chapter 4

Fat had distorted her natural form beyond all recognition, her body was just a blubbery mass of rolls, bulges and chins. Her facial features looked tiny, crowded out by her bulging, fleshy cheeks and she had so many chins that her face seemed to melt into her neck.

Her arms and legs felt so heavy that it was an effort just to lift them. They were coated in a thick layer of blubber, fat rolling over her elbows and knees. Her belly was an enormous pale mountain of flesh that jutted out so far before her that she could no longer see her feet.

Finally no longer able to support her immense gain she sank to the floor as her belly surged forth again, sagging down to touch the carpet and forcing her tremendous thighs appart. She fell backwards, her whole body quivering like jelly, as she felt her blubbery backside spreading beneath her again until it looked like she was sitting on two enormous cushions.

As her gain slowed to a halt the feeling of euphoria faded and Anna was forced to confront her terrible predicament and she began to cry.

"Come, there's no use in crying like that!" Anna said to herself rather sharply. "I advise you to leave off this minute!"

She generally gave herself very good advice - though she very seldom followed it. But how could this have happened to her? It was as if all the natural laws that governed the world had been suspended here. She had always thought of her body as something solid to be sure of but now she felt like it had a strangely viscous quality, jiggling and rippling independent of her will. Perhaps if Alice was trapped on the other side of the looking glass then something of that world had leaked out, destabilising everything inside the school.

Just how fat was she? She had seen so few fat people in her life that she had little to compare herself to. She thought of their housekeeper's daughter Martha who always got winded quickly when they played together and whose little butterball belly shook when she giggled. Then there were the husbands of Aunt Ina's friends who she sometimes saw at dinner parties with great big bellies that shook when they smugly laughed at their own witticisms and wobbling double chins. She knew that she must be so massively obese now that she dwarfed even the biggest of them by hundreds of pounds.

There was another memory, buried deeper. She remembered now that when she was 5 years old Alice had taken her to the seaside town of Brighton where amongst the other fairground attractions there had been a freak show that claimed to have a quarter ton woman. Could she really be that big? Bigger?

She wondered if her immense form would even fit through the door. She imagined trying to squeeze her monstrous belly through the doorway, her enormous hips smashing into the doorframe, splintering the wood and chipping at the stone. She imagined having to turn sideways to fit into the narrow passageway and even then she would have to inch her rotund body along as her belly and backside pressed against the walls on either side.

She couldn't just sit there like a massive, sagging balloon and wait for someone to find her like this. She tried to heave up her enormous body but her weight had skyrocketed into obesity so fast that her muscles were hopelessly unprepared to support her huge bulk. She only succeeded in making her fat slosh around as her thick and flabby arms and legs wiggled uselesly. She realised that she must look like Humpty Dumpty but there were no king's horses and king's men to help her.

Her eyes fell on a little glass box lying on the floor a little way in front of her. She attempted to reach her plump hand far enough beyond her overstuffed belly to touch it but it was no use and she had to give in, leaning back and panting with the exertion. With effort she managed to shimmy herself far enough forward, her gargantuan thighs and backside quaking and slapping against the floor all the while, to reach the box. She snatched it up with her stubby fingers and found it contained a very small cake with the words "EAT ME" beautifully marked out in currants.

"Well, I'll eat it," Anna said. "And hopefully I will shrink back to my original size."

She felt a nervous excitement as she brought the cake to her lips. It might cause her to shrink but what if it made her blow up even larger? She was already a giant blimp of a girl, swollen beyond all recognition. How much fatter could get? She imagined herself a shapeless, gelatinous blob big enough to fill the entire room, her doughy body even swallowing up the furniture. As much as the idea horrified her, a dark and secret part of her craved the blissful pleasure she had experienced as she had swelled up.

Almost as soon as she had swallowed the cake her stomach gave a peculiar gurgling noise and she began to shrink back down again. She had returned to normal but still she felt slacker somehow, the way an elastic band feels when it is stretched to its limits and then allowed to spring back.

She turned to the looking glass but Alice and the room beyond were gone and all was dead and darkness as before. The shards of glass once again glittering on the floor. She felt far too shaken by what had happened to try to find the missing shard again that night so she decided to return to the dormitory. Her dress was ruined beyond all repair but it was all she had to conceal her modesty so she pulled it on anyway.

As she made her way back to the dormitory she saw something at the end of the hallway that looked oddly like Cherish's disembodied grin glinting malevolently like a dagger in the moonlight.

"I've seen a girl without a grin but never a grin without a girl before," Anna thought absurdly.