Death for the Resurrection

by Liz Maher

Katie Poole never intended to eat so much. She would sit down in front of the television, with a diet coke and bag of jelly beans (which had NO fat in them), and curl up to watch Animal Planet. But sooner or later the tray of E.L. Fudge would find it's way to the tasteful forest green couch given to her by her parents when they moved to Canada. Soon to follow was the ice cream, macaroni and cheese, Entenmann's doughnuts, and well, you get the picture. She knew that if she could get a handle on her eating, one day she might meet a cute guy. But for now she knew the truth. She was no idiot. No one fell in love with fat people.



Don't get me wrong. Of course Katie hung many veils of illusion over her predicament. She maintained elaborate fantasies where gorgeous men would fall deeply in love with her beautiful personality and overlook her dimpled and sausaged physique. In one scenario the sweet shy young lad that bagged her groceries at the Kroger places a note on her car claiming she has something special. He can tell by her choice of food items and wondered if she would go with him to a Cowboy Junkies concert. But she knew, truthfully, that nothing like that would ever really happen. And, of course, it never did. So Katie found herself just getting fatter and fatter and fatter and fatter.

Soon for no reason at all, or so she thought, she was fired from her job at the Purrrfect Pets and began to collect unemployment checks from the government. This is when the shame spiral really gained momentum.

Life became divided and distinguished by different hourly cable television programs and the corresponding food items Katie would eat while watching them: dozens of baked potatoes with butter sour cream and chili with bags of Fritos sprinkled on top. Mountains of nachos molded with cheese, piles of cream pies, towers of Krispy Kreme doughnut boxes grew and expanded around her living room; tub after tub of every imaginable flavor of ice cream, steaks and barbeque chicken legs and fountains of soda and on and on and on.....

And thus the pounds began to stack upon her thighs like shingles and hang in languid lumps like bats from her arm bones. The fat congealed itself onto her belly and buttocks like sand bars and soon, she no longer felt human but more like a host body for a secret scientific experiment. She had no control over the blimping mass growing around her bones and organs and through the glare of her greasy oil-filled mind she could vaguely blurp up a memory of a dream. The dream for a normal life when she had hoped to meet someone special. She summoned the distant picture of an outside world where people lived and moved energetically to and fro. If she had once had friends, and she couldn't remember anyone specific, none of them came around any more.

Except the grocery boy. He came every day to deliver her boxes and boxes and boxes of groceries. He was her tambourine man, her demonic enabler, her hope. He even had a key to her condominium so that he could get in on his own. Moving, even to answer the door, had become impossible for Katie. It was as if she had become her own solar system, a gravitational force unto herself. She was the sun and everything had to be pulled in toward her.



She recognized a notion somewhere in the vast landscape of her immense body, an appreciation for the delicate beauty of the boy. Perhaps he was a college student, she thought. He always seemed sunny and peppy as he buzzed around her kitchen putting groceries away. He would talk at length about the universe and god and who knows what else. Katie gleamed heavily at him from the corner of her living room. She never said a word but would do her best not to fart in his presence. This was her attempt at conversation. She wasn't always successful.

One day he tried to play a CD he had recorded of his band but she halted him claiming not to like music. This was true. She could tell he was proud of his band but she feared noise coming form anywhere but the television. She only trusted her meticulously plotted series of programming.

The grocery boy was shocked that Katie was not more receptive to his suggestion. He considered it an offering of immense kindness and generosity on his part toward someone so obviously wretched and smoldering in stagnation and waste. He thought she could use a "pick me up". And yet...she refused.

Big Katie's disapproval of him aroused his interest. As he buzzed in and out her kitchen over the following days, he began to navigate farther and farther into the domain of the living room. He began searching for clues into the psyche of this enormous enigma.

One day his thoughts turned to Katie's vagina. He imagined what it might look like. Would the fat have deposited itself there like everywhere else? And would it expand and spiral out from its core folding and unfolding over itself? If this were true and the vagina was the bud or anchor of this woman's body, in fact, the entire lower half of her must have flowered into some kind of huge gapping pussy. But with feet! Daydreaming away, the boy noticed that he had a rock solid hard-on. He excused himself to the bathroom. Katie screamed and growled and yelled obscenities at the grocery boy but he went in anyway and there was nothing she could do about it. Soon she became short of breath and passed out.

Entering the pink painted bathroom, the boy unzipped his trousers and began to rub himself hard dreaming, swimming in Katie's infinity. He imagined his penis getting sucked into a vacuum of flesh and losing his entire self in a whirlpool of aroma and emotion. He finally came into one of Katie's kitten bath towels and then took a moment to absorb his surroundings. The room was Pepto-Bismol pink with a single picture on the wall. It was Katie long ago at the Purrfect Pets company picnic. She had pushed her face through one of those life size body pictures with a hole where the face would be. The body she chose was of a curvy cowgirl lassoing a cowboy. Though the fat in her face was spilling over the wooden frame, the boy couldn't help noticing that she looked pleased with herself. Accomplished. He thought about what the cowgirl's vagina might be like. Tight, most likely, dry, and smelling of hay. Not anywhere near as erotic, as infinite, as splendid as the idea of Big Katie's.



Lost in time, the boy was not sure how long he had been in the bathroom thinking about vaginas. He pulled up his pants and buckled his belt opened the bathroom door, and leapt back in horror. Outside the frightening heaving blob of quivering humanity that was Katie Poole was glowering in front of him in the hallway.

"What...are...you...doing...in...here..." she heaved. Her face was beet red, and strands of hair clawed at it like sweaty squid tentacles. Before he could say anything, Katie collapsed in a heap onto the floor, exhausted by the physical exertion. Still dumbfounded the boy searched his limited experience for what he should be doing but before he could muster a response, Katie began to heave long drawn-out sobs of despair. The noise traveled from deep inside her cavernous body and exploded with a roar expressing her deep sense of tragedy to the entire condominium complex. Strangely the boy did not experience pity for this glob of disaster piled at his feet. He felt, instead, something akin to awe at the majesty of her predicament. It was as if vibrations of pure knowing energy emanated from her gigantic mass and penetrated him as if she really were the sun. He stood and basked in her glory. The boy could not physically help her. He knew this; she was over 700 pounds. The only thing he could do was stare and stare.

As he was pondering his next move, their eyes met in a moment of synchronicity. Katie caught the look of amazement and wonder beaming at her from the grocery boy's face. The moment was incongruous from all previous moments in her life. "But wait..." thought Katie, "Perhaps my mother looked at me this way when I was a... baby." Yes. Yes, Maybe she did Katie. Maybe she did.

Photograph by Laura Podolnick