Chapter 1 - There’s a monster in the woods

They were coming. The Ghouls. It’s all they’ve been talking about on the news lately. I was watching my stories, as I’m prone to do most weekdays in the early afternoon when there was an “interruption in my regularly scheduled program”. I was ready to turn it off, but couldn’t quite reach the remote on the end table next to my bed, so I just continued to watch hoping it would be over soon and I could get back to my soap opera. Most updates like this didn’t affect me much these days, so I didn’t pay them much mind. I never watched the news anymore, content to only concern myself with the affairs within my little bubble. What was the point of worrying about what happened outside?

I hadn’t left my house in several years. Haven’t left the bed in a handful either. When Ravi moved us out to the cabin, the plan had been for me to continue growing in relative seclusion; isolated from the problems of the world. It had been going so well. Shortly after our marriage, I had put on a good amount of weight. Enough to no longer be considered skinny by most standards. I assumed it was just my genetics kicking in. All the women in my family are notorious for plumping up after their weddings, but that usually coincided with a pregnancy or two. That hadn’t been the case for me.

Before I knew it, I was sporting a potbelly. Ravi didn’t seem to mind. He was always cooking, bringing me snacks, taking me out to eat. If I had been paying attention, I might have suspected he was a feeder earlier, but instead I just enjoyed the ride. He revealed his true nature to me once I reached 200 lbs. He confessed how much he liked seeing me grow and how much bigger he wanted me to be. Part of me skeptical of his proposal to fatten me up, but a bigger part was relieved. Relieved that I didn’t ever have to worry about losing weight again and could keep finding pleasure in the cushy lifestyle he granted to me. So I went along with it and never looked back.

Until now.

I could feel my stomach rumbling under the pile of caramel-colored folds flooding out from my long buried rib cage. Ravi would usually be here to feed me, but he had gone to the store hours ago and hadn’t returned. I was running low on food and he’d thought it be smart to stock up before we went into lockdown. We both knew it was risky, but the thought of me not having enough to eat to at least maintain my current bulk was a nightmare scenario for both of us.

I’ve missed both lunch and dinner today. I can’t remember the last time I missed a meal outside of sleeping through it. I was starving, an unfamiliar hunger taking over me. I wanted so desperately to eat something. Anything. But sadly there was nothing I could do about it.

In the last few years, I had grown into blob of plush and jelly. My muscles atrophied from inactivity, my bones weakened from a lack of nutrition; I was barely able to move my fingers, let alone my legs. The thought of standing and walking to the kitchen was as foreign a concept to me as walking on the moon. Weighing well over half a ton, my body had been permanently affixed to the bed beneath me for quite some time, as my flab filled every inch of it and then some. Usually I didn’t have a problem with this. Ravi did everything for me, having seduced me into completely helplessness and dependence. I gave up on doing things for myself long before I had become physically incapable of doing so.

I took to life as a lazy glutton fairly quickly. Once we moved to the cabin, I didn’t have much else to do than eat and watch tv. I was never the outdoorsy type, so hiking in the hills and swimming in the lake didn’t appeal to me in the slightest. I was content to sit my fat butt on the couch until it grew too wide to fit through the door. With Ravi providing me with an unending stream of the most fattening food imaginable, it didn’t take long before I was trapped indoors permanently.

From that point on, with no possibility of escape and the increasing strain of lugging around the hundreds of pounds of fleshy blubber I had become, the motivation to move at all lessened and my world became even smaller. When Ravi started bringing my meals to the bedroom, I saw little need to get up during the day. When I no longer fit in the shower, Ravi would start cleaning me by hand. When shuffling my way to the toilet became such an arduous process that I’d mess myself from the strain alone before I could reach the bathroom, Ravi came up with other arrangements for that too. Before I knew it, I had no reason to leave my bed at all, so I stopped doing it entirely.