Fat-needling

chapter 1

Her mother had had them too; flabby upper arms. They hung down past her elbows. How could I let myself get this fat, she wondered hotly, exquisitely embarrassed. Lately she'd been fat-talking her body as she'd seen a thin girl doing at the bus stop. “You’re such a lardass,” she hissed at the mirror, hot with self disgust, and self-lust. She had been noticing the way the sleeves of her T-shirts cut into the jello-like blubber of her droopy soft arms, Joy Division and The Damned. At least people knew she wasn’t trying to fit in, even as they pointed her gigantic hitching butt out in the hallway for special ridicule.

Highschool had been hell; college was supposed to be better, an end to the teasing, but at 5’0 and 350 pounds, this 19 year old fat woman knew there would never be any such thing. It made her eat more, out of stress and for another reason. Lately she’d been putting on tight white shirts and going to the mall three cities over. “Look how much food that fat lady is eating, Mommy,” one little girl had said about her as she stuffed her huge moon face with Chinese food. Mommy had absently shushed her, but the wide-eyed child had persisted with one final, shouted word on the matter. “But Mommy! It’s not healthy! She’s…so…fat!” Tears of fat-shame had welled up on her face, as they always did, even though that’s exactly why she had come. She thought it was funny, how badly she still hated fat-shaming, even though it really turned her on. Had since high school.

At what point had she begun to actually crave this? God knows she still hated it- being so fat everyone stared at you everyplace you went, already acutely aware of how every pound of soft fat felt jiggling on her body. Her huge, dimply thighs that hung down past her knees, the way thin women stared at them openly and with horrified disgust, the butt so big other kids had even grabbed it in the hallway as she waddled by. Even now, on the bus last week a tiny black woman had sat down behind her on the bus. "Can I have a dollar, dearie?" She had known better than to refuse. Even still, the woman's true objective was to give her big fat jelly rolls a pinch as she walked by on her way off the bus, making her sulkily glare. To a girl this fat every social interaction is swollen with it, an unhideably unsightly handicap for which one is constantly mocked, for she knew the truth: we all love fat-shaming. We love to see a big tub of lard shake and jiggle their obscenely obese selves up and down the street, nervously tugging at the clothes that never completely cover up their blubber, hoping no one is staring but knowing they are. Unless someone fatter is around; then - and she hated herself for this - she was like a lean wolf in her need to hear their stories and add to their lifelong humiliation. She hated it when it was done to her, but she loved to see it happen to other fatties, and to her own blobbery Not blubber, she'd been told once by a neighbor boy. Blobber. Blubber and blob, that's you. Double the fat. Body.
She'd been pinching her stomach until it turned angry red lately in her fat-talk sessions; her body disgusted everyone, most of all her, and it was sweet to see its corpulence degraded. "Are you happy with your body," crooned the thin, leering doctors of her dreams. They always told her to lose weight, but they would lose their nightmarish power over her if she did. One fat girl, she thought as she fell asleep that evening. One fat, fat girl.