chapter 1

“You are getting very sleepy,” he said slowly in a monotone drone, swinging his pendulous pocket watch back and forth in front of her face. “You feel very relaxed; you are calm and at peace.”

“I am calm and at peace,” she repeated.

“You feel very hungry,” said the man. “You feel so hungry that you wish you could just eat endless amounts of food.”

“I’m very hungry,” she repeated.

“I’m going to ring a bell now,” he instructed. “I want you to listen to it carefully.”

The man picked up a dinner bell from a nearby table and rang it once.

“Whenever you hear the sound of this bell, you are going to go to the kitchen and eat. You will eat and eat and eat, and you won’t stop eating until you hear the bell rung twice in a row like this.”

He picked up the bell again and rang it double, then set it back down upon the table.

“Do you understand this?” he asked.

“I understand.”

The young woman seated comfortably in her chair stared out blankly into space, a drunken-dazed look in her eyes and the faintest hint of a smile on her lips. She was indeed very relaxed, as if she were on the edge of sleep.

“Now I want you to close your eyes,” said the man, “and when I snap my fingers you will open your eyes, and you won’t remember any of what was said here.”

She closed her eyes, and when the man snapped his fingers she opened them and looked around the room. She seemed a bit disoriented at first, as if she wasn’t entirely sure where she was or how she got there. As her eyes scanned her surroundings, she recognized that she was in her own kitchen, and eventually her eyes focused in on a familiar face smiling just above where she was sitting.

“Hey, honey,” she said, “what’s going on? What am I doing sitting in the middle of the kitchen?”

“You mean,” said the man, “you don’t remember?”

“Remember what?” she asked.

“Oh, umm — nothing,” he said to her. “We were just sitting here talking and you kind of spaced out on me.”

“I did?” she asked. “That’s weird, huh?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Weird.”

The woman got up from her seat and stretched her arms high up into the air and yawned as if she had just woken up from a long slumber. She licked her lips and put her hands on her soft paunch of a tummy.

“I’m so thirsty,” she said. “I think I need to get a glass of water.”

She got up from her seat and pulled a glass down from the shelf, then scooted over toward the fridge to pour some cold water from the spout in the door. When her back was turned, her husband picked up the dinner bell sitting on the kitchen table and rang it once.

Without saying a word, the woman put her glass down and opened the refrigerator door and immediately started grabbing handfuls of food and stuffing her face. The man stood back and watched with delight as his wife devoured everything in sight, all the while with that dazed look in her eyes and that mild half-smile on her lips.

“I wonder how long she will really keep eating like this,” the man thought to himself, watching as her rate of consumption seemed to be increasing. He took a seat at the kitchen table and observed silently as she continued to cram food down her gullet. Whole chickens, entire loaves of bread, tubs of ice cream — she packed it all away in her gut at lightning speed.

After nearly two hours of non-stop eating, all of the food in the refrigerator was gone, and the woman’s belly had expanded to twice its original size. The buttons on her blouse had popped open and the bare flesh of her flabby gut came spilling out over the tightly-bound waistband of her skin tight jeans. She was breathing heavily and and her eyes were watering as though she were in a great deal of discomfort, yet the dopey-looking smile was still there on her lips.

Without skipping a beat however, she immediately moved over to the pantry and began scavenging for more food to stuff her face with. Boxes of cookies and crackers, bags of potato chips and packages of snack cakes — she even opened up a can of beans and started shoveling them in her mouth with a large spoon; it seemed there was really no limit to what or how much she would eat.

“This is amazing,” the man said to himself. “She’s like a damn eating machine!”

Her overstuffed bely was growing bigger and bigger by the minute. Soon the button on her jeans gave out and the rest of her fleshy mound of fat came rolling out like an avalanche. Watching as she stood there in her undergarments, her clothing in tatters on the floor, pouring bags of jelly beans into her open maw, the man started to feel some remorse for what he had done.

“I’d better stop this,” he said to himself. “As much as I love watching this, I’m afraid if she really keeps eating like this she will rupture her stomach and not even know it.”

He picked up the bell from the table and rang it twice, causing the woman to snap out of her trance. She suddenly became acutely aware of her state of undress as well as the intense discomfort and fullness in her stomach.

“Ugh! What happened?” she groaned. “Why am I in my underwear, and why does my tummy hurt?”

“You were sleep walking, dear,” the man said to his wife. “You came down here and started pigging out in your sleep.”

“I did?” she said, still sounding as though her mind were clouded in a dense fog. “How much did — hiccup! — I eat? I feel so full, like I — hiccup! — swallowed a whole cow or something!”

“Yeah,” he responded, “it looks like you really ate quite a lot.”

Standing there massaging her swollen belly, she let her tongue hang out over her lower lip as she let out a giant gust of wind, followed by hefty burp. Looking around the room, she saw a mass of empty food containers, wrappers, empty bags and chicken bones littering the floor.

“What a mess!” she gasped with a rasp in her voice. “Did I do this? My god! I really — hiccup! — made a pig of myself!”

“It’s okay,” said the man, feeling a bit guilty for what he put his innocent wife through. “Why don’t we go to bed, and I’ll give you nice belly rub; I’ll clean this mess up in the morning.”

He took his wife by the arm and helped her as she waddled off to bed, lugging her bloated belly up the stairs and down the hall toward their room like it was a sack of cement. She crawled into bed and snuggled next to her husband who massaged her lovingly until she drifted off to sleep.