Hello all! With due apologies for how silent I’ve been lately, please enjoy this short, absurdist horror tale, recently published in Sky Island Journal. Thanks a lot to
, who helped it reach its current shape.
Bob loved being fat.
The sixth of seven farmer’s sons, he relished occupying more than a broomstick’s worth of space, being all but impossible to ignore or budge without consent. His bigness grounded him, made him feel real.
There was also a simpler explanation. Bob liked food. Reallyliked it. As far back as he could remember, there’d been a hunger inside him, a bottomless pit demanding attention. When his first paycheck enabled filling that pit, he found he could not stop. Satiating his hunger was the most fulfilling thing possible. Being fat, then, meant he kept doing it. Kept being true to himself.
Eating at night was best. City life took its well-earned rest then, and it felt like just Bob and his food existed in the world. It was his mindfulness practice. Nightly he ate not for sustenance—not for energy to face another day behind the cubicle—but pure pleasure. He paired his baked, broiled, fried, frozen, and double-fried friends with horror favourites, so that in time, they intermixed. The Thing meant caramel corn as much as it did Kurt Russell, and The Fly would forevermore be grafted onto a plateful of pickled onion rings.
One night, however, Bob posted himself in front of the open fridge, scanned its shelves for treasure—five pizza slices, a two-pound bucket of strips (extra crispy), a five-pound bucket of coleslaw salad—and found he wasn’t hungry. Not in the usual way, anyway. The feeling still existed, but came dulled, like a scream from a faraway room. The fridge’s contents seemed too heavy for such a hunger. As though trying to feed a newborn Spam. He grabbed a pack of munchies from the kitchen cabinet and returned to his room.
Bob lay on the bed and explored his body. He touched below the sternum, whence regular hunger would radiate. Then went lower. No mistaking it. The feeling came from inside his belly button.
Truthfully, it had always been deep. He’d always sort of wanted to stuff something in there, see how big of a thing could fit.
He dropped one of the munchies in. With a timid pop, it disappeared. The hunger went away as well. What might it all mean?
Before he could think up an answer, overwhelming relaxation spread through his body, and Bob fell asleep.
He woke hungry, ate his usual heap of breakfast cereal, and went to work. At night, the belly button stirred again. Bob tried feeding it another munchy. The star-shaped thing popped in, then got spat back out. One munchy, it seemed, was no longer enough. Bob fed it an extra crispy strip. That quieted it. And Bob fell asleep without his nightly meal again.
Night after night, it demanded bigger meals, until Bob had to pour the entire coleslaw bucket into his umbilicus. Its hunger grew bottomless, like the hole itself. Like Bob’s own used to be.
Two weeks in, Bob stopped feeling hungry altogether. The only hunger left was the belly button’s, and its demands had gotten oddly specific. It seemed to have discovered a way to communicate with him. Not quite like hearing voices, but what the hole wanted was no less clear to Bob than if it had been whispering into his ear.
One day, a tire iron. The next, a whole truck tire. A bag of coal. A bottle with a special mix of grease, surgical spirit, and Sriracha sauce. A wooden mock-up of his company building.
Soon enough, the loss of his hunger began changing Bob. It showed in how people perceived him, or, for that matter, no longer did. He wasn’t used to checking himself out in the mirror, but sometimes he’d get the urge to step on the bathroom scale, then sigh with relief at the number, inevitably bigger than the last. He’d weighed 325 pounds the week before the belly button woke up. One month later, he was at 152. He stole a look into the mirror. Flaps of skin hung off an emaciated face like cheese strings from a burger.
He tried forcing himself to eat. Bad idea. Not only could he not keep down food, he couldn’t even keep it in his mouth. Everything tasted like seashells dipped in ash. The days of Bob the foodie were over.
The weird thing? He found he didn’t really care. For decades, he’d defined himself by what he stuffed inside himself. Right now, he was just… Bob. The corporate IT guy. The lanky dude from troubleshooting whose last name nobody knew. The man with a seemingly infinite, talking belly button.
And boy, did it feel good getting it to shut up.
Six weeks later, Bob saw a sack of bones in the mirror.
Skin stretched so tight across it that his sharp-edged skull looked about to poke through. That should have scared him; it didn’t. By now, Bob was no longer in command of mind or body. All he wanted to do—could do—was provide his Master with everything It required. The plan was nearly complete. Just one ingredient away.
Bob sank into the mattress and removed his billowy Videodrome T-shirt. No need to ruin a beautiful thing. He looked towards his right hand. Was it ready? It looked healthy. He’d washed it, rubbed it with lotion and a mix of spices, applied a tenderizing massage. He wanted to do it slowly, finger by finger. Savor his part of what was coming. But when the first finger entered the hole, this was no longer his moment.
The entire hand went in, then his arm up to the elbow. The hole pulled further, and Bob’s spine began to break. There commenced a horrid symphony as slowly, relentlessly, his body broke apart.
Crack. Shuffled.
Squelch. Turned inside out.
Screech. Remade itself.
And Bob was no more.
“At last.” The newborn stretched, its fresh jaws popping as it spoke. “At last, the Belly Button lives!”
Best opening line I've read in a long time! Loved this!
eerie and quirky and good.
'One munchy, it seemed, was no longer enough. Bob fed it an extra crispy strip. That quieted it.' made me laugh