Getting Fat

On the evening of 29th January Hilda Merton noticed that she was getting fat. When she grabbed her stomach there was a handful that shouldn’t be there and when she looked in the bathroom mirror a fat version of herself looked back at her.

Her husband Tom assured her not to worry, he’d still shag her, though she noticed that night that he didn’t, in fact he hadn’t for nearly two months.

Hilda decided to diet. She gave up all meats, fats and sugars, living off fruit and vegetables and the occasional rice cake. She signed up to go to the gym with her friend Tricia, who’d been asking her to go for ages, “do you good” she’d said, “it’s only natural, we all need a bit of exercise”. Tom told her she was silly and insisted she still cook him his fry-up every evening, while she just had salad. He made sure that the fridge was stocked with beers and snacks before he’d let her leave for the gym.

Hilda felt much healthier, at least after the initial jolt as the sugar left her system, and a spring returned to her step that hadn’t been there, she realised, for several years. She speeded up, walking more briskly as she trundled her trolley round the supermarket, lifting the laundry basket was no longer a strain, even hoovering became a pleasant experience.

But a week later, alone in bed while Tom played poker into the small hours with Barney and Steve, she found that the bulge was still there, in fact it had grown. The next morning she found she could no longer fit into the largest of her dresses, and had to phone Tricia to borrow one of her old maternity outfits.

She went to her doctor, who looked at her, weighed her, and told her “We all get fat as we grow old.” She left with a diet sheet, which she stuck to rigidly for five days. It was when she could no longer fit into Tricia’s maternity dresses that she knew she had a problem.

“God you’re fat,” Tom said to her one morning, as he was leaving for work at the slaughterhouse, “you should do something about your weight.”

After that she gave up food altogether, living off water, as she’d seen IRA hunger strikers do on the telly when she was young. She dressed herself in clothes she made out of old sheets, until Tricia brought round a catalogue from a company that specialised in outsized clothes. “I’ve been trying to get you to that gym for ages” she reminded Hilda, “I knew something like this would happen.”

But even with just water, which she restricted to just two pints a day, her body continued to swell. She spent 12 hours of every day exercising, four hours at the gym, four hours swimming, followed by a ten mile run. Tricia told her she was crazy, “your heart’ll never take it dear,” but she continued in desperation, losing several buckets of perspiration over the course of every day, literally flinging sweat from her wobbling body parts as she ran. But still she continued to grow.

“It’s probably psychological,” suggested her brother, who introduced her to a specialist in this sort of thing. A psychiatrist. “Not that you’re mad or anything, everyone goes to a psychiatrist these days.”

“You are not fat,” the specialist advised her, “you merely think you are fat. You must start thinking that you are thin, and you will be thin.”

It took three of the psychiatrist’s staff to lift her out of the soft sofa, into the very bottom folds of which she had sunk. She went home in absolute despair.

On the 29th February Hilda climbed to the very top floor of the tower block in which she lived (the lift was broken), onto the roof that was littered with spent condoms and empty beer cans. She stood for several minutes on the ledge, looking down with contempt at the sludge of the city below. Even as she stood there she could feel her body growing. She was disgusted with herself, she could pick up literal armfuls of fat and still there would be more seeping down from her stomach, nearly reaching the ground.

In fact, she noticed, she was growing far faster than she’d ever grown before. She could actually see her stomach expanding, splitting even the tent sized dress she was wearing, apparently the biggest dress ever built for human use. Her naked bloating body could be seen for miles around, a great pink blob on the top of the tower block, yet still it continued to grow and grow.

Yet though she grew fatter and fatter Hilda felt she was getting less heavy, in fact as she stood there, in enormous nudity, she could feel her body being lifted by the wind. She laughed to herself at this mad thought, but a moment or so later her body had been swept away by a particularly strong breeze and she was flying.

Hilda let the wind’s currents take her, high above the city, into the land of the clouds. She flew like a balloon, a bloated pink novelty in the sky, causing excitement in the widened eyes of a girl far down below in the slimy city streets. Hilda felt happier now than she’d ever felt, finally free of a loveless marriage, rising above a detestable, dirty world she never cared for and that had certainly never cared for her.

Yes, Hilda decided, I would be much happier living here as a balloon, and with one last great wobble of her bottom directed at the earth-tied people below, she soared upwards to immerse herself within a cloud, after which she was never seen again.