Chapter 1 - to be continued!

Karl shivered when Melanie put her lips to his ear.

“And you didn’t want to come,” she said, her voice more felt than heard.

Karl took her hand and leaned against her. She was a tall girl, at least six inches taller than Karl’s five foot three, and he was in love with the sheer bulk of her body, nearly three hundred pounds of it, so different from his fine-boned slenderness.

“It’s going really well,” he said. “People seem to like it.”

The walls of the small gallery were hung with ten of his big oils, with some thirty charcoal and wash sketches placed between them. They were all nudes, all fat women, and the paintings were done at a larger-than-life scale that gave the meticulously rendered expanses of flesh an intimidating erotic impact. When you stood in front of one of the huge canvases, you felt as though the woman before you might fall out of the picture like a great wave, burying you in breasts and belly, buttocks and thighs. Karl’s approach was strongly influenced by the Rennaisance masters and the Flemish painters who came after them; when he’d started out, he’d even made his own paint. His style was rooted in observation and draftsmanship. He disliked having the term photorealism attached to his work; what was important was the way his fascination with his subjects came through in his treatment of them. He was inevitably compared to Renoir and Rubens; his work was sharper-edged, cleaner, but still lushly romantic.

One painting showed Melanie, seen from above, stretched out on a sofa, a sack of chips and a liter of diet soda on the floor behind her, brown hair spread out over her shoulders, belly and hips spreading off the couch, pillowy breasts seeming to bulge out of the canvas. As in most of the paintings, thighs and belly obscured the pubic area, giving the image a strangely innocent air.

Karl had hired Melanie as a model and they’d started dating. Things were getting serious fast and Karl was getting a little nervous despite his affection for Melanie. The focus and attention he brought to bear on his models frequently led to physical involvement and Karl felt the sensuality of the experience was central to the feel of his work. He didn’t want to give up being able to handle the flesh that he painted, the rolls and folds, bulges and dimples that he celebrated visually.

Ellie Wren, the gallery owner, approached him with an uncomfortable expression on her face.

“I just got the strangest offer,” she said, “and I wanted to hear what you thought about it.” She pointed to a woman who was dreamily studying a row of sketches.

“Ohmigod,” Melanie said, “look at her. How can she go out like that?” She swayed against Karl, bumped him with her hip and made him stumble. “She’s just your type, isn’t she?”

She was. The pretty-faced blonde had a strange body, strangely dressed in bright red short-shorts held up by suspenders and an abbreviated top that was little more than a push-up bra. Her face and narrow shoulders were just a little plump, and her round, high breasts seemed small despite their actual size.

The rest of her was massive, immense, bigger than any woman Karl had ever seen in real life. Her upper arms were weighed down by swags of flab that hung inches past her elbows, and her lower body was a solid mass of flesh from the shelf of her hips, which were easily a yard across, down to the floor, where the dimpled sacks of fat that formed her legs half-covered her feet. Her shorts were a bowl filled with her soft, low-slung belly, the wide straps of the suspenders cutting inches deep into the exposed flesh. And she wasn’t just fatter than Melanie; she was taller as well, standing over six feet.

“She says that if you close down the gallery and let her take the paintings now, she’ll pay twice the asking price for the whole show,” Ellie said. “I asked her how she’d pay, and she said any way we wanted. She said if we gave her an hour, she’d pay cash.”

Hearing Ellie’s voice, the woman turned to them, the heavy, ponderous motion moving like a tide across her nearly-naked body, waved a hand and smiled. “Hello,” she said, her voice pitched high and sweet. “I’m Sheila.” The top two buttons of her shorts were open, as though she’d had to ease herself after overeating. The blatancy of her exposure was a delightful shock. Karl had to force himself to meet her eyes as he approached her – he wanted to just stare at that triangular bulge of pale flesh, or rather to touch it, to take it into his mouth.

Karl went to her. “Pleased to meet you,” he said and she grasped his extended hand with both of hers. Karl noticed their softness, the way the knuckles were dented like a baby’s hands. He loved those kinds of details, the little physical features that spoke of abundant flesh. “So you’re interested in my paintings?”

“They’re ab-so-lutely marvelous,” she said, still holding onto his hands. He could feel the warmth of her body, smell her clean flesh. She was so big she had her own atmosphere. “My boss is going to love them. He saw the reproductions in the flyer but they just don’t do justice to the real thing. They’re so big!” She giggled, and Karl couldn’t keep himself from staring at the jiggle of her cleavage. She swayed forward, brushed her belly against him. “I’d like to model for you some time.”

Karl was startled; not just by her offer, but by her demeanor. The women he wished to use as models almost always refused, at least at first. They didn’t like their bodies, didn’t trust anyone who did. The idea of making their fleshiness visible, especially to themselves, was quite literally the most frightening thing some of them could imagine.

To say that this woman was at ease with her body wasn’t accurate. Rather, she seemed to brandish her flesh in open rebellion against a world that either pretended that people of her size didn’t exist or regarded them as disgusting and pathetic. Her overt sexuality would have been startling no matter what kind of body she had but the way it combined with her genuinely remarkable obesity grabbed Karl, overwhelmed him. Newtonian love, he thought, the greater the mass, the greater the attraction.

“I’m sure Karl would be happy to work with you,” Melanie said from over his shoulder. Karl started when he heard her voice; he hadn’t noticed her approach. He stepped back, and found himself pressed into her. She shifted, and he found himself falling against Sheila, who giggled again as his hands pressed against and into the flesh bulging out over the waistband of her shorts. She didn’t move an inch; she must have weighed four times what he did.

“Excuse me,” Karl said, stepping out from between them. Melanie’s smile was tight and didn’t seem to reach her eyes and Karl didn’t forward to whatever she was going to say to him when they were alone again. ***, Karl thought to himself. She knows how things work.

Sheila looked Melanie up and down as though appraising her, then stepped close and lightly touched Melanie’s forearm with her fingertips. “You’re Melanie, right? From the painting?” Melanie nodded, and Karl thought he could see the corners of her mouth soften. “Oh, sweetie, you are so pretty. You look smooth as butter in your painting.” Sheila leaned towards Melanie. “And I wish I had boobies like yours.” Melanie blushed – blushed! – and giggled. Sheila tugged at her top, and said, “No matter how much weight I put on, these things never seem to get any bigger.”

Melanie put her hand over her smile, then laughed out loud. “You’re something else, you know that?”

Sheila grinned. “That would be me,” she said and looked towards Karl. “So, do we have a deal?”

Karl looked thoughtful. “I don’t know,” he said. “The main point of having a show is more to gain an audience than to sell the pieces. I mean, it’s not that I don’t want to sell to you but I’d hate to shut down the show before anyone gets a chance to see it.”

Melanie turned to face him. Her thighs were too wide for her hips, so she had to heave one around the other and rock from foot to foot. She was sweating and breathing heavily, and Karl wondered how much one of her legs weighed. It was obviously hard work to move them around. “You know better than that,” she said. “If your show sells out two hours into the first day, even if no one sees it, everyone will know about it. And I’m willing to bet that you’ll get more than one commission out of my boss.” Karl kept his mouth shut and tried to keep a poker face.

Sheila looked down at him, then smiled. “Okay,” she said. “How about this? Shut the gallery down for the rest of the afternoon while we discuss this. No obligations; you just set your price and we talk about it for a couple of hours.” She shrugged, pushing her shoulders and cleavage forward. She may not have had big breasts for a woman her size but.

“Okay,” Karl said.
***
Hunger was the first thing that Melanie felt as she started to regain consciousness. She had a vague memory of being taken into a room full of women much, much fatter than she was, women like furniture, women like architecture.

“Come on, wake up,” The Flatman ran his knowing hand down Melanie’s flank and the swiftness with which that gesture destroyed Melanie’s ideas about her life would haunt her afterwards. Her body was different. Her body had changed. She was like those other women now.

She was a monster.

The hand came stealing across her thigh again. “Slugabed, slugabed, barley butt, your bum is so heavy you can’t get up!” His other hand slapped time against her bottom, one cheek and then the other. “Now you say it.” She could feel the Flatman’s strange, inhuman body — it felt half crab, half skeleton — press into her flesh, both hands starting to pack slippery lotion into the cleavage between the sofa mounds of flesh that were her buttocks. She felt a jolt of sickness, of complete disgust and revulsion when she remembered the old R. Crumb cartoon Karl had once showed her where a man was smiling and waving from between the bulging, glowing buttocks of a young girl. Now, she had been made into, what? A sex toy? A piece of furniture?

She could feel him reaching, spreading the slick, frictionless lotion, starting to actually crawl into her ass.

“Don’t do that,” she said. He had squeezed his head until he was just able to breath, stretched his arm out as far as he could reach. He felt small to her. She couldn’t see all of herself, she couldn’t touch anything past the rolls around her wrists and ankles. She didn’t know how big she was but she was big.

“Stop me,” the Flatman said and peppered the section of her ass directly in front of his face with kisses. “Lay back, roll over, what can I do to stop you from stopping me?”

“Please, don’t…” She wanted some feeling of human sympathy and that was when he did it. He slithered into the lubricated pocket he’d just made, folded himself into a shape like a frog that had been run over, and positioned himself so his face had access to open air.

“But it’s so cozy in here!” The Flatman was shouting to her from the crack of her ass. She could hear him in her ears and feel him in her ass and the sensations were too far away from each other and it made her disoriented. He was snugged between her massive cheeks, pinching and licking and biting and kneading. “This is why I need you big girls, so I can have a place to play and feel safe and warm.” He wriggled and pulled himself partway out, licked franticly at the rolls of flesh over the small of her back, snorting and gobbling at the sweaty folds and creases.