2 - A Pound for Flesh

Asenath smiled as she picked up the next candle. It was slender, and as white as her dress. She held it with both hands, elbows on her knees, and her voice was soft as she said, without preamble:

"I call this story,

A POUND FOR FLESH

Sisa had always been a rather heavyset young woman. British food and plenty of it had combined with a Peruvian grandmother who expressed love through cooking and had the inevitable results. Babyfat from childhood had never really faded. Her brown cheeks remained pudgy, and no amount of exercise or dieting seemed to shift her potbelly or thick thighs. Asthma kept her from hard running or sports.

When Sisa went to university, she had hoped to turn a chapter in her life—to find some new balance that would let her slim down. She had never imagined being one of the skinny, fit girls, but she hoped to avoid the onset of actual obesity. Yet there was the stress of her studies, of the strange new place with the catty girls who made fun of her weight, and the food at the student cafeteria tended more toward greasy curries and fries than salads and lean meat.

The freshman fifteen put Sisa over two hundred pounds. Her clothes were tight on her full figure, and she had no money to buy new ones.

That was when one of the skinny white girls in her dorm handed her the flyer.

BIG GIRL? £££ EARN MONEY! £££

"So, like, I do this modeling, off-campus?" the bottle-blonde girl said. Her name was Daisy, though everyone on the floor called her Ditzy behind her back, because nearly every sentence sounded like a question, even if it wasn't. "Glamour shots, right? And lately they've been wanting to expand out, and they're looking for some curvaceous girls, right? And I thought of you, because there's this finder's fee?"

It seemed too good to be true. Yet Sisa answered the advertisement.

Mr. Ocathsip was from the same region of Peru as Sisa's grandmother. A pale man with dark eyes and a thin dark suit, neither black nor grey. His studio was not far from campus, in an old converted warehouse, and he used real film cameras, not digital.

He gave her lingerie to wear. Sisa felt self-conscious to have her bare stomach poking out from her nightie. To show so much cleavage. To have him focus in on her huge ass. Yet Mr. Ocathsip smiled and said how perfect she was as they took the shots. There was a big bed, and Sisa was asked to position herself on it, this way and that. The camera clicked.

Then Mr. Ocathsip asked if she would like to make a little more money.

Sisa felt guilty, as the nightie came off. Yet excited too. No one had seen her as attractive before. Her saggy breasts jiggled, the small, hard nipples stretched. For the first time in her life, Sisa felt a little sexy. Then an odd thing happened—her stomach growled, and Mr. Ocathsip seemed to quiver, his whole body gone rigid.

Mr. Ocathsip asked if she was hungry. There was a birthday cake, in the small fridge in his office. Was she hungry? Would she like some?

There was more money.

Sisa found herself seated on the edge of the bed, her face buried in the frosting as she ate and ate as the camera clicked and clicked. When it was over, Mr. Ocathsip let her shower, and Sisa left a thousand British pounds richer in money, but with the terrible feeling that something of herself had been given away.

Of course, a thousand pounds doesn't go as far as a young woman would like, when you're over two hundred pounds in weight. Thrift shops rarely have clothes, and as Sisa's bras to contain her jiggling, sloshy tits had to be custom-made. She fingered the card he had pressed into her hand, as she left. Mr. Ocathsip was willing to take more pictures. He just had some very specific clients, he explained. They liked big girls. The bigger the better. They liked to see them get bigger.

So she ate. One day it was three large pizzas. Another day, mounds of potatoes cooked in a dozen different ways. A third shoot, he had five gallons of protein shake, attached to a hose, and she laid on the bed and let gravity pour it down her throat. Every time, she left feeling heavy, her stomach strained to its limit, the excess calories dedicated straight to her hips and thighs, her jiggly breasts and her fat stomach that already overhung her pussy.

Yet every time she felt worse. Emptier inside, not physically, but as if she had lost a part of herself. The young women in the dorm noticed her increasing weight. She could hear their jokes about the little piggy fattening herself up. At night, as she collapsed onto her too-small bed, the springs creaking in protest, Sisa would cry. There were days when she hardly left her dorm room. Took as many classes as she could online. Anything to avoid the stares and jeers of everyone else.

It was when she broke three hundred pounds that Mr. Ocathsip offered her something else. Not to gain weight. Quite the opposite.

"Liposuction," he said. "If you're willing, I'll pay you for each pound of fat."

Sisa did not know what he would do with that fat. A part of her didn't care. She was tired of being fat. Of getting out of breath just going up the stairs. Of buying huge clothes that fit her like a tent. The weight of it, of all she had done to try and get rid of it, and the pictures that Ocathsip took had seemed to drain her of whatever dignity and hope she had to ever lose the weight on her own.

She no longer dreamed of being one of those skinny, beautiful young women. She didn't dream at all. Her nights were filled with claustrophobic impressions of the walls closing in on her, of being trapped inside her own massive body, immobile, unable to ever leave her small dorm room. The same nightmare, night after night.

So she said yes. Signed all the paperwork.

The day came, and it was at a private clinic. Getting undressed for the procedure wasn't much different than stripping for Ocathsip's camera. She lay on the bed, wheezing gently as a man in a surgeon's gown fixed a mask over her face, and told her to breathe, to count backwards. She did. Yet the darkness never came. Not entirely. Sisa felt a sharp pain in her, as something pierced her body, cold and hard. The sound of suction started...and then the long, slow agony as it moved around, beneath her skin...

When Sisa returned to the dormitory, the other girls didn't recognize her. The brown skin, once so taut, sagged empty around a young woman who was little more than skin and bones. Her old bra, that hung off Sisa's gaunt frame, was stuffed full of pound notes. Only Daisy was there with Sisa as the poor young thing collapsed into bed, breathing hard. None of Sisa's clothes fit, and her once massive breasts were little more than deflated balloons. In her delirium, the young woman told Daisy the story. The same story Daisy told to the police later, except for one thing.

On that table, in that clinic that Daisy never learned the name of, as Sisa lay on the table half-****, out of the corner of her eye she saw Mr. Ocathsip standing over her. He had long tube in his mouth, and gobs of yellow fat were being sucked into his maw, cheeks hollowing out with each intake of breath.

Perhaps it was an hallucination, brought on by the anasthetic. When Sisa fell asleep that night, she never woke up. Organ failure, the coroner said. That can happen, when body fat drops too low. And Daisy, who had given Sisa the flyer, and saw the wasted body surrounded by the money she could no longer spend and the clothes that she could no longer wear, got depressed. She began to stress eat. As her body filled out, her clothes got tighter, and she couldn't afford new ones. And...well, that's another story.

Asenath's smile was sad as she blew out the second candle.