced, Molley didn’t slow, continuing to put forward one foot after the other. And then she stepped into a tight alley between two buildings.
She glued herself to one of the buildings and froze. It was dark in the alley, and as far as she could tell there was no one else there. Keeping the pistol at her side, she peeked around the corner with as much caution as she could muster and saw the fattest person she had ever seen.
Not that this person was very fat: there simply were very few fat people in Molley’s old life. The people of her village labored in the foothills of the mountains, raising sheep, hunting occasionally, and mining oil from the surface to trade with itinerant merchants for a few other necessities. The years were long and cold and their access to food was limited. Only those lucky enough to make it to old age managed to put on a little weight, just by virtue of their slowed metabolisms. But this woman was genuinely fat: a small but real double chin lined her large jaw, the calves below her skirt were stocky, and a small potbelly pushed taut the waist of her skirt. She was in the middle of the street that the alley opened onto, laughing and flirting and dancing (poorly) with a man, a hunk of warm, steaming bread in one hand and a flagon of some drink in the other. Her cheeks were flushed, and most of her sentences didn’t make it to the end, collapsing in fits of giggles.
Molley was transfixed, frozen to the spot. She had just stumbled from lonely and certain death into a city that by all accounts should not be there, been bathed in warmth and frivolity and confronted with a woman the likes of which she had never seen before. She must have been weaker than she thought, hallucinating as she teetered at the edge of death. Her head was spinning; she wasn’t sure what to do. But her body took charge. She clicked the safety on the pistol, placed it in the inside pocket of her coat, and stiffly stepped out into the alley.
The portly woman in front of her didn’t think twice as she exclaimed and grinned at Molley, as though she were an old friend. Then she gasped a bit and tilted drunkenly to one side: “You’re so thin! Come here, deary!” And she stumbled up to a still-frozen Molley and held the flagon to the frigid woman’s lips, pouring it through. Molley choked a little as the drink touched her dry throat, but soon she let it flow. She had never had something like this before: it was fermented like the ciders they brewed back in the village, but somehow richer and more bitter at the same time--and warm. She let the warmth pour down her throat and the alcohol go to her head, and for the first time in days, she relaxed.
The portly woman guided her into a building nearby--a pub, though Molley had never seen such a thing. Dimly lit by oil lamps hanging at intervals around the wall, it was full of people, a boisterous crowd of dozens who were also eating and drinking lustily. Molley’s self-appointed guide cleared a way through the fray and seated her at a large chair near a low fire. It wasn’t cold in this newfound town, but Molley was still chilled to the bone, and she was glad to be near these flames. Her head spun a little, but Molley’s guide brought her some water--she must have known that alcohol was not enough at the moment--and as Molley sipped it and felt more stable, she took stock of the room.
It was unlike anything she’d ever seen. Back home, the village had sustained itself precariously in the harsh foothills of the mountains, men hunting and raising livestock while women maintained their households and wove blankets and clothing. Most of the year was cold and all of the work was hard: there was little time for celebration. But this room was full of jolly, absurdly happy people, eating and drinking and swinging and dancing. Some of them wore clothes like the woman Molley had met in the street, but most were decked in ornate robes and suits and masks, hiding their true identity.
Even more remarkable, no one was skinny. To be sure, the majority were simply chubby, a little round in the cheek and the belly, and many were as portly as Molley’s guide. But a sizeable minority were varying degrees of enormous. One woman, dressed simply in pants and a loose vest, had the largest legs Molley had ever seen, tree trunks that stamped around as their owner tried to dance, bulbous buttocks shaking atop them as she moved. Another had a massive belly with a billowing flowy dress draped over it; she would have looked large on her own, but the dress seemed to double her in size. A third had arms and hands so fat they looked like giant stuffed sausages, straining at the seams. Her overplump fingers were clenched around the handles of two large flagons, one of which she was presently emptying into her surprisingly small mouth. And then it hit Molley: all of the fattest people were women. Yes, there were no skinny men, and some were chubby or even portly, but many were also muscular, even fit. Rotundity seemed to skew feminine in this place.
Molley suddenly felt a hand on her shoulder, and she looked up to see her guide. “Isn’t it amazing?” the woman said. “I think it gets better every year.”
Molley finally found the words to speak: “What is it?”
The woman looked taken aback for a second, and then she burst out laughing. “That beer must have gone straight to your head. You’re drunker than you look! ‘What is it,’ like you don’t know what the Harvest Festival is….Oo! I love this song!” And as the small band in the corner started up a new song, Molley’s guide bounced into the crowd, her belly bouncing with her.
Molley was awash in excitement and fear and anxiety and anticipation all at once, but her shock had begun to fade, and her hunger was creeping back to take its place. All at once her body remembered that she hadn’t eaten much for days, and she began to stuff herself, shoving hunks of bread into her mouth, tearing the meat off a drumstick, sampling the many cheeses. It didn’t take long for her enfeebled stomach to fill, but she continued to eat through pangs and rising nausea.
She was delirious now, and confused, but somehow still hungry, and she wandered out into the street in search of more food. If anyone had been paying attention, really, she would have been an alarming sight: a small, skinny woman in an oversize wool coat (still hooded), nibbling on a piece of bread as she worked her way uncertainly down the road. But everyone else was absorbed in their own revelry. She saw a costumed young couple in an alley, the man amorously feeding his masked blond lover candied cherries as he rubbed her belly. A trio of young women just this side of adulthood--an apple, a pear, and an hourglass--sat in a circle on a small hill in the next block, chatting and giggling as friends do, picking pieces off a gigantic cake in the middle of them, occasionally the other two feeding the apple an extra-large piece, sending her eyelids into flutters of pleasure. (Molley asked for a hunk of cake as she passed, which the young women, giddy and distracted, were more than happy to supply.) In a nearby tavern, a stocky woman with a belly like a barrel was downing a flagon of beer without taking a breath, her generous double chin shuddering with each gulp, each complete flagon falling away as a small crowd handed her another and cheered her on. Molley stole another sip of beer from an unattended flagon and again felt the alcohol rush to her head. She chuckled and stumbled back a step.
And then she came upon a truly spectacular site. The road she followed came to an abrupt end at an amphitheater set into the ground. It seated dozens of guests in various stages of obesity, but the stage at the center held the true stars. Three spectacularly fat women sat at a very long table buckling under the weight of platters and platters of food. On the left sat a woman with arms wider than Molley thought possible, huge sacks of fat compressing two massive breasts, all of which pushed up against a double chin so big it had basically erased its neck. The middle woman seemed taller than the rest until Molley realized her ass was so big it boosted her sitting height. This woman’s upper body was certainly fat, but each of her legs was the size of a large, full-grown man. And the woman on the right was simply fat all over, ballooned in every limb and surface until she barely looked like a person anymore. Despite their size, each of these women had the strength and enthusiasm to continually shovel food into her face. They never stopped, and when even a small amount of space was cleared on the table, one of several young, merely chubby women would rush up and replace it with fresh food. In fact, not only were they impeccably served, these women were also lavishly dressed, decked in necklaces and dresses somehow tailored to their enormous, irregular bodies. Half of the audience seemed wrapped up in their own mini-feasts, while others look on the stage eagerly, cheering on one or another of the massive women. Many, like people she’d seen throughout town, were hidden behind elaborate, colorful masks. Molley was utterly engrossed.
But her concentration was broken when she noticed, in the corner of her eye, two people slinking away from the event. Well, one was slinking, a man; the other, a woman, was far too large for any kind of subtle movement. They’d slipped into a nearby alley, so Molley crept closer to see what was going on. Both were wearing festival masks, and the woman’s hair was pulled into a bun so compact Molley couldn’t really make out much about it. But the woman’s body was visible enough beneath the revealing, loose, translucent fabric than hung over her body. She was short, a hand or so shorter than Molley, but remarkably shapely: her calves were beautifully curved for being so fat, her thighs like oval balloons. Her arms were similarly pillowy and her arms chubby, but below her fairly modest breasts sat her most impressive asset, her belly, a thick, round pillow of an apron that spread from its somewhat narrower start at her waist to cover her at the widest parts of her mid-thighs. And though her mask covered her nose and eyes, a brilliant white smile sat above a delicate chin and a generous double chin.
The man took the woman’s fat cheek in his hand and leaned down to kiss her, and her fat body trembled ever so slightly as she thrilled. Her face radiated peace, but tinged with something else--relief, perhaps, or even gratitude. The man brought his other hand to the woman’s face and pulled her into an even tighter kiss. Molley flushed, this time in embarrassment, but couldn’t tear herself away. The masked woman continued to tremble - too much, in fact, and suddenly Molley noticed that the man’s hands were not cradling the woman’s head but wrapped around her neck, choking her. The woman’s arms shot out and flailed against the wall behind her; she stamped her legs in a vain effort to escape, but the man, taller and surprisingly fit for this town, controlled her fully. The woman’s face turned blue, and she began to falter.
CRACK.
Molley hadn’t hesitated, hadn’t even thought. Her heart now beat even faster as she stood frozen, her hood blown back and her arm extended, the pistol still hot and smoking, and Molley’s green eyes wide, locked on the eyes of the fat woman who stared back at her as the man thudded sideways to the ground, a bullet through his head.
At the time, Molley couldn’t explain the sequence of events that followed. The woman before her finally stepped away from the wall, touching her fat neck where the man’s fingers had left red imprints, and tears of gratitude, even awe, pooled in her eyes. And then she threw herself before Molley as gracefully as her huge body would allow, the act of supplication clear despite her clumsiness. It was now Molley’s turn to tremble, uncontrollably, undone by her act, by everything that had happened in the last twenty minutes. The pistol fell from her hands, but she quickly scooped it back up into her pocket.
By now a crowd had begun to gather around the mouth of the alley. People were murmuring and shouting, and others joined them--even one of the impossibly fat women from the amphiteater had somehow managed to haul herself up the shallow stairs to find out what was going on, standing there with her chest heaving and anxiety on her face.
“My people,” cried the woman Molley had saved, “we have been visited by a miracle!” And the crowd fell silent. The woman sat up on her knees. “My wretched husband, whom you have all known as a kind and benevolent Governor of our realm, tried to kill me.” She held up her chin so all could see the bruises that spotted her neck. “He had been foul with me for months now, but I had not suspected that such treachery lay behind it. But then”--her voice, and her chins, trembled with emotion--“then I saw that our Goddess watched over me always, and that when my wretched husband laid his hands upon me he was laid low by divine Thunder. We are not worthy of the love and protection our Goddess offers us. We would none of us recognize her servant in this diminished, emaciated form. And yet we give everything we have in gratitude for our Mother’s boundless care.”
At this the ever-growing crowd erupted in cheers and sobs--the impossibly fat woman’s voice wailed out in sorrow and joy--and they rushed in to lift the assaulted woman to her feet, and to press their fleshy bodies into Molley is adoration. They surrounded her in a warm, soft flood, and she could barely breathe, but she felt no fear. She became giddy. A carriage pulled up, pulled by two large animals that looked something between oxen and goats, and the assailed woman and her savior Molley were lifted into it. The enormously fat woman reached up into the carriage while the door was still open, taking the assailed woman by the hand and kissing it gently. She closed the door, and they left.
“Rest now, servant of our great Mother,” she said to Molley, smiling as the carriage rumbled along. “We will attend to you properly at the Manor.” Her eyes looked up to the skies, still smiling. “What fortune is visited on us this day.”
