THE MAGICAL ASS: Squat & Squeeze Your Way to a Better, Brighter, Tomorrow
an excerpt

Odelia laid the stick flat on the toilet tank and checked her watch. How could she possibly have gotten pregnant? She hadn’t been on so much as a dinner date for years… it was impossible. But she also couldn’t be having menopause… not yet, not before turning forty.
The only alternative that sprang to mind was cancer.
Cancer… The word held less terror for her than it should have. If she was incubating a bouncing baby tumor she would welcome it into her life with at least as much enthusiasm as she would an offspring. Which is to say, none.
It had been a very long time since Odelia had felt enthusiasm for much of anything.
She watched the second hand on her watch tick on. What would she do if she were pregnant? First she would wonder who the father could possibly be… Second she would wonder how he possibly could have accomplished his task. Then she would… Her mind blanked at that point.
If she had gone to college and could hold down a job that paid more than minimum wage, paid enough to support a child, then she might be able to raise a child. But she had neither the means nor the desire to be a parent. Look what terrors her niece and nephew were. While it was tempting to think that no child of her own could possibly be that narcissistic, that greedy or incorrigible, she knew better than to let herself believe it. She couldn’t control her own life, so it was unlikely she could exert enough control over a child to counteract other influences.
The required three minutes of processing time felt more like twenty. As the second hand ticked its way toward ‘twelve’ she started. There it was again--that tickling sensation deep within her. A twisting, as if something considerably more substantial than ‘butterflies,’ had shifted position.
With trepidation, she once again picked up the stick and raised it into the light.
A single line had appeared; a minus sign. It seemed that no miraculous asexual conception had taken place after all. Jesus would have to look for another uterus to plan his comeback in.
With shaking hands, she dropped the stick into the trash. So it had been butterflies. Only butterflies all along, she told herself, pushing back and tamping down the nagging little voice in the back of her mind that kept repeating you know what you felt.
A minus sign meant she definitely wasn’t pregnant. It said so right on the box.

The family had left their usual mess around the breakfast table. Crumbs and splatters and fingerprints adorned each place setting, including those of her brother and his wife who should have known better.
Her brother, Jackson, never tired of sneering at Odelia for the way she ate, but at least she did so carefully and using silverware. That was more than anybody else in their house could boast. Yet according to him, she was the pig.
It was true that she was an overeater. But if he didn’t nag her, didn’t pester and humiliate her every chance he got, maybe she wouldn’t have to turn to food for comfort. Because that had to be the root of her problem. What else could it be? If she wasn’t pregnant, her continual hunger had to have a psychological cause, didn’t it? Cancer might explain the cessation of her monthly bleeding, and even her ravenous appetite, but not weight gain. If cancer could lay claim to any upside, it was its efficacy as a reducing aid. Its victims might become swollen, but never fat. And there was a difference.
Odelia was fat, but she wasn’t swollen. Her joints didn’t ache and her movements were fluid and while her clothing might fit her like sausage casings, her skin didn’t. She didn’t feel sick, just ravenous and lethargic, and… odd.
Depression was the most likely explanation for her troubles. Even the missed periods might be the result of depression wreaking changes in her metabolism.
If only she weren’t stuck in her circumstances like an insect in amber. If only her brother had used some of their life insurance payment to put her through college after their parents died. If only he hadn’t been her guardian at all. She was drowning and choking and mired in ifs.
She turned on the dishwasher, picked up the carton of orange juice they had left on the counter and opened the refrigerator door.
Just put the juice in and shut the door, she told herself sternly. Don’t even look at that cheesecake. Don’t you dare.
If only it hadn’t been so heaped with strawberries, so very tall, so fluffy looking… Those strawberries probably wouldn’t last until Thanksgiving anyway. It would be a shame—no, a sin, an actual sin if it were allowed to go bad without any of it having been eaten.
Maybe just a sliver. That would be all right. The family would never, couldn’t possibly, eat it all at Thanksgiving anyway. There would only be the five of them, after all, and she would make and serve pumpkin and mince pie as well as the cheesecake. So some of the dessert would definitely go to waste; there was no way around it. And the cheesecake might not even last until the holiday, anyway. Strawberries were fragile things, they had a short shelf life, they…
She licked her fork clean of the last of her sliver of cheesecake. She had eaten it so fast, she hadn’t even tasted it. Not really. That was a shame. A waste, really. Maybe if she let herself have just a little bit more, maybe a whole slice this time. She raised a knife, hesitated, and made it a wedge rather than a slice. There was still so much on the platter that it didn’t really matter how much she took. If only she wasn’t so hungry.
If, if if…
“There’s a pregnancy test in the bathroom trash!” Jackson’s voice boomed, causing Odelia to flinch violently enough to miss the cheesecake with her fork. Its tines scraped against the china plate like fingernails on a blackboard.
“Melanie’s on the damned rag and Courtney’s barely twelve, so there’s only one fat stupid bitch who might have left it—”
“I’m not pregnant,” she snapped. “What are you doing fishing through used Q-tips anyway? That’s disgusting.”
“Disgusting is the thought of any man horny enough to stick his dick in your rolls of fat. Look at yourself. Have some self-respect and stop eating. Melanie wasn’t as fat as you when she was pregnant, you goddamned whale.”
“Do you ever listen to yourself, Jackson?” Very deliberately, Odelia speared a strawberry and raised it to her lips. “Because it might be revelatory to you if you did. I suggest you tape yourself one of these days.”
“And I suggest you tape your mouth shut while you still weigh less than my SUV.”
Instead of answering, she bit into the strawberry.
Jackson stomped out of the house to go to work, but his words seemed to linger in the air behind him like a bad smell. Her brother: the Cheshire Cat of disdain.
The strawberry was at the peak of its ripeness. Sweet and flavorful, even its color was perfect; a uniform red throughout. By Thanksgiving its brothers would surely become mushy and might even develop spots. What a waste that would be.
So it wasn’t really a bad thing that she’d eaten the entire cheesecake. Was it?
What truly scared her was that she was still hungry.
She carried the platter and her empty plate to the sink, squirming in discomfort as she walked. Her clothes felt so much tighter than they had an hour previously, when she’d put them on.
No matter what she felt, it simply wasn’t possible to gain weight fast enough to see and feel yourself getting larger. Being pregnant without benefit of sex would have been more plausible than that. She must have simply managed not to notice how tight her clothes were when she put them on. Because she was distracted by the results of the test… Yeah. That was it. That had to be it.

CHAPTER 02

The muumuu Odelia had swathed herself was so big it was actually getting in her way. As she raised her arms to pour the boiling potatoes into the colander waiting in the sink to catch them, her dress billowed out around the pan, blocking her line of vision.
The “Big & Beautiful” web site she’d bought the muumuus from said that oversized clothes make the person wearing them look smaller, so she’d bought 12X, the largest size they carried.
“Ouch!” Dropping the pan in the sink, she recoiled from an unseen cloud of steam that had burnt her forearms.
“Dinner had better be done before the football game starts. I’m warning you, old woman!” Odelia’s nephew, Brian, was glowering at her from the kitchen doorway.
“Everything’s finished except the whipped potatoes, and that’ll only take a minute. If you want to speed things up, you could always help carry the platters to the table.”
His reply was a snort and an eye-roll. “That’s your job, isn’t it? Get your ass in gear and dish us up some turkey.”
Jackson pushed past his son and picked up a warm dinner roll. “I think you mean ‘assES,’ not ‘ass.’ Looks like she’s packing a couple hundred of them under that circus tent.”
“If you’re going to be in here, you can help me,” Odelia said. She shook the last drops of water out of the colander and returned the potatoes to the pan. “You have longer arms than I do, so you’d be able to reach into the bottom of this pan easier…”
When she turned to carry the potatoes back to the stove, she saw that she was once again alone. The word “work” was as good as abracadabra when it came to making her family disappear. The truth be told, she rather enjoyed most of her chores and even if she hadn’t, the peace and solitude that accompanied them would have made up for it.
Furiously mashing the potatoes into a thick paste, she felt gas bubbling in her mid-section. A furtive glance around the kitchen told her she was still alone, so she let it out.
She sniffed the air and wrinkled her nose, but not in distaste because, like most people, she never felt all that disgusted by the smell of her own farts. One’s own stinks are always more interesting than they are repellent. No, it wasn’t distaste but surprise that made her recoil.
Her farts had gone beyond interesting into the realm of just plain peculiar. This one smelled like someone had dropped a clump of plastic wrap onto a stove burner, but she didn’t even bother to look around to make sure she hadn’t. There was no way that smell had come from anywhere other than between her cheeks.
The odor wasn’t particularly unpleasant to her, but she felt disquieted by it anyway. It was curiously industrial rather than organic.
The only thing out of the ordinary about her diet was the volume she consumed, not the food itself, so it wasn’t something she’d eaten that was to blame. Which left only her digestive system as a possible culprit.
Ladling the potatoes into a tureen, she carried it to the table and set it down in front of Courtney, who didn’t look up from her video game to acknowledge her.
“It’s about time,” Brian said, grabbing the dish and scooping a glob onto his plate.
“Don’t just stand there—bring out the rest before it gets cold,” Jackson added.
Melanie simply shook her napkin out and spread it delicately across her knees.
One by one, she ferried serving dishes to the table. After the mashed potatoes came the yams. Then gravy, followed by dinner rolls, cranberries, green beans, ears of sweet corn, and jello molded in the shape of a pumpkin.
Her heart pounded a little louder in her chest after each trip and by the time she sat the corn down, a thin film of sweat had broken out across her brow.
“You’re going to have to carry the bird in, Jackson. I feel sort of faint.”
He shot her a look of disdain harsh enough to strip paint. “Oh, so you’ve reached the point your arms are too heavy to lift anything but themselves. I can’t say I didn’t see that coming.”
“I am, as it happens, afraid I might drop it—” she began, and he stared at her.
“If you can’t handle your chores any more, maybe we should bring in someone who can. Of course, we wouldn’t also be able to afford to keep giving you your allowance—”
Odelia lost her temper. “Even an illegal would cost you ten times what I do. All your empty threats will get you is a colder meal, so why don’t you simply do what I ask?”
He threw his hands into the air. “Yes, it would be a tragedy if your food were allowed a few seconds to cool before you bolted it down! If you’re that afraid you’ll starve to death before I carry the turkey in, all the more reason to do it yourself.”
“Ha! As if I’ve ever gotten to eat a holiday dinner while any part of it was still warm! I’ll tell you what: you can either carry the turkey in or leave it in the kitchen where I will eat it. Right away, while it’s still piping goddamned hot.” She leaned forward and growled. “I might as well eat allll of it while I’m at it. Or don’t you think I’m capable?”
“I think that settles it, Jackson,” Melanie said. She tilted her head back far enough to look down her nose at Odelia despite being seated. “That threat is far from empty.”
Flinging his napkin onto his plate, Jackson pushed away from the table. Chin trembling with indignation, he stomped into the kitchen.
“I hope you’re happy,” Melanie said. “You’ve ruined Thanksgiving.”
Ruined…? Odelia gaped at the word. “If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t even have Thanksgiving. When was the last time you fixed a meal this elaborate? Or any meal at all you did more than spoon out of paper cartons?”
In place of a reply, Melanie tapped her toe impatiently and checked her manicure. It was like talking to a wall, if a wall could be egotistical.
The picture of injured dignity, Jackson pushed through the kitchen door carrying the turkey platter. “No wonder you didn’t want to carry it. This is what? A fifty pounder?”
“Twenty-one,” she wearily corrected him.
“For one meal for five people? What were you thinking?”
The turkey, a Tom, was golden and glazed and perfect. As a garnish, she’d arranged tiny tomato roses around its base.
“It was on sale,” she lied.
“I do not intend to live on turkey leftovers for a solid month, just because you couldn’t pass up a ‘bargain.’” He picked up the carving knife set and made the first incision. “A five pound ham will do nicely for Christmas. No matter how fat you get, I expect you to be able to manage to carry that on your own.”
Having made his point, he proceeded to carve. Odelia turned her back on the less than Rockwellian scene and headed back toward the kitchen. The pots and pans weren’t going to start themselves, and it was a given that nobody present would volunteer at any point to help with the cleaning. Working on her own, the task would take hours, and letting the pans sit long enough for food to harden on them would only add more time to her sentence.
If only she weren’t so tired already. Her feet were killing her. She collapsed onto one of the chairs at the breakfast table and it groaned ominously beneath her weight. Not only that, but her butt overlapped the seat to the extent of actually draping over its edges. She had never noticed that before, not even that very morning when she’d sat down to peel potatoes. Could she have gotten so much wider in the course of a single day? A single day in which she hadn’t eaten so much as one meal?
True, she had been… nibbling. She had to sample; just to make sure things were properly cooked and seasoned correctly. But she had to admit that she had sampled a bit more than she usually did. The hors d’oeuvres, Devils on Horseback, hadn’t even made it to the table. The first one she’d tasted was sooooo good. Creamy, rich turkey liver around a sliver of water chestnut, wrapped in crispy bacon… The others would have picked at, rather than eaten them. Pulled them apart and pushed the components around their plates, as if they hadn’t been served in perfectly balanced bites meant to be taken whole. So Odelia had helped herself to a second. And then a third. And then there were no longer enough left to make a proper platter, not really, and she had used up all of the turkey liver so she couldn’t make more, so… she had finished them.
The calorie total of that little snack was undoubtedly formidable. There was no point in lying to herself about it. How many calories were there in eight strips of bacon and a whole turkey liver? Probably several days worth of Weight Watcher points… And that hadn’t been her only snack during the preparation of the meal.
She had sampled everything except the uncut turkey. In fact, she had more than sampled. She had stuffed herself, shoveling whole yams into her mouth. An entire pack of the brown & serve rolls had failed to make it to the table, and she had garnished them with an entire stick of cold butter. Even the peelings from the potatoes had disappeared down her throat rather than the garbage disposal.
Yet here she sat, still so hungry that her stomach was growling. There were, she remembered, several scoops of mashed potatoes left in the pan on the stove, and the thought of them flooded her mouth with saliva.
What the hell was wrong with her? Odelia absent-mindedly picked up the pan of mashed potatoes and licked the cooking spoon. A visit to Dr. Burgher was unlikely to be helpful and certain to increase her stress exponentially. He’d simply lecture her about her weight and ‘lifestyle’ until she was shaking with shame. Besides, it was a cinch he wouldn’t come up with any possible diagnosis she couldn’t find herself in an on-line medical database.
She wasn’t pregnant, and it couldn’t be cancer. The only logical possibility left was early-onset menopause. It had to be that. Most of her symptoms did fall in line with the information in the articles she had read on the subject. Supposedly it wasn’t unusual for a woman’s shape to be altered when her hormone levels started to wane. Odelia’s weight gain was concentrated around the hips and abdomen, just like the articles said it would be.
She swallowed something thick and scalding and only then became aware that she’d been drinking gravy straight from the pot on the stove. Aghast, she lowered the pot and grabbed a paper towel to wipe her face with.
How in the name of Christ had she done something like that without even noticing? The pans… She should be washing pots and pans. Yes. That’s what she would do right now.
Hurriedly, she dropped the soiled paper towel into the trash. Only with difficulty did she manage to resist the impulse to suck the gravy stains off it first.

The scent of chlorine bleach, stinging and acrid, rose from the hot soapy water in the sink. She leaned into it and breathed deeply. The bleach was almost strong enough to cut through the diesel exhaust-like reek of her latest fart.
Apparently, that’s what you had to look forward to when you fueled your farts with large quantities of gravy. If she could only get her eating under control, then these odd symptoms like inorganic smelling farts and the sensation of harboring something ‘other’ inside herself, these few symptoms that didn’t fit a diagnosis of menopause… they would go away. It was as simple as that. And once her body had finished adjusting to the change of hormonal levels, she would be able to control her eating.
She felt much better once she had reasoned things through. So what if she had drunk a quart of gravy like it was a pitcher of marguerites? It was a holiday. You were allowed to go a little crazy on holidays.
Leaning over to put the last pan, clean and gleaming, back into its place in the kitchen cabinet, she felt a delicate pop in her back, like the cracking of a knuckle. There was no pain involved. In fact, she felt a bit better afterwards, a little less uncomfortably full maybe. As she straightened back upright, a short series of these pops rumbled through her gut and oh no not again she felt something shift inside her abdomen as if her intestines were rearranging themselves into something new and more complicated, as if something were being… unpacked and assembled.
Gas, most likely.
Yes. That was what it had to be.
As if in confirmation, a bubble pressed against her sphincter, begging for release. Warily, she let it slip out.
“Did you use chemical oven cleaner on that self-cleaning oven?” Jackson had pushed open the kitchen door. He sniffed the air, his nose wrinkled with distaste. “I smell Easy-Off. If you ruin the finish on that oven, I’m not buying a new one. You’ll just have to keep cleaning the one you have by hand from here on out.”
“What do you want, Jackson?”
Hauteur dripping from every word, he informed her that the family was awaiting their dessert. With a sigh, Odelia headed to the dining room to begin ferrying the leftovers back to the kitchen, wondering as she did so whether any of them would still be in the refrigerator by the time she went to sleep that night.

CHAPTER 03

Odelia’s fart was so loud that it woke her from a sound sleep. She licked her teeth and cracked an eyelid at the clock beside her bed. Four forty-five in the morning… Much too early to get up.
The twin bed that had once been more than large enough for her to roll over comfortably in was now just wide enough to cover her backside. That of course wasn’t the most honest way for her to regard the situation. It wasn’t as if the bed had shrunk.
She wriggled under her covers and another fart rippled its way to freedom. There was no denying its unnatural scent, but Odelia refused to allow herself to think about it. She had spent enough fruitless hours contemplating the increasingly inorganic smell of her own farts. It was a pointless and twisted exercise in self-absorption and she was done, thank you very much.
Pressure in her gut forced her up out of bed and onto her feet. Farting a little with every step, she headed for the bathroom.
The exhaust fan couldn’t quite keep pace with her ass, making it impossible for her to entirely ignore the pungent, caustic quality of the air. It was more like smoke than gas, and not a pleasant, woodsy sort of smoke a person might barbecue over, either, but something curiously… other.
Several minutes of straining produced nothing but a thicker odor. Finally, a bulge slightly more solid was pushed towards the exit. Something smooth and stretchy. Something putty-like, that slid into the water without making a sound. Apprehensively, Odelia stood up and snuck a reluctant look at it.
No longer brown, or even black, her turds had developed a metallic sheen and iridescence. This one shouldn’t even really be called a turd at all. It was smooth, it was stretchy… Cohesive enough not to break apart, but billowing in and out of oddly geometric shapes, occasionally forming what could only be called corners before they once again smoothed out on their way to some new configuration. She closed her eyes against this deviant display and flushed. When she opened her eyes, the thing was gone, replaced by a pool of pristine water.

She was reawakened not by another fart, but by a yell that startled another fart out of her. From the chunky and tactile strength of the acrid smell in her room, she had been producing them regularly as she slept.
“What the hell?” Jackson bellowed from the living room. “Is the glass fibers plant on fire again? Christ, that’s awful!”
Oh no… Was the smell that obvious even from the living room? Odelia heaved herself upright and opened the bedroom window. The curtains ruffled with a chilly breeze that did little to ease things. It was better than doing nothing, but not by much.
The front door clicked open. “It isn’t coming from John Mansville!” she heard her brother’s voice say. She cracked the door to her room open in order to hear the conversation.
“If it’s not the glass fibers plant, then where is it coming from?” Melanie asked.
“Nowhere—it’s not coming from anywhere—it smells fresh outside! It has to be coming from inside our house,” he answered.
Odelia eased the bedroom door shut again and rushed back to the window, pushing it up as far as it would go. Jackson would undoubtedly notice the house getting cold and scream about the heating bill, but she shuddered to think what he would say if he discovered that she was the source of… whatever the hell this was. She picked up a book and used it as a fan to increase air circulation.
The thudding of running feet came to her from either end of the house, along with muffled voices. Obviously, the search for the source was on.
Her gut rumbled and she froze. The sensation was so uncannily suggestive of a fetus, or possibly multiple fetuses tumbling and jostling for room that her first thought was that she should take yet another EPT. As if the prior three could all have failed; as if there were any way for her to have become pregnant at all without aid of a man or even a turkey baster.
The rumbling ceased, and Odelia exhaled, slowly… carefully. For now, the volcano god within her had quieted. But if she resumed moving her arms, fanning the air, there was no way she’d be able to keep it under control. Remembering the failure of the bathroom’s exhaust, she sighed in resignation. If she kept moving so vigorously, she’d produce far more than she’d be fanning away.
Easing the window back shut, she sat down on the edge of her bed and turned on the television, tapping the volume up high enough to cover the scurrying noises of the continuing hunt.
Just her luck: the movie Jaws was on. It was the scene where Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss were comparing scars, while Roy Scheider looked on, hiding his own. She felt like a cross between Roy and the shark.
Ahh… Jaws. What if the shark wasn’t a soulless eating machine? What if he were self aware; ashamed, even? What then? Would that have made him less of a monster or even more?
In the background, she heard the doorbell ring and the sound of her sister-in-law’s answering footsteps. She hit the mute. Now what?
Reluctantly, moving very carefully, she reopened the bedroom door and carried her rumbling termite queen of a body out into the hallway.
“Even if you can’t see smoke, there could still be a fire,” she heard an unfamiliar male voice say. She sidled closer to the living room so she could see who it was.
Oh Christ… They had called the Fire Department!
Two firemen in full regalia filled the front door. “It might be something smoldering inside the walls,” the fireman said. “It’s probably nothing, but we should take a look around; feel for hot spots.” Apprehensively, Odelia followed them out into the kitchen. As she walked, another wee little teensy spot of gas worked its way out of her ass.
“Does it smell stronger to you in here than it did before?” Jackson asked. Hair uncombed, still in his bathrobe and scuffs, he managed to look both wild-eyed and still half-asleep. “It smells stronger to me. Doesn’t it smell stronger to you?”
The taller of the two firemen checked the readout on an electrical device he was carrying. “Nothing’s showing on the air monitoring meter. Maybe I should get the T.I.C. out of the truck.”
“Yeah,” the shorter one said. “I don’t feel any heat in the walls, but that’s the best way to be sure…”
“What’s a T.I.C.?” Melanie asked.
“Thermal Imaging Camera… Let’s you see heat even through walls—I’ll go get it.” The taller one headed back out the door, while the other got down on his hands and knees, running his hands along the wall over top of the electrical outlets, where the wires would be embedded. “Do you guys have any new appliances? Sometimes, electronics straight from the factory give off an odor when you turn them on, and after a few weeks, it just goes away. Or, it could be the furnace. When did you first start the furnace up for the year? Was it recent?”
Jackson stammered and threw up his hands.
“It’s been a warm fall,” Odelia murmured.
“So it hasn’t been running much until lately?”
Courtney pushed her way into the room, rubbing her eyes. “What’s this guy doing here? Somebody needs to fix my breakfast,” she demanded.
Wordlessly, Odelia walked over to the cupboard and got out a bowl. Unfortunately, she had to stand on her tip-toes and stretch to reach the box of Captain Crunch.
“There! Smell that? It’s stronger again!” Jackson said.
“I think I heard the furnace kick in a moment ago,” Melanie added. “So you think that’s what’s doing it?”
“Could be,” the fireman grunted from where he was feeling his way along the base boards. “If we don’t find anything, you might think about having your furnace checked. It could be as simple as needing your filters cleaned or replaced.”
If only, Odelia thought. If, if, if…
“Would you like a banana or a peach with that?” she asked Courtney.
The girl sullenly patted her cereal with the back of her spoon. “I WANT,” she whined, “a cherry PopTart and more milk. NOW.”

Chapter 04
Constipation was nowhere mentioned in her research into the symptoms of menopause. But constipated she was, and dreadfully so. It had been at least a week since she’d properly gone. And over the past three days, she had even stopped producing those metallic-toned blobs that she’d begun squeezing out in place of turds.
At least she had experienced some improvement in the gas department. While still plentiful and unusual in nature, her farts were no longer something that could be mistaken for an industrial fire. The smells they gave off were changeable and still oddly inorganic, but not like something that might, had, or maybe ought to explode.
All things considered, she felt pretty good. Lethargic, yes, and bloated to the point that her new maximum-sized muumuus were beginning to feel not so very loose around the middle any more.
Surely that had to be due to bloating.
She couldn’t possibly be that fat, so it had to be bloating—true, she still didn’t feel swollen, but that was what it had to be. And as soon as she could do her business again, her dimensions would return to something more… human.
The little nagging voice in the back of her mind that insisted this was simply not true was the voice of unreasoning hysteria, and she would not have it, by God! Again and again, she pushed the little voice back and bound it in chains of logic.
No one could possibly gain such massive amounts of weight in as short a time as she seemed to have. It defied the laws of not only biology but physics. Ergo, it could not be true.
Most of what appeared to be weight gain was doubtless due to the constipation she was suffering, and probably also the retention of water. The fact that she was retaining this water solely in her midsection and hips was unusual, but hardly unheard of.
Of course, she had been eating a great deal more than usual, so some of this weight gain was probably real and lasting, but… What of it? Lots of women became a tad ‘hippy’ when they went through the change.
“God damn it—haven’t you been to the store yet?” Jackson called out peevishly. “And why is the freezer empty?”
Odelia turned towards him and lied, patiently, “The power was out for hours and the food in the freezer started to thaw, so I had to throw it all away.”
“That Goddamned electric company! What the fuck do I pay a utility bill for? Useless sons of bitches… MELANIE!”
Odelia’s sister-in-law was in the living room, staring at QVC on the big screen TV, and not about to leave it, so she screamed back, “WHAT?”
“PIZZA OR CHINESE?”
Odelia knew what was coming: they would spend ten minutes arguing, each trying to force the other to perform the monumental labor of calling in the order. It was a source of constant frustration to her that these two laziest of people each held down jobs paying far more than any position she could ever hope to be considered for. She decided to retreat to her bedroom.
As she sat down on the edge of her bed, its frame groaned in protest. Curious what Melanie had found so fascinating, she tuned the TV to QVC.
“—this hour of Precious Moments, where we will be debuting several pieces specially produced for QVC and available nowhere else—” the television host was saying, in a voice that sparkled with infectious fake enthusiasm.
Melanie luuuuuved her some Precious Moments. Precious only in the sense of conveying cloying sentimentality, they were little ceramic statuettes of children with tear-drop shaped eyes, frozen in tableaus of sickening cuteness. Melanie kept two glass cases full of the ugly little things in the master bedroom suite. Odelia occasionally wondered how Jackson managed to ‘perform’ with all of those little tear-drop eyes staring unblinkingly at their marriage bed.
Odelia bit her lip. Every Christmas, she gave Melanie a new Precious Moments figurine, but this year she hadn’t ordered one. She couldn’t. She had eaten her way through not only her allowance, but her entire savings account. She had nothing left for Christmas shopping.
She had eaten Christmas.
“HEY!” Brian had joined into the screaming conversation outside her sanctuary. “THE LIGHT’S BURNT OUT IN THE BATHROOM!”
Uh oh, Odelia thought. Light bulbs had been passed over when she made the shopping list, along every other non-grocery item they were running low on. If a thing couldn’t be eaten, she couldn’t seem to remember it, let alone deem it a necessity.
“ODELIA!” Jackson yelled. “GET OFF YOUR FAT ASS AND CHANGE THAT LIGHTBULB!”
Oh, great… Now what would she do? She pushed herself off her bed and headed for the bathroom.
“The” bathroom meant the one across the hall from her own, the one that was considered to be anybody’s to use, rather than the one within the master bedroom suite or the one between the kids’ rooms that was considered to be exclusively theirs.
Odelia thought of “the” bathroom as hers. But nobody else saw it that way.
She entered it now and shut the door behind her. Sure enough, the lightbulb in the fixture above the sink was blackened and unresponsive to a flick of the switch.
She could always tell Jackson that she had changed it and the new one must have blown out, too. She was getting to be a deft hand at lying. Look how well the electricity story had worked out. Unfortunately, it didn’t explain her spending the usual amount of household money without buying the usual supplies. Too bad light bulbs couldn’t melt.
And toilet paper… and soap, and tape and pencils and batteries and everything else she’d let run out in favor of buying extra food.
There was only one option: confess. That would be a fun conversation. “You know how you’re always telling me what a fat bitch I am and how one of these days I’m going to eat you out of house and home? Guess what I did!”
How he would scream. Maybe he’d follow through on his favorite threat and throw her out of the house. If there were anywhere else in the world that she could possibly go, that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. But she was without other relatives and it had been years since she’d had a friend close enough they might let her crash on their couch. She didn’t even belong to a church, and the nearest town with a homeless shelter was Defiance, and that was at least forty miles from Edon. Too far to walk, even if she were still a normal size, and it was impossible to imagine anybody stopping for a hitchhiker big enough to pose a peril to the suspension on their car.
Her gut rumbled and (butterflies it had to butterflies) tumbled like a dryer full of wet sneakers. She leaned over and opened the cupboards, reaching in as if she didn’t already know they were empty. Except for a film of gritty dust, her hand met bare shelving. But she couldn’t feel, or even see into the corners. It was possible that something useful had been pushed wayyyy back…
It had been a while since she had managed to get down on her knees, but it would have to be done.
Placing one hand on the side of the tub and the other on the sink, she put most of her considerable weight on her right foot and winced as it cracked. The tumbling in her gut intensified as she sank toward the floor and she winced as a gas pain shot through her. Wow, that was painful. As she hit the floor, the fart escaped.
The fart wasn’t alone.
As she farted, she felt something solid pass along with it, something big enough to pooch her panties out away from her ass. As if she didn’t have enough troubles, she had shit her pants.
A tear rolled down Odelia’s nose as she struggled back to her feet. She’d wanted to poop; she’d needed to poop; but not like this. Accidentally? In her pants like a helpless infant?
Odelia had reached her limit. Everybody has a breaking point, and this was hers. As her body shook with sobs, another lump landed in her pants, and then a third. Gently, so as not to make a bigger mess and add to her woes, she eased her panties down her thighs and let them slide to the floor.
As careful as she was to make the slide slow and controlled, one of the lumps rolled across the fabric, out of her pants, and bounced across the bath mat.
She stared. Then she blinked. Then she stared some more.
There on the bath mat lay a sixty watt GE soft white bulb. An incandescent light bulb, of exactly the type she had hoped she might find in the far reaches of the cabinet. And there, nestled in the crotch of the panties she had just stepped out of, were two others exactly like it.

CHAPTER 05
Dreamily, Odelia poured a box of Junior Mints into her mouth with one hand as she reached for the remote with the other.
Beside her bed was a neatly aligned row of small gift bags. She had chosen bags, mainly because she had thought they would be easier than boxes, having fewer pointy corners and all. Also they were pre-decorated with bright Christmas-themed pictures rendered in holographic foil, which eliminated the need for wrapping.
Her ass was now so huge that it was no longer possible to deny the tightness of her muumuus, especially when she was sitting down, like now, and her thighs and hips spread out to their maximum width. But for the moment, she refused to let that, or anything else bother her. She had Christmas shopping to finish.
On the television screen, Jessica Fletcher was strolling through a garden. Odelia smiled. As she pointed the remote, a little bubble of gas escaped her butt, and the faint scent of spring lilacs wafted into the room.
That was something new! She hitched a hip up and farted again. This time, the scent of roses rolled forth. On the screen, Jessica had moved from standing in front of lilac bushes to a grouping of roses.
For a moment, she considered trying to produce a rose itself, but then the thought of thorns flashed through her mind and she pushed 008 on the remote instead.
“—last Precious Moments show of the year!” the vivacious blond QVC host said. From the warning tone in her voice, you’d have thought this was the equivalent of “last gas station for next four hundred miles of interstate!” BEWARE! Buy now, lest ye run out of tacky before New Year’s Eve!
The door of her bedroom flew open and Jackson stomped in. “Why are there twenty tubes of toothpaste in my bathroom but nothing in the kitchen cupboards?”
“Ummm… There was a sale—” she started.
“It beggars belief that you, of all people, would make a trip to the store and not bring home food. What is it, your idea of a diet? Bring no food into the house because you can’t resist… What the hell is THAT?”
Her eyes followed his accusatory finger jab to the empty Junior Mints box in her hand. “It’s… I had…” Her newly honed lying abilities failed her.
“You’re stuffing your face with candy but you couldn’t be bothered to bring home cereal for the kid’s breakfast? What the FUCKING HELL WERE YOU THINKING?” He stared at her, his buggy eyes opened so wide it was possible to imagine them falling out of their sockets entirely to dangle and roll over the tops of his cheekbones. “Jeeeesus Christ, Odelia! A diet does not consist of spending the family’s grocery money on nothing but toiletries and paper products while still gorging yourself on fucking chocolate, you fat fucking retard. Thanks to you, I’ve got enough fucking toothpaste for the next ten years, but nothing to goddamn eat to make my teeth dirty enough to need brushing.” He stepped closer, jabbing his finger at her as if he were throwing punches. “You are going to get off your fat ass right this minute, waddle down to the Super Value and pick up a box of fucking Cocoa Puffs for tomorrow morning. NOW, GOD DAMN IT!”
He had chosen the wrong moment in which to demand that she stand up. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to let us run out of cereal—”
“And bread, and peanut butter and fruit and vegetables and frozen dinners and ice cream and—”
“YES! I’m sorry, Jackson. I didn’t mean to—”
His face contorted with rage. “Well, I don’t see you racing to do anything about it, do I? Is it because you spent all the household money on shit like toothpaste and batteries? Because there is no way in hell that I’m giving you one dime extra! You’ll just have to buy us our groceries with your own money, you fat hog. Yeah, you heard me! Now get off your fat ass!”
He grabbed hold of her arm and yanked it, trying to pull her up, onto her feet. All he managed to do was set up a blubber quake under her stretched muumuu.
Jackson froze in mid-tug and his jaw dropped. “Oh… my… god…” Cautiously, he reached toward her midsection and gave it a tentative tap. The rippling renewed. “Is that all you? I thought that mass between your neck and your knees was mostly dress! Fuck! A couple weeks ago, it was mostly dress… Wasn’t it?”
He stepped back, away from her. “What the hell have you done to yourself?”
Odelia didn’t know how to respond. Clearly, the theory that she was experiencing unusually early menopause had, like her muumuu, reached the point of no longer covering everything expected of it.
He narrowed his eyes with calculation. “So you are pregnant, after all… Well, you know what? I don’t care how many bastards you’ve got on board, you are still walking down to that supermarket before it closes and bringing home those groceries. If you expect to stay in my house, you will by Christ do what’s asked of you.” With that, he grabbed her arm and yanked it again, this time bracing his foot against the bed she was sitting on which gave him just enough purchase to unbalance her. As she toppled forward, tottering onto her feet, there was a crash.
This was followed by a moment of stunned silence which Jackson broke with a hoarse scream of incoherent rage. On the hardwood floor lay a shattered ceramic figurine of a blonde boy with tear-drop shaped eyes.
“That’s from Melanie’s cabinet.” The exertion it took to move Odelia’s bulk had combined with his rage to reduce his voice to a wheeze. “Was that UP YOUR SKIRT? It was, wasn’t it? As filthy an animal as you are, this is… is… Fucking UNBELIEVEABLE! Masturbating with Melanie’s Precious Moments figurines? How can even you sink so low as to stuff a Precious Moments up your greasy, filthy, bastard-filled twat?” Grabbing her by the shoulders, he shook her violently, punctuating the shakes with saliva-speckled growls. “What in hell… is… your… major… malfunction?”
A thud interrupted him. A second figurine, just like the first had rolled down onto the floor, and this time survived the fall intact. The little blonde boy looked up at them through his preposterous painted eyes with his ceramic lip stuck in mid-tremble. He was holding up a bandaged finger as if waiting for one of them to kiss it and make it better.
“—remember, ‘Boo-Boo Hooey’ is only available from QVC! This is the first and only time we’ll ever air this exclusive creation! What a perfect gift for that collector on your Christmas list than the rarest Precious Moments of all! Look at this close-up of the detailing! See that patch on the knee of his overalls and the painted stitches around the edges—”
Jackson’s eyes traveled from the figurine on the floor to the image on the TV. And then again; flicking back and forth as if the two immovable ceramic boys were playing tennis. Finally, his gaze landed on Odelia’s. And there it stayed.
He knew.
His mouth moved wordlessly and the muscles of his face slackened. He dropped to his knees and reached out to pick up ‘Boo-Boo-Hooey,’ but at the last second he rubbed his fingers together and scrunched up his nose with distaste. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a tissue to use as a finger-condom.
“It’s perfectly clean,” Odelia said, stiffly.
The look he shot her was redolent of scorn and disbelief.
Even now, all he was capable of was disrespect… Odelia scowled down at her brother, kneeling at her feet not in awe or appreciation at the miracle he witnessed, but disrespect.
She chose her words with equal parts deliberation and satisfaction. “I didn’t hear you complain about the taste of the toothpaste.”
The kaleidoscope of expressions that twisted his features was everything she could have hoped for. She reseated herself on her bed, the more comfortably to enjoy the show.

CHAPTER 06

“It’s crème brule. Your favorite,” Melanie said.
Odelia’s bed, its frame having collapsed under her rising weight, had been replaced by a King-sized mattress laid flat upon the floor of her room. She sat on it; her back resting on pillows piled up against the wall, wishing she had the willpower necessary to refuse the casserole dish of crème brule that Melanie was holding out to her. Its skin of caramelized sugar shone tantalizingly in the light of the reading lamp that had been set up beside her mattress and her fingers curled of their own volition around the soup spoon Melanie pressed into her hand.
Never had it entered her mind that someday she might experience Melanie waiting on her instead of the other way around. And even more astonishing, that she would resent her sister-in-law for doing it.
“I can’t,” she began, but Melanie shushed her.
“What? Aren’t you hungry?” she asked, all innocence. As if she didn’t know that Odelia was always hungry. As if she didn’t know that Odelia was getting fatter and fatter and fatter, always fatter and that it was terrifying her.
Pushing her hair behind her ear with a manicured nail, Melanie looked sourly at the TV, which Odelia had tuned to a commercial-free movie network. “What are you watching?”
“It’s about a dance-hall girl,” she began and realized she was talking around a mouthful of the custard she didn’t want to eat. God, but it was wonderful. God, but she hated Melanie for giving it to her.
“Couldn’t you bring me things like apples and carrots instead of—”
“There’re showing cameras on Shop/NBC. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather watch that?”
“Yes!” Odelia snapped. “For God’s sake, there are enough presents stacked under that tree for ten Christmases. Can’t I even take a break long enough to watch a movie in peace?”
“I’ll just go make you a milk shake, then.” She turned to leave, but not before dropping a catalog on the mattress. Odelia stubbornly refused to look in its direction. She could not, however, find the willpower to set the dish of crème brule aside. Her stomach had become a yawning pit; her hunger a continuous source of maddening irritation. Whenever she wasn’t actually eating, the only thought she could hold in her head for longer than a few seconds was that she was hungry, hungry, hungry. It was like an ever-thickening cloud of biting insects that surrounded her night and day.
As much of her life as she had spent feeling powerless, the ferocity of this drive still managed to stun and humiliate her. She couldn’t say that she had lost control of herself, since she’d never had any to begin with. The sensation was more like being driven on an interminable car trip to somewhere you never wanted to go and feeling the straight stretch of interstate under your tires swoop down and away without warning, like a roller coaster track.
“How are you doing? Comfy?” Jackson brushed the door with his knuckles, in the sort of courtesy pseudo-knock a friend might use to herald his arrival into one’s inner sanctum. As if he knew he was always welcome, seeing as they were such bestest-ever friends and all. “Anything you need me to ah… take…” his eyes scanned the room hopefully, “or maybe bring you, or do for you…?”
She regarded him sourly. Then her eyes narrowed a grin twitched at the corners of her mouth. “Well, now, seeing as you’re so determined to see to my every need,” she said, flexing her ankles, “I’d luuuuve a foot massage.”
Something twitched in Jackson’s left eyelid. He looked down at the end of the mattress, where her lower legs were sticking out of the end of her improvised toga. It was made of sheets rather cleverly knotted together around her neck. Whenever she outgrew it, Melanie had brightly explained, they could simply add another sheet to the design.
Jackson looked at her feet, took a half-hearted step toward the mattress, and then paused. “COURTNEY!” he bellowed, “GET IN HERE!”
A few seconds later, Courtney, flushed from running, sprinted into the room. Her eyes swept the room. “What’d I get?”
“Rub your aunt’s feet,” Jackson commanded.
Her little face turned red and she glared at her father as she turned on her heel and stomped back out.
Odelia scraped her soup spoon around the rim of the casserole dish. “I’m waiting,” she said.
“BRIAN!” Jackson bellowed. “GET IN HERE!”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Odelia said. “Just go away and leave me—”
“No, no! You want your feet rubbed: you get your feet rubbed. BRIAN!”
“Whatever it is, forget it!” Brian hollered from the other end of the house.
“GET IN HERE RIGHT NOW OR YOU’RE GROUNDED FOR THE NEXT THREE MONTHS, MISTER! What’s that?” Jackson walked around to the side of the bed and picked up the catalog Melanie had left. “Jesus Christ… MELANIE! ARE YOU RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS?”
Scuffling his feet, Brian trudged in. “I don’t care what it is, I’m not touching anything that came from Assville.”
“Rub your Aunt’s feet!”
Courtney had followed her brother. “I don’t see why we have to get butt presents, either. How did Santa get stuck in there anyway? Did she eat him?”
Brian snickered.
“I think we should take a knife and cut him out,” Courtney added solemnly.
“YOU WILL TREAT YOUR AUNT WITH RESPECT, MISSY!” Jackson roared. “I want to see each of you rubbing a foot in the next five seconds, or everything under that tree is going on eBay!”
“What is it?” Melanie had to elbow her children aside to get inside. “Is there a lot?” She was breathless with anticipation.
“Did you leave this here?” Jackson rattled the catalog under her nose and she pouted and looked away. “I thought we agreed nothing sharp! Diamonds? You expect her to shit out diamonds? You can cut glass with diamonds! We have to set limits, Melanie. You know that.”
She pouted and looked guiltily at the floor.
“What if we tear it up and then it doesn’t work any more? Do you want that? Do you?”
“It?” Odelia asked.
“Go ahead!” A gleam had entered Brian’s eyes. “I want you to put them on eBay! Then we can take the money and buy presents that were never ass-nuggets.”
“WHY AREN’T YOU RUBBING FEET YET? Get cracking!”
Under the stern gaze of their father, both kids hesitantly moved forward. Courtney kicked off her Kangaroos and began pulling at her socks.
“NOT YOUR OWN FEET!”
Courtney rolled her eyes. “Do it like this, Brian,” she said, slipping a sock over each of her hands to serve as make-shift mittens. “Then you’re not touching the ickiness.”
“I’d honestly rather you all left me alone to watch TV.” Now that her twin bed had been replaced by the king-sized mattress, there was relatively little floor left for all of these people to stand on. Melanie kept brushing against Odelia’s dresser, making all of the little perfume bottles on top jingle together.
“I don’t think that’s a bad idea,” Melanie was saying. “We’ve got sixteen of those Cobra radar detectors and only two cars. We could sell the extras on eBay. Even if we only get half the retail price, that’s nearly a thousand dollars.”
“Who’s going to run the eBay store? We both have full time jobs and you know the kids can’t be trusted.” Jackson frowned, considering the possibilities.
“Do I get a say in this?” Odelia asked.
“We could hire a couple of high school kids to do the shipping,” Melanie suggested.
“And risk someone finding out about… it?” Jackson lowered his voice to a whisper. “Are you out of your mind?”
The two adults put their heads together and began whispering. Meanwhile, the kids were trying to pick up Odelia’s feet, their hands sheathed in their grubby, sweaty little socks. She flinched from their touch.
“Don’t do that. All of you get out of here and leave me the hell alone. What makes you think you can turn me into an eBay store without even asking? If I want to sell the things I make, I can do it myself!”
“Be sensible, Odelia!” Melanie’s hand flew to her heart. “You can’t handle that sort of work in your condition! You can barely walk to the bathroom and back, and you’re going to print out all those labels and deal with the UPS guy by yourself? How? Besides, how would you even explain how you came by all of these things?”
“How would you?”
Melanie was totally unfazed. “That’s exactly my point—nobody’s going to look at me and think it’s impossible that this woman could be spending her free time running around hunting for bargains so she could resell them, but you… Come on.”
Waving his hand, trying to signal his wife to shut up, Jackson broke in. “All we’re trying to say is we’re here to help you so you don’t have to do these things for yourself. It’s not as if you wouldn’t be benefiting from the money—it would be family money, and you’re part of this family.”
As he droned on, Odelia turned to the TV and tried to read the lips of the actors. It wasn’t as if there was any suspense connected to the outcome of this argument.
What was she going to do? Take her brand new eBay store and hit the road? Waddling down the street in her bed sheet toga with small appliances falling out of her ass every other step? Hello, can I rent this apartment, this car, this computer? No, I don’t have any cash, but here are a hundred tubes of toothpaste that I made with my butt. Consider it a downpayment.
No. There was no point in fighting it. They were going to do what they wanted, and the best she could hope for was that running their new business might keep them busy enough to give her some relief from their company.

CHAPTER 07

“Her ginormous ass finally cracked the toilet,” Brian yelled from the bathroom. “There’s water all over the place!”
Odelia sighed and tried to roll over, but the fat rolls around her middle had grown so numerous and so large that they overlapped one another so that she couldn’t shift her weight without pinching herself. She also couldn’t stand without holding onto a walker and even then her legs felt as if they might snap under the strain. And now she couldn’t even take a pee without cracking the toilet.
If only they would stop feeding her!
OK, then her hunger would probably drive her insane.
But they could listen to her pleas and let her have a few vegetables now and then, instead of whole pounds of bacon and milk shakes served in gallon tubs.
“You’re just going to have to stay home from work again to let the plumber in,” Jackson’s voice rumbled.
“I might as well quit my job, I’ve had to stay home so often this month. Why can’t you do it?”
Odelia sighed and reached for the remote. It would be nice if they every once in a while managed to have a conversation that was spoken rather than shouted. She turned the sound up on the TV to drown them out.
Flicking the remote, she found an old movie. Arsenic and Old Lace, with Cary Grant… Just the kind of thing they hated to catch her ‘wasting’ her time on; too old to feature any of the expensive little electronic toys that fetched such high prices for them at auction, and without commercial interruptions. So it would show her none of the sort of images they wanted to be transmitted to and cloned by her magical ass. If her loving family had their way, she would never get to look at anything else.
She was turning out almost as many iPods as Steve Jobs. If only she could keep one… but if she did, they’d make sure it was loaded with nothing but commercials.
“BED PANS? How can I possibly bring her bed pans? I’d have to quit my job altogether!” Melanie’s always shrill voice had developed a razor-sharp edge.
“Have you looked at our receipts from the business? Financially, it makes more sense for you to quit your job and run the eBay store full-time!”
There was a long silence. Odelia smiled to herself, picturing the expression on Melanie’s face at that little speech. As if tending to her fat sister-in-law’s magical mutating ass was a venture into entrepreneurship and she should jump at the opportunity. Welcome to my world, she thought. What do you need with a career? You’re a woman, and there are bedpans to be emptied!
Bedpans… Dear Christ…
Odelia shivered. How could she live like that?
What had she become? And how much more might she change before the process either ran its course or killed her?
“I don’t think bedpans are a very good idea,” Melanie was saying. She had gotten control of her voice, Odelia noted, and adopted a tone of sober reasoning. There was nothing to slap a person to their senses like the thought of a lifetime of ferrying piss pots to and fro. Good luck getting out of it, sweetie. It’s a cinch there’s no toilet on the market that will hold me at this point. Indeed, it was remarkable that the one they’d had lasted as long as it did, and they didn’t make ‘em like that any more.
“But even if I did stay home, I’d still have to leave her alone occasionally,” Melanie said, in her best ‘I’m just being practical’ voice. “Think about it. I’m the one who does things like grocery shop now that she can’t, and in case you haven’t noticed that takes a lot of time these days. Unless you want to spend your evening on either bedpan duty or running errands.”
“Well what do you suggest? If we diaper her, piss will get all over our inventory!”
“Jesus Christ, Dad,” Brian sneered, “Like it’s clean in butt town.”
“But they do come out clean—there’s no smell and they come out dry and spotless—”
“It’s still gross.”
“If you think there’s no difference, go dip your iPod in piss and then try to get it to work. Come to me then and tell me how there’s no difference.”
Odelia had had enough. “Stop talking about me like I’m not here!” she called out. “Don’t you think I should have some say in this?”
She was greeted by silence.
Evidently, no, they didn’t see any reason she should have any say. Oh, well. At least they’d quieted down enough to let her hear the movie. Peter Lorre was begging the actor who should have been Boris Karloff but wasn’t to kill Cary Grant the quick way. But the guy who should be Boris Karloff was having none of it. It seemed that Cary Grant was his brother, and as such had earned a long, slow, agonizing death.
If she were killing Jackson, she’d do it the quick way.
Not because he’d earned mercy, but because she wouldn’t want to spend any extra time in his company if she could help it. Ergo, the guy who wasn’t Boris Karloff and Cary Grant had a closer and healthier relationship than she and Jackson.
She sighed, and tried again to roll onto her side.
Pain shot through her abdomen, the sort of deep pain that let her know she would be increasing their ‘inventory’ sometime in the next hour. She wondered whether, if she kept watching this movie, she would produce one of the props. And whether it would come out in shades of black and white. That would be kind of cool. She had half a mind to watch nothing but cartoons for an afternoon just to see what ass-creations that would spark. The really old, black and white cartoons, where everything moved like it was made out of rubber bands.
As if they would let that much time go by without thrusting a catalog or something into her hands…
Bedpans…
Dear God, she prayed, Why are You doing this to me?
Her query was greeted, of course, only by silence. Silence as deep, as wide, as mysterious as her magic ass itself.

CHAPTER 08
“I’m sorry. It’s not as if this is any more fun for me than it is for you,” Melanie said.
A tear trickled from the corner of Odelia’s eye and rolled into her ear.
Melanie was kneeling beside her mattress checking her equipment against the printed out list she held in her hand. “Let’s see… Lubricating jelly, surgical gloves; syringe; water; antiseptic wipes; drainage receptacle;” she patted the pile of huge plastic bags with anti-reflux valves so what went in wouldn’t back up, “and catheter.”
The two women exchanged commiserating glances, and then Melanie began removing her rings. “Are you ready?” she asked.
Odelia was too miserable to speak. I’ll never be ready for this, she thought as she nodded her assent.
Briskly rubbing her hands with an antiseptic wipe, Melanie said gently and quietly, “Spread your legs.”
This was easier said than done. Odelia had to lift her belly with both hands and drape her folds of flesh about her, just so, in order to manage it without hurting herself. When this was finally accomplished, Melanie pulled free a fresh wipe and read aloud the first step on the instruction sheet. “Clean the labia and urethral meatus using downward strokes. Avoid the anus.”
She snorted and even Odelia managed a smile. All of the equipment about to be used had issued forth from that opening ordinarily to be avoided as a source of contamination. Odelia steeled herself for the coming physical contact. It had been two years since her last gynecological exam, which was also the last time she’d been touched there by any hands other than her own. She couldn’t decide which she found more repellent; the physical sensation or its accompanying shame.
Melanie tossed the soiled wipes aside and reached for the sterile gloves. “Lubricate the catheter and locate the meatus opening, below the clitoris and above the vagina,” she read. “It says you might feel a little pressure as it goes in.”
Odelia held her breath as the catheter was inserted. If having it in place turned out to be as uncomfortable as getting it there, she didn’t know how she would bear it.
But she simply couldn’t get on and off the bedpan any more. It was all she could do to roll over often enough to avoid the formation of bed sores. And diapers… Thank God her family was terrified of the effect diapering would have on the magical ass’s artifacts. Otherwise, she might find herself marinating in her own piss for hours on end, waiting for a fresh diaper. As horrifying as catheterization was, it was better than—
“Ouch!”
“Sorry. I must have started inflating the balloon before the tube was far enough into the bladder. Wait a second… there, does that hurt?”
It wasn’t the most comfortable Odelia had ever been. But it was tolerable. “No, it’s fine,” she said.
Melanie helped her rearrange her sheet/toga in a more modest configuration. It wasn’t often that Odelia felt sorry for her sister-in-law, but the misery she now saw on Melanie’s face echoed her own. Perhaps she wasn’t simply upset on her own behalf, either, but experiencing pangs of empathy.
It wasn’t likely.
But it was possible.
This was the closest the two women had ever come to sharing a bonding moment. Surprisingly, neither of them made a move to break the spell.
Melanie crossed her legs Indian-style and cocked her head to one side. “How do you think this happened? I mean… Well, I don’t really know what I mean, if you know what I mean.”
They laughed, but not light-heartedly. The Big Unspoken Question had been finally been uttered.
Twisting a corner of one of her sheets in her fingers, Odelia hesitantly ventured to answer. “There’s obviously no biological or scientific explanation. Which doesn’t leave much. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t leave anything.”
“And yet…”
“And yet, here I am, being and doing and trapped in the impossible. It’s not as if I haven’t thought and thought about it. I can be sound asleep and the thought of it will swim up into my conscious mind and startle me awake like a fire alarm went off right next to my ear.”
Melanie’s pinched little features flushed, and she chewed her lip with embarrassment. “Then you don’t have any sensation of having been touched by… Him? It doesn’t feel like a gift from God.”
This time Odelia’s laughter was unreserved, straight from the gut. She laughed so hard a cluster of tightly-rolled catheter collection bags sprayed out of her ass and unfurled themselves in a fan shape across the floor. “If this is God’s idea of a gift, he’s not as omniscient as he’s cracked up to be. In fact, God is an asshole! A giant, magical asshole!”
Melanie gasped. “So you don’t feel any connection to God at all, even though you’re literally sitting on a miracle.”
“Shouldn’t a miracle make your life better in some way? Look at me! I can barely move. I’m in pain most of the time. My body isn’t even human any more. What’s the opposite of a miracle? Wait—I know. A nightmare. I’m living a nightmare.”
They sat together in silence, each lost in her own thoughts for a time.
“What if…” Melanie slowly began “I… put you on a diet. A liquid diet. You could still eat so you wouldn’t be hungry all of the time, but they’d be those diet shakes like Oprah used to lose all that weight.” She cocked an eyebrow and smiled conspiratorially. “Jackson probably wouldn’t even notice. Not for a while, anyway.”
“You’d do that?” Odelia felt a strange sensation steal over her. A lightness; a buoyancy…
Hope!

CHAPTER 09
“You can roll onto your back now,” Melanie said.
She had used a curved upholstery needle to sew a queen-sized mattress to the side of Odelia’s original king-sized one. The room wasn’t big enough to hold two king ones side-by-side.
Idly, Odelia wondered what they would do when she became so big she overlapped the new mattress configuration. Would they knock down a wall? Build an addition onto the house? It was hardly worth wasting a thought on. Surely she would die before she got that big. Wouldn’t she? How big could a human being become before their heart would no longer bear up under the strain?
“Can you look something up for me?”
Melanie paused in the act of tucking a sheet corner under the mattress. “Of course. What?”
“I want to know the height, width, and weight of the biggest human beings who’ve ever lived. Look on the Guinness Book of World Records site.”
She shook her head and frowned. “You don’t want to be in the Guinness Book. If people found out about you, the government would swoop down and carry you away, probably to one of those Eastern Block black-ops prisons where they can do anything they want to people. That or a lab, where they’ll study you to find out how your… thingie… works and see if they can’t make more of you.”
Until Melanie mentioned it, the thought hadn’t occurred to her. It was an interesting one.
If she was a world record holder, she’d be famous. As a freak, of course, not a celebrity… But weren’t all celebrities freaks to some extent? She could probably go on David Letterman. Maybe even as a regular. She could crap out things they could then play “Will It Float?” with.
But Melanie had a point. She wasn’t just unusual, like someone who happens to possess unusual height, weight, talent, or extra limbs. She was monstrous; her condition a crime against all known laws of nature. God only knew how people would react if they knew. Would she be celebrated or stoned? If there really were Men in Black, she was definitely the sort of person they would swoop down on.
“No,” she said. “But look it up anyway. I just want to know.”
“More slop for the trough.” Approaching her with a pitcher of shake mix and a sneer on his face, Brian took her extra-long twisty straw from the empty pitcher by her bedside and put it in the new one. “Happy slurping, turd factory.”
Despite the increased warmth of their relationship, Melanie didn’t turn a hair at this. She even patted the little brat’s back as he carried the empty pitcher back to the kitchen.
Knowing that complaining would get her nothing but a blank stare, Odelia took a sip of her diet shake. Chocolate again. It was amazing how tired a person could get of the taste of chocolate, even surprisingly good chocolate. But she refused to break down and beg for real food. Despite the fact that she had actually gained weight while eating nothing but diet shakes, that didn’t necessarily mean it was doing nothing. If she had been eating real food, the high calorie stuff she’d been on before, she might have put on twice as much. If only it were possible to exercise. Or even simply sit upright. She had learned how to best arrange her fat rolls so that it was less of an ordeal to turn over on her side, but she couldn’t find any way to push and pull them that would allow her to bend at the waist.
“I read that it can take up to six weeks for a diet to start having an effect, so it still might work,” Melanie said, and smiled encouragingly. “If it hasn’t by then, I’ll try another brand. Don’t give up—it’s only a matter of time. We’ll get it right.”
Odelia nodded. Just knowing that somebody in the house was finally on her side made her weepy with gratitude. “I’m going to try to make this pitcher last longer than the last one. Because it has to be the quantity I’m drinking that’s causing the diet to fail—”
“Oh, no! Don’t do that!” Melanie’s tone was stern. “These shakes are designed to make you lose more weight the more you drink! It supposedly takes more calories to digest this stuff than it has in it. That’s the point of the diet.”
“Really? You didn’t tell me that before!”
“I wouldn’t have chosen something that made you have to take in a smaller volume of food. I know that would make you utterly miserable.”
And possibly, Odelia thought to herself, less productive. But it would be too much to ask that Melanie’s motives be wholly selfless. She simply wasn’t that sort of person. That she was being helpful at all was much more than Odelia had ever expected. To reward her for her efforts, Odelia drew a titanic swallow through her straw.
Hesitantly, Melanie handed her a catalog, a new one. “Could you maybe…”
“I didn’t know Tiffany’s even had a catalog.” Jackson would have a fit if he knew she was asking for jewelry again. But she was being so helpful, and so kind… and if the piece to be cloned were chosen with some care, perhaps something with cabochon stones… Cabochons were smooth. Or beads…
Yes, beads. She could manage beads. That wouldn’t be any harder on her than most of the other things she was making. Less, probably.
“Maybe,” Odelia said. “We’ll see.”

CHAPTER 10
“Jackson, can I please use your car?” Odelia asked.
The family was clustered around the big screen TV in the living room, watching Wheel of Fortune together. Courtney had even turned her GameBoy off.
“Fat chance, fat ass,” Brian said.
“If there’s anything you need, it’s exercise, and you want to drive four blocks to the grocery store? I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous in my life,” Melanie added.
“Jackson, I asked you a question.”
Two vehicles sitting in the driveway, but was she ever allowed to use one? No. If her feet couldn’t take her there and back, she could just plain forget about going. It was ridiculous.
“You’re buying a vowel?” Jackson said. “Where do they get these people?”
“Jackson!”
Resentfully, her brother turned his head far enough away from the television screen to look at her. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Can’t you see Wheel is on?”
With a sigh, Odelia walked through the living room, into the kitchen, and out to the garage, to collect her little red wagon from where it sat behind the lawn mower.
It was humiliating to have to walk through the neighborhood dragging that little red wagon. If she weren’t so huge yet, she could get a bicycle. That would be nice; then she could go fast enough for the wind to ruffle through her hair. It would be nice to move fast enough to feel the air resist your passing. Something like that must make a person really feel as if they’re getting somewhere.
Still, it was good just to be able to walk. To feel the cracks in the concrete sidewalk through the soles of her loafers and smell the tar on the railway ties as she and the wagon rattled over the crossing…
As always, she left the wagon on the sidewalk beside the automatic doors, and replaced it with a cart as soon as she entered into the welcoming swoosh of cool air. Musak played softly as nozzles on automatic timers misted the produce.
Produce… spinach and carrots and snow peas and celery… She paused the cart and lifted down a head of cauliflower and set it carefully in the cart, aligning its edges squarely with the edge of the cart. Then she added a bag of baby carrots, stacking it neatly on top of the cauliflower, making sure the edges were perfectly flush again. The bananas were just the right shade of green-tinged yellow with no brown anywhere on the peels. She added a bunch of them to her cart, neatly stacking it on top of the other boxes of butter already in the cart. Radishes and cabbage and collard greens were added in neat little cubicle piles. Then she moved onto the fruit, buying two kinds of apples: sweet cream and salted.
She left the produce section with her cart filled to the brim with fresh, dairy butter.
Odelia awoke with a gasp, sweaty despite her lack of bedding, one of the sheets from her toga tangled around her arm.
The clock beside her mattresses glowed 5:46 AM, but she knew it would be useless to try to get back to sleep, so she groped for the remote. Her remote had become her only point of access to the world beyond her mattress, and as such, precious, so she always felt a stab of fear in those few seconds before her fingers found their target.
Channel surfing until she found a commercial-free channel, she settled in and tried to take her mind off her nightmare, but she may as well have been looking through a kaleidoscope for all the sense she could make of the images in front of her. The harder she tried to lose weight, the fatter she became. She had stuck faithfully to the liquid diet Melanie had put her on, despite her yearnings for something, anything, in the way of variation. If it hadn’t been for the nauseating sense that she would be literally cannibalizing herself, she might have been tempted to create something else for her to eat. But thankfully, the sense of horror accompanying this thought was more than she could get past, and Melanie had proved strong enough to say no to her occasional bursts of tears and begging.
Yet here she was, by far the fattest human being who had ever lived. When your ass is so wide that it overlaps a king-sized mattress sewed side-by-side to a queen-sized one, confirmation from Guinness becomes superfluous.
Hunger drove her arm to the pitcher beside her bed, although she knew the dregs left were several hours old. It would be another forty-five minutes before they brought her breakfast, though, and her hunger was maddening.
The last of the shake had not only settled to the bottom of the pitcher, but had separated into layers. Its various components, she supposed. Well, that was one way to get some sort of variation in its flavor, let it sit until it separated out. She pulled the straw free and shook it out, then lowered it carefully into the top layer of the liquid and drew in.
The flavor was unmistakable.
The top and thickest layer of the shake’s components was nothing other than butter. Melted, unsalted sweet cream butter.
With a cry of horror, Odelia flung the pitcher against the wall.

Melanie was the first of the family to reach the room. Her hair was tangled and was still in the process of tying her bathrobe around herself when the door slammed open and she ran in. “What in the name of hell is this racket about?”
Tears were streaming down Odelia’s face. “Butter! You’re feeding me BUTTER!”
“What?” Melanie’s jaw dropped and she looked around in confusion. “What the hell…?” Bending over, she picked up a shard of the broken glass pitcher and examined the splash pattern left where it had impacted on the wallpaper. “BRIAN! GET IN HERE, NOW!”
Sullen thudding footsteps announced his imminent arrival.
“What the hell do you want?”
Melanie slapped him right across the face. If Odelia hadn’t seen it with her own eyes, she never would have believed it. While far from perfect parents, up until now, they at least refrained from hitting their demon spawn.
“You have one chore to see to, just one, and this is how you do it?” She raised her hand to slap him a second time and he flinched.
“What the hell are you so mad about? I kept the trough slopped, just like you said!”
“You’re supposed to remove the last pitcher, to take it to the kitchen before she goes to sleep at night. You didn’t do that, did you?”
What the…? “Are you kidding me? That’s what you’re mad about! My diet shakes are at least one fourth butter and you’re only mad because he let it sit?” Then she stopped. Of course that was why she was angry. It didn’t anger her that Odelia had been guzzling pounds of butter every day, but that Odelia had found out.
Her shakes were unvarying in flavor, no matter whose turn it was to prepare and bring them to her. So every single member of the family had to have been doing it, not just Brian. With Melanie in charge, directing it all.
“How could you do this to me? I trusted you.” Tears choked her words off. Here she had been making herself swallow as much of the mixture as possible, in order to maximize its slimming effect! She should have known that nothing truly ‘diet’ could have worked so well at satisfying her unnaturally intense hunger. She should have known its taste was too rich to be artificial.
But she hadn’t wanted to know. It had been such a comfort to think that somebody wanted to help, that one member of her family actually wished her well. The feeling had been too dear a thing to let logic have its way with.
How exhausting it was to be betrayed… She was almost too drained to be angry.
Almost.

CHAPTER 11

It was only hour three of her hunger strike, and already she was close to breaking.
Her pooping strike was proving, surprisingly, to be at least a little less painful. This is not to say there was no pain at all, but that the pain was purely a physical sensation without the incessant forceful longing that accompanied her appetite. Probably because desire was an unnecessary element when it came to outflow, but if you didn’t want to eat, you didn’t search out food and actively put it in your mouth. Once she succumbed to the desire to eat, eventually the trinkets would resume flowing from the other end no matter how she strained to prevent it.
Unless she made her bowel so impacted that flow was impossible and it simply built up inside her until something ruptured and she was mercifully released into death. Didn’t Elvis die from constipation? Yeah… he fell off his toilet dead from the strain of trying to poop. Hmmm… But he had accomplished this unusual feat with the aid of lots and lots of drugs, opiates that paralyzed the muscles of his digestive tract. Too bad they didn’t advertise things like OxyContin on TV the way they did Viagra. If she could see a few tablets, maybe she could manufacture them…
But they did advertise rat poison…! Yes… that would do it. That would be perfect, if she could only get past the fact it would mean swallowing something that came out of her ass. No matter how she tried to get past this aversion, she simply couldn’t. Her throat closed up at the mere mental image.
Ordinarily, she would have rejected thoughts of suicide as irrational, but these were hardly ordinary times. In fact, her suicidal ideation was a welcome relief from her thoughts of food, food, food and food, and how good even the tiresome butter-laden concoction at her bedside smelled to her right now.