chapter 1: little town

BRINNNNG BRINNNG BRINNNG!!!!

“What in the world is- Son, son! There’s a bomb in the house!”

Fero sighed sighed and shook his head.

“No, Mother!” the young man shouted out of his bedroom. “It’s just my cell phone!”

A startled but confused face, his mother’s, suddenly poked its way through the curtain that separated Fero’s room from the rest of the small cottage the two of them shared. “A What!?”

Fero did his best not to roll his eyes out of respect for his mother. She would already know what a cell phone was if she ever went with him into the city where they were as common as cobblestones. But Fero’s mother was of the generation that hated the hustle and bustle of urban life and venerated the soothing tranquility of the countryside.

Fero was the exact opposite. He loved city life, loved all of the lights and constant commotion, loved how everything was the exact opposite of how it was in his boring, “tranquil” little village eighty kilometers out from the capital where the roads stopped being paved and the plumbing stopped being centralized. Most of all, though, Fero loved city girls.

It was immediately obvious when a girl had spent the majority of her life in the capitol as opposed to the villages or the slums. Fero’s mother Senali was a perfect example of the latter. She was certainly a very beautiful women, especially for middle age, but she had the slender, toned figure of a woman who had spent long, hard hours of physical labor in the wheat fields and ate only what she could acquire to sustain herself. She dressed plainly as well; as she fully entered Fero’s bedroom to examine the still-ringing cell phone, her loose, faded brown dress draped over her lithe form and danced in time with her footsteps, like a coat dangling off of a pole in a breeze. Coupled with her flowing dark hair and attractive features, Senali was certainly a catch for a “village girl”, the very definition of “plain but beautiful”.

But city girls were different. City girls had much more expensive tastes… and much more expansive appetites.

The most critical difference for Fero between the life he had and the city life that he wanted was not the incredible gap in wealth and the subsequent disparity in quality of life, but the disparity in the quality of the women. While village girls were thin and wiry like his mother, city girls wore their wealth on their waistlines.

Traditionally, men and even women of the capitol displayed their wealth in ways one would expect: fancy cars and flashy electronics, large, gaudy houses, the latest fashions and trends from America, but the surest sign of a wealthy household came from the size of a man’s wife and daughters. On the female frame, pounds translated directly to prosperity and girls of the capitol were encouraged to overeat and overindulge even at an early age.

Fero was twenty-two years old, which meant that many of the girls his age from the city were preparing to celebrate their Rite of Settling. It was the most important day in a young city woman’s life, a day-long festival/feast thrown by the girl’s entire family to congratulate her on achieving “overabundance”, the customary way of describing a woman who was officially so “generously prosperous” that she could no longer stand or walk on her own. Most girls actually tried to stave off their Rite of Settling to grow as big as possible; women in their mid-twenties would frequently brag to one another about who had the highest number on their day of overabundance, who had been able to carry the most weight or sport the highest body fat percentage before succumbing to the inevitable. Girls who lost their mobility in the lower five hundreds or even, Gods forbid, the four hundreds were openly judged and ridiculed by their friends and female family members while women who managed to make it into the mid-eight hundreds were applauded and practically worshipped.

But there was no Rite of Settling in the village, no overabundance, no heated arguments over lunch about who had the higher body mass index or which body shape was better suited for carrying the most extra fat, no nothing.

No, Fero needed himself a city girl, a very wealthy one with the size and the appetite to show for it. And, against all odds, the dirt-poor village boy happened to have a girlfriend who was exactly that. A princess, in fact.