Fatty

Kyle Hemmings

She fell in love with the detective she hired to find her missing boyfriend. With her extra large charm, her exotic mushroom breasts and folds of chin, she told him to call her “Fatty.” Please, she said, I’m not ashamed anymore. He made an inept pass, referring to her figure as cream puff, that heavy people always struck him as something light. Later, he confided that his mother made cream-filled pastries for an Italian bakery on the East Side. Something that was once ugly and cornered inside her–almost swooned.
…..The weight was something she learned that she couldn’t lose, unlike her skinny boyfriends. There was a history of them and they loved her lady fingers and her delicate biscuits. It was so easy for skinny men to grow cold or hungry. Or to become lost.
…..In bed, the detective brought all the tools of his trade: his wise-guy one-liners, his gun-metal hardness, his restrained passion that reminded her of falling pennies. Although he was somewhat older than most of her past steadies, he managed to lubricate her with the delight she recalled from her mother’s favorite black-and-white movies, where somebody whistled and somebody else opened the door. At times, she imagined the skinny boyfriend swallowed, deep inside her chest cavity, tortured by her fluttering cries, his audible construction of the perfect thin woman.
…..The detective sat up. He apologized for his quick-rise but rapidly deflating performance. Alluding to a recent marriage, he said his scars were fresh. She sunk her head against his back and offered him a jumbo breakfast of flapjacks, scrambled eggs and more sex over easy. Shaking his head, he stated that there was a new clue, but he didn’t want to get her hopes up. A pair of shoes, same style and size as the missing boyfriend’s, were located near a dock. Shoes, she asked. But the last time I saw him, she stated, he was wearing sneakers. She reflected on the silence, drowned in it.
…..Nevertheless, he still had to check it out, he said.
…..He turned to kiss her and the kiss felt like old candy, but it was edible and it would melt. The mouth of her missing boyfriend always tasted like menthol cough drops. He chained-smoked, suffered bouts of deep-water depression and complained of an eternally recurring sore throat.
…..I’ll be back, Fatty, he said.
…..She listened to the screech of his tires. She inspected the red love marks where he grabbed her too hard, too passionately, or the places he let go of too fast. There were no teeth marks she could become giddy over, like a new tattoo. Adipose was more impressionable than muscle. But it held water and she marveled at her ability to remain dense and solid-like, while others disappeared. She imagined this detective as once being thin and without shelter. She now saw a body lying at the bottom of murky deep waters. Today, ships would be ordered to strangulate in ports. Birds would mysteriously drop from the sky at an alarming rate. Children would wander aimlessly in a city of suspects. There’d be no explanations forthcoming. She wondered which one, if any, would return.
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Kyle Hemmings lives and works in New Jersey, where he skateboards and sometimes falls and can’t get up.

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