The private exhibition

Chapter 4 - part 4

From now on, as my eyes travel further to the right, every piece on that wall seems to depict me as just a little fatter. As I look from one to another, my body balloons at an alarming rate. My once graceful neck has been lost under a roll of soft flesh. My shoulders have turned to plush pillows and my boobs to flat, sagging sacks of fat. My once taught tummy has grown ever wider and heavier -- it hangs ever lower until, soon enough, it has completely hidden my nethers from view. My once pleasantly rounded buttocks have turned to vast, square slabs, my thighs to pillars of rippling flesh. With every new sketch, the fat further infests and reshapes my body.

These drawings portray a woman who has given up on herself, who has turned her life over to her appetite, who has given her body over to food. She is, quite simply, a hopeless pig.

As I look at all these pieces of his, the pleasure he took in depicting my sorry state is only too clear to see. His portraits put an astonishing attention to detail into depicting as my features sink into my fat, as my face grows wider and rounder. My eyes, now so small as they sit in the middle of my full, flushed moon of a face, have long since lost any hint of the gleam they once had. Now, they're placid and dull, the eyes of a woman who cares for nothing but food.

His figure drawings, meanwhile, capture with loving care the way in which all my drooping rolls and folds have come to impede my mobility, how they fill my hopelessly tight clothes and ooze out of them. At this point, his art has come to focus entirely on my fat, on capturing the way it sits on my body, the way it shifts and changes with every laboured move I make. Now, to him, my obesity is all that defines me.

As I continue to grow, his art starts to focus, more than ever, on my eating. From here on, the wall is crowded with swift sketches of me as I stuff my face, a dozen studies that seek to capture every aspect of my overconsumption. All these small pieces soon lead up to a far larger one. A huge painting titled, simply: 'Gluttony'.

It is, I must admit, one of the most awe-inspiring works that his hand has brought into being. It shows me, completely naked, with all my flab hanging out for the world to see, right in the middle of a binge. My chin is smeared with food and my eyes are closed as I sit there, lost in a piggish haze. My expression demonstrates only too well the overwhelming extasy of overindulgence, while my body, covered in cellulite and stretchmarks, offers a sobering reminder of its consequences.

The piece captures me exactly as I am. It shows, all too well, just what he has turned me into.

My stomach lets out a rumble and I return to the present, to my unbearable hunger.

"Please, sweetie," I say, looking towards the canvas behind which my husband is hidden. "can't this be enough for today? I'm so hungry."

He doesn't look out from behind his painting, his arm continues to move, his brush continues to make its subtle strokes.

"Just a little while longer," he says. "I've almost got this down."

I frown but say nothing. I know there's no point in arguing. I'll get my food in good time. Until then, there's nothing I can do.

I direct my gaze back to the wall before me, to another of his paintings. In this one, I'm sat at a bench in a lush garden. A drowsy, beaming smile on my face as my belly rests in my lap, as my wide backside spreads across the seat beneath me. From a gleaming diadem on my head hangs a sheer, white shroud. All my loose, drooping flesh has been squeezed into a gorgeous, if slightly too tight, white dress, obviously tailored to lend some semblance of shape to my 340-pound body.

The painting puts a great deal of emphasis on how my fat strains against the restricting fabric, as though yearning to break free. A choice that, I think, shows all too clearly what sort of a future my new husband had planned for me. As I look into the eyes of that bulging bride, I can tell that she knows, just as well as I, that she's never going to be this thin again.

By the time he proposed to me, I'd long since given myself over to a life of mindless gluttony. Bit by bit, I'd come to accept myself for the pampered pig that I was rather than the goddess of femininity I'd once wished to be. Still, when, one evening, after having taken me out for a huge dinner, followed by a sizeable ice cream sundae, he got down on his knees and presented me with a ring, I still found myself taken aback. As I stared at that glittering piece of jewellery, I knew only too well what sort of a life I'd be signing up for if I agreed.

If I accepted his proposal, I would, I knew, spend the rest of my life being stuffed like a pig for market. I'd be his fat, pampered pet. A lazy, pathetic pillow princess with no life outside of food. The thought filled me in equal parts with longing and horror. In the end, I wasn't slow to say yes.

Once we had married, once I had, fully and truly, sworn myself over to him, my beloved's attitude towards me soon changed. Though still every bit as loving as he always had been, he seemed, all of a sudden, to have gotten harsher, more commanding. He started to feed me like never before. No longer taking no for an answer, he would force me to eat every last crumb he put before me, to stuff my face until my stomach felt just about ready to burst, until it hurt so bad that tears would run down my cheeks.

Having moved me, without much warning, to our new home -- a remote place far from any friends and family -- and left me in this room, on this bed, he turned my life into one long, overwhelming feast. As my appetite grew, he fed me more and more, until, finally, my hunger never seemed to go away.

I suppose, once upon a time, I could've tried to resist, or at least to object to what he was doing to me. But by then, I'd already grown so used to obeying his every word, to never bothering to think for myself. And so, as he forced me to eat more than I could ever have dreamed that my stomach could take, as he poured shakes filled with cream and protein powder down my throat, I simply did as he said. I responded without question as he started to refer to me as his 'precious pig' and his 'well-fed whale'. Since he brought me here, I have done little but to sit on my butt and eat as my body spreads uncontrollably around me.

"So," he says, smiling slightly as he looks out from behind his canvas, "that should do it for today, I think."

My eyes widen and my face lights up like the sun.

"You mean..."

"Time for fatty to have her reward," he nods. "But first," he grabs his canvas and turns it around, "let's have a look."

I stare at the painting before me. It's a masterpiece, of that there's no doubt. The pose is the same as the one in the first painting he ever made of me, all those years ago. Or, at least, as close to it as I can get these days. The painting shows me, reclined in bed, staring at the viewer, my naked obesity displayed in all its glory. As I look at it, I can't help but to marvel at the sheer, impossible size of the woman it depicts.

Her dark, luscious hair flows, like silk down her blubbery shoulders, framing her ripe, spherical face. Her features are afloat in a sea of flab, her regular chin dwarfed by the huge, swollen second one that it rests atop. Her body is a shapeless collection of rolls, any hint of firmness having long since sunken to the bottom of the vast ocean of flesh that is her body.

"So," asks he, "what do you think?"

Looking into the eyes of that immense whale of a woman, I find myself, quite simply, astonished. Unable to believe that anybody could ever be that fat. At this point, it's impossible to see her as anything but a blob of unmoving blubber, as an overgorged circus freak, an unbelievable marvel of nature.

Still, as the girl in the painting stares back at me, I find myself reflected perfectly in her small, sleepy, docile eyes.

"It's brilliant," I say at last, before pausing a moment. "Now, could you please bring me something to eat."

He smirks and heads off upstairs. Soon, he will return with my next 'little' feast.

Once, back when the two of us had just met, he told me that, to him, art was that which served no purpose other than pleasure, that which existed only to be admired and enjoyed. By that standard, I am his greatest piece. A woman whose body has long since turned to a barely mobile mass of dough, whose once lean limbs have been rendered useless by drooping rolls, so heavy that she can hardly lift them.

The room in which I spend my days is no ordinary bedroom. It is a private exhibit hall, a museum dedicated to what he has done to me, where my body is the centrepiece, the true artwork on display.