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Felidae Obesus

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By Shalion

I'd never been happier than the day I sold my soul. That might sound strange, but I'd really given it rather a lot of thought, and considering what I was getting in exchange as well as how I intended to live my life afterwards, it honestly was a hell of a bargain.

I could begin by telling you how I met the charming devil, how I grappled with the metaphysical truth of the afterlife, heaven and hell, and the lengths I went to to secure our deal, but that's not the story I want to tell you. Suffice to say that I was granted a single wish, really it was several wishes all rolled into one, but after years of daydreaming, I knew exactly the one thing about my life that I would change if ever such a fanciful opportunity arose. I told the devil that I wanted total control of my body, right down to the cellular and genetic level. It turned out to be everything that I'd ever hoped for... and maybe that was the problem.

I remember that day very clearly, the day I became a shapeshifter and so much more. Given that, it might surprise you to learn that I hadn't actually been around that day. In fact, I personally would not even begin to exist until several weeks after the fact, not until I had decided to achieve immortality by cloning myself. But to understand why I chose to do what I did, and more importantly, my current predicament, you need to know that I've always been a rather peculiar person, even long before the soul-selling shenanigans. In addition to being the kind of person who would, even after learning about the afterlife, what a soul is, and why a devil would want it, still be willing to part with it, I had been a man driven by two secret longings. The first was to be something other than human. I had accomplished this already merely by accepting the deal, but really my aesthetic values leaned more in the direction of a coat of fur, a muzzle, and large ears. My other secret fantasy to which I told no one was to be immensely, outrageously fat.

Don't ask me why I had these predilections, they were probably genetic and definitely carnal in nature. And even though I made my wish partly in order to satisfy these deviant cravings, I knew that if I was to live the life of an immortal - and I knew for sure now that there was nothing waiting for me after this life - such base desires might fluctuate over time or disappear entirely. Part of the reason I - the original me - created the me now speaking to you was out of a desire to live at least part of his - my - secret fantasy and perhaps shake off our irrational desires early on in preparation for the centuries ahead of us. Needless to say, the plan did not quite work out as intended.

Beginning as nothing more than a lump of cells on my original body's spinal cord, I remember being inside my own body. It was not as disconcerting as one might imagine, after all, we're all used to living inside our own heads. It's just that I happened to be quite a bit lower down, situated as little more than a tumor of undifferentiated cells in the small of my back. But having an awareness and full control of my physiology right down to the cells that composed me meant I could command my flesh in alarming ways and I knew that right from the start, having already earned a degree in microbiology.

I knew that I could make a perfect copy of myself, right down to my memories and personality by growing a new brain and linking it with my present one as it grew. I felt it was the most sensible thing to do. After all, while I could command my biology to do various things, like stop aging, that was little good if I happened to take a bullet to the head, or caught fire, or was smashed, fell from a great height or experienced a number of other unpleasant things. But there was safety in numbers, even if the process itself had been distinctly dissonant for the both of us. Once the second brain - again, me - had developed sufficiently to begin having its own thoughts, necessarily it had to sync with the thoughts of the original brain which was still being copied down to the last neural connection in my lower back. That would have been perfectly fine save for the lag of about 1 millisecond up and down the spinal cord separating us. I hadn't considered the problem, not until there was a constant echo in my own head that made me feel like I was second guessing every decision and thought I had for the three days it took my new body to form. It was fortunate for my first copy that I had decided to start small...

In a way, it feels as though I had never been created. I have a full copy of my original's memories, they feel like my own, even if I know cognitively that I was present for none of my life as a human. I honestly had no idea that I was even a copy, not until the spinal connection between us finally severed and rather than lying on my stomach and concentrating on forcing the skin over the small lump on my lower back to thin and slough off bloodlessly, I found myself in a warm, dark place soon to be dislodged like some kind of weird parasite from a horror movie and placed shivering onto the ground by giant hands. It took me longer that I'd like to admit to realize that the hands were not giant, but rather I was small. A master of my own genetics and biology, I'd decided to turn myself into a cat and a rather meager half-pound kitten at that, though you'd hardly guess that looking at me now.

I remember the first time I turned my head upward - it was very heavy, almost half the weight of my whole body! - and looked at myself in my own eyes; it was definitely not at all like looking in a mirror. I knew in that instant that, despite having the same set of memories, despite not even being aware that I was the cat all along, we were immediately and irreconcilably different people. I saw that he knew it too.

"Well, hopefully this works out." said the original me, the now not-me.

I released a faint mew and blinked more colorless slime out of my eyes; it would be a while yet before I decided to modify my vocal cords and tongue enough to accommodate even a heavily-accented english. I figured it was safest to just be mute for a while. I'd seen enough movies with evil doppelgängers to know that I - he - would be wary of me. In the meantime, I decided that it would be best to start learning how to be a cat, which as it turned out, was not terribly difficult.

The majority of the first year of my new life was spent just getting used to the new feline configuration of my body. Sure, I could have reconfigured the muscles, tendons and bones however I liked, but I honestly found the transition to quadrupedal life quite enrapturing as well as the soft, yet sturdy, springiness my feline shape brought. That, and the familiar domestic shape was my disguise in case the worst happened to my predecessor.

But for the first time in my life, the prospect of death, of my ending, weighed very little on me. The life of a domestic cat was very simple compared to my previous one - it involved a LOT of television - the one my "roommate" continued to live for the time being. And while simpler, it also felt like liberation. No more need for a job, for money, my needs were met and all of my time was my own for seemingly the first time in my adult life! I decided to spend most of it sleeping.

Before the end of my first year, I'd reached my full adult weight of ten pounds and was very cattish in my mannerisms, quite indistinguishable, I might add, from any other silver and black tabby. I had not spent the entire time in my - or was it my roommate's? - apartment. I'd already gone on my fair share of adventures out of doors, mingled with actual cats and learned a lot about how to use my fantastically heightened senses. I'd even caught a mouse once; mouse is surprisingly gamey, but fresh blood is electrifying to a cat's palette, even better than cat nip.

But contrary to fantastical imagining, I found real cats to be a bore to hang out with and most preferred their own company anyways; maybe I had not mastered the most subtle forms of body language yet, or perhaps my scent was just a tad off. Regardless, my only intention had been to learn enough to pass myself off as a real cat and in that, I'd succeeded. I knew because by then even my alter-ego was treating me more like a pet than the man I once was, but never had been. Of course, if I had spoken a single word to him in all this time, things might have been different. He'd given up cajoling me many months ago and mostly avoided the fiendishly feline glares I gave him. But even after spending so much time running along the tops of brick walls, diving in and out of yards and accustoming myself to shitting outside in public - not nearly as hard as catching a mouse actually - the reason I had created myself remained, tugging on the back of my mind like a loose tooth and filling me with lustful thoughts whenever I deigned to lick my crotch; an unspoken perk of cat-hood, though one I would be shortly forsaking.

When it came to pass that I began having difficulty enjoying my all-day television binges because it kept crossing my mind that all the characters were human, I knew that my guise was sufficiently complete and that I'd learned enough about being a cat to start living out my other secret fantasy. This had been a crucial element because I had not wanted to be a marvelously obese, inexplicably tiny and furry human. I'd wanted to be marvelously obese, fat cat, and that required first learning how to be a cat. But it hardly felt like play-acting anymore. It might have had something to do with looking up at furniture like buildings overhead or the way smells and sounds leapt out at me with far more immediacy than anything I saw anymore, but as my mind had shaped the vessel that was my body, so too, it seemed had my vessel shaped my mind; and over such a short amount of time as well.

I practiced in the mirror all day after the surprisingly uncomfortable adjustments to my throat. My voice was still more than half meow, but it would have to do. I would not give up my capacity for subtle mews or purrs that vibrated my whole body just to speak a little more clearly.

When my former self got home from work that evening looking wretched as usual, I leapt clear up to his chest, propelled on the springs in my legs and latched my claws into the fabric of his shirt and tie with an uncanny mix of feral speed and casual deliberateness that widened his eyes in shock. The shock continued a moment longer as he embraced me reflexively in his huge, ape-like arms and I whispered in his ear, "I'm ready for a change."

Continuing to hold me, a smirk dawned on the man's face. "You sure did take your time. I'd half-thought you'd gone feral."

I huffed a cat's laugh onto his neck. Had he really forgotten that was the entire point of this exercise? I wondered. I tapped his neck firmly, letting the man feel the prick of my claws. "I just thought you should know, since I'll be needing much more substantial dinners from now on."

I thought he might respond with a quip or a joke, but perhaps the man was too tired for that. "I suppose I can do that..." he sighed and lowered me the substantial distance to the ground. I looked up at the giant, my eyes around mid-calf level on my old body. He shrugged out of his coat and proceeded with surprising gusto into the kitchen. My nose pulled me in after him soon after my ears perked at the sound of a tuna tin being cracked open and butter sizzling on a stainless steel pan. Leaping effortlessly onto the counter, I watched him with wide eyes pull the tab on a second tin of the fish I'd grown to be quite fond of and then a third. Quite naturally, my tail began to lash behind me, not just my hunger aroused. As my human counter-part began to mix in a small amount of the rice he had prepared for his own dinner, he spoke again, surprising me. "I assume you've decided on a name?"

My hackles rose unbidden. I had decided on a unique name for myself, a necessity for the inevitability of future clones, but it had been so long since I had last thought about it, it took me more than a moment to remember. I smoothed my fur before I responded. "Call me Francis." I said and tried to lick a paw casually, though it was difficult with the delectable scent of fish and butter rising from the pan in front of me.

"Francis eh..." the man drawled and then after a moment, cocked his head back at me knowingly. He looked at me a while but already knew that he couldn't beat me at staring contests. "...from Felidae?"

I shrugged, only slightly disappointed at how fast he'd guessed. But I had not really expected to confound my other self for long despite the number of years since he - we? - had read the book and the number of times I'd watched the movie in the past year. But I kept my body noncommittal. I'd kept the man at paw's length for almost a year now and did not want to be particularly chummy with him now. I'd only decided to speak now out of pure necessity. I thought it was for the best that we keep moving along as different people and keep things as minimally confusing as possible for the both of us. I think he understood that too. But the heaping plate of steaming tuna more than erased any awkwardness that had sprung up between us and I accepted several strokes of his broad hand down my back as I dug in with gusto, heedless of the grease cloying to my whiskers.

The heaping mound of tuna and rice was more than three times what I usually got and I was painfully full after it had been disposed of and the plate licked clean; a decent start. Of course, I could have enlarged my stomach as much as I ever wanted, but I wanted this experience too. I wanted to dive into the depths of my own greed and gluttony just to see where the bottom of it might lay, and also I wanted to be shaped by those same desires, to find who I wanted to be by finally giving into these feelings I'd craved since childhood. I never thought I'd be so long in searching...

Things... settled after that. Nothing so dramatic as my forgetting my essential humanity and neither did I ever for a single day regret my decision to follow through on deliberately making myself an enormous furry butterball, even when mere mobility became a serious issue; I've had time for some serious regrets just recently, but we're not quite there yet. What did happen, I realize now only in retrospect, is that I fell into a trap, one quite insidious and subtle, the trap of comfort.

For twenty years, I lived as a creature of pure comfort, most especially so in the last five years. With an unlimited lifespan and the ability to completely negate any health issues from either my diet or my weight, I felt no need to start piling on as quickly as possible; in fact, I believe that I put on as much weight in the last two years as I did in my first ten. But no matter how heavy I got or how awkward or lazy I became with respect to my leaner self, I never became _un-_comfortable and never did the yearning leave me, the thoughts about how much nicer I would look and feel with a couple extra pounds surrounding me, always just a couple... Though I have to admit to myself that in the last several years, my thoughts rarely turned towards how large I had become at all. Through utter excess my world narrowed considerably and reflecting on that time now, it feels almost as though I was asleep in my own life, even during the very brief segments of time I actually spent awake.

It is indeed a little difficult to explain what exactly happened to me during my two decade-long transformation and I can only reflect now in my current situation that perhaps this is what happens when people - and yes, I am still a person as well as a cat - are allowed to wallow in endless pleasure and effectively turn off their brains.

Suffice to say that on no particularly special day in the twenty-first year of my life as a cat - fifty-third year of life subjectively - I received a rather rude awakening from the somnolence my life had become, though it did not hit me all at once.

It dawned on me slowly because at that time, I was spending between 21-23 hours of my day asleep. That was certainly one pastime that I excelled at and one of the very few left in which I could partake owing to the fact that it had been over five years since I had last been able to drag my bloated self across the floor on my own and I had put on a very significant amount of weight since then. I still have no idea how heavy I was that first - or, perhaps last - day. It took a number of days before I had rebuilt enough muscle mass to even be able to crawl on my belly like a slug and that effort had undoubtedly burned off a number of pounds all on its own. It was not until later that week when I managed to - with great effort! - pull myself onto the glass surface of my alter-ego's bathroom scale that I was able to put some numbers onto my situation: "152.6 lb" All that on a formerly 10 lb frame. But now I am getting ahead of myself.

The most recent five or so years of my life bled into each other fiercely such that it is even now very difficult for me to distinguish one year from another, but the memory of hunger that day stands out like a hot flare, or perhaps a period, marking the end of that section of my life. But I feel that I ought to try reconstruct those last few years, even if memory fails me and half of it is made up.

Despite what's happened to me now due to years of indulgence that I am now sorely in need to make a rapid recovery from, I can't bring myself to hate the past-me, or even really to despise what I did to myself; allow to happen to me? The broadest impression and the most concrete of the past couple years remains that of happiness and profound satisfaction; that mingled indeed with a mild, but escalating boredom. Even now, and more than a little, I have to admit, I wish that I had had a few more years in that blissful state or at least that my extraction from it had not been quite so... abrupt; relatively speaking of course, it could have been much worse.

I can't help but feel though, as I relate this to you, that had I not been forced to give up my lifestyle, things might have eventually changed on their own. Realistically, probably not, but I want to believe otherwise. I fear that soon I'll reach the point where I begin to regret each additional pound of flesh I lose. I'm definitely not there yet, but that old yearning may still be inside me, I think, lurking in the shadows and lost in the immediacy of my present situation. But I am sure that compulsion, that addiction to the gaining of mass had been quite silent for the greater part of the last years. Even as I put on weight faster than I had at any previous point in my life, I could not have cared less about how big I was or if I got still heavier in a month or a year's time. Might it not have been better for me to get sick to death of boredom if nothing else and ultimately decide to change my condition on my own? But, that apparently was not in the cards for me.

The slip into a lifestyle revolving around eating and dealing with the inevitable consequences of massive obesity had been startlingly easy as I recall. In fact, for the first decade, hardly anything changed in the substance of my life as a domesticated cat. My human counter-part was always full of his schemes and his long term plans. I had not forgotten that he too was a shape-shifter, though you would hardly have known for his home life. We had been a timid, bookish person, perfectly comfortable with our our company, that definitely helped with the fact that I barely spoke more than a few dozen words to my human companion over the last two decades. But with eternity to look forward to we could afford to take our time. The plan was to live out the rest our normal life span as close to normally as possible. That would allow us to maintain our relationships with our few recognizable family members, at least until the point where it would be simple to disentangle ourselves from old commitments and craft an entirely new identity. In the meantime, steady work and slow savings promised to eventually lift my human self from the tedium of work... in the gradual, very gradual, fullness of time, of course. For me, naturally, I was already free to do anything and everything I wanted. The best part of that was that these things were all conveniently located right in the apartment where I lived.

Of course, I developed a tremendous appetite. One would not think that a 10 pound cat could eat as much as a full grown human in one sitting, but I'd beg to differ. I put my own gastrointestinal fortitude through grueling paces, totally surrendering myself as I'd always wanted and without a hint of embarrassment as my tastes evolved over time and forced my roommate and caretaker not only to provide bigger and bigger portions, but higher quality brands of meat and fish with more elaborate preparation. If some dish did not meet my exacting standards, I'd turn my nose up at it; I restrained myself from dashing the offending plate onto the ground in all but one instance and considered myself generous in preventing added labor for my human alter-ego. This might sound terrible, but on the other paw, my behavior was as much acting as it was real - at least at first - and my alter-ego expected it and perhaps even loved it. I was to be his spoiled, fat cat and he was all affection when I would roll over on my back, purring and half senseless with pleasure straining in my softening middle. No matter how hard I forced him to work on my behalf, he would pick me up and cradle me in his arms like a babe, holding me in his admittedly comfortable lap while we watched television and the pain faded from my bloated midsection as he stroked my growing curves.

Over the years, we moved several times, but seeing as I usually never left the inside of the home, things tended to blend together, even before my indolence really began to set in. To my surprise, my human counterpart began to lose weight even as I transitioned from a sleek but respectable figure into a much more noticeably spherical shape topped with pointy ears. There was even a woman or two who would come by, but I could not tell if these were actual girlfriends or just repeat escorts. He would not talk to me about his love life, however, he did talk to me about other things and at length, as if I were some kind of security blanket, even as he noticed the gleam of intelligence in my eyes. He complained about his job incessantly and there were several of those. He talked endlessly about politics and recent events, but as insulated and self-centered as I was becoming, I found it hard to even pretend to care about such petty things, especially when there was the more important matter of dinner to attend to.

As I already mentioned, I ate a lot and ate regularly, stretching out my stomach by purely natural means. With my ability I had an awareness of the richness of my diet actually flowing through my veins. It took creative biological solutions to keep my arteries from clogging over time and maintaining a proper balance of sugar in my blood, but as it happens my ability did not require me to analyze the extreme specifics of controlling each type of cell, indeed creating entirely new classes of cell with specialized functions not found in nature. I had only to picture the outcome and it would begin to happen before my heightened senses. In a way, it was like an endless stream of wishes. But in case you are wondering why I didn't simply wish myself to a size that suited me, or indeed why I don't wish myself down to a size that would better suit my pressing needs, my ability is limited to the speed of physics and that allowed by my -current- carbon-based biology. I can't make matter appear nor can I make it disappear unfortunately. And so, just when it might be more convenient to be human rather than a severely morbidly obese cat, I can't make that happen either... at least overnight.

My memories from the years leading up to the end of my comfortable life are fuzzier, however, I do recall one night when my roommate complained about how my appearance made it difficult to bring people over anymore. How he had gotten tired of 'difficult conversations' about the health of his enlarged feline housemate. I remember being so offended, I actually considered shitting in his slippers. Instead, I settled for raking my claws down his neck half an hour before his alarm was to go off the next morning and shunning his deviously comfortable tummy rubs for a month.

As I continued piling on pounds, the added weight quite abruptly changed from a complete non-issue into something which I had to take into account during my daily life. Even though I almost never went outside, when all of the furniture in the house is as tall as a multi-story building, navigating my indoor environment still took some degree of dexterity and physical prowess. I'm pretty sure that is why I started gaining so much more weight after I stopped moving around even though I hardly ate more than I had been. Well, that and one other thing.

The first time that I failed to get up onto the counter and felt my heavy body dragging me down as I clung desperately to the smooth edge, I was desperately grateful that there had been no one around to see. I was less grateful when my strength inevitably failed and I fell heavily onto my backside with all of my fifty or so pounds! I was sure that I'd cracked my tailbone, but I was far too embarrassed to even consider asking for a vet visit and thus admitting what had happened, not that my roommate would likely even think about taking me to a vet and facing yet more awkward questions about my unusual appearance. Even with my healing factor, I'd walked with a limp for two days and ever afterwards I thought about that pain in my rump when I looked up at the rim of the counter. Hopping onto a chair seat first and then up to the counter served me well for another couple of years, but by then the weight was coming on at a significantly faster pace.

Seeing as my muscles would never atrophy no matter how inactive I was and I could, in fact, strengthen myself much more quickly than I gained weight just by willing my muscles to grow, weakness or tiredness was never much of an issue for me. However, the greater the bulk on me grew, the more troublesome it seemed to move around, even if I had the strength to equal the task. I still had to use my muscles, of course, and lifting up a body which was six times as heavy as it ought to be did not have that effortless quality movement once had when I was leaner, no matter how strong I got. It bred in me a mindset for laziness, I'm positive, and an indolence which grew and fed on itself as I continued getting heavier. It was about then, and I am still not quite sure if it started out as a conscious thought or if my ability was reacting to a subconscious desire, but either way I began actively lowering my metabolism, far below the level that mere inactivity would have managed by itself.

Once I started that, my weight seemed much less like a pressing concern or even a hinderance to my wellbeing. With my metabolism falling month by month, I spent more time sleeping and even wanted to do less. Even when I got too heavy to move effectively on my own, I never felt like I was forcing myself to sleep to cover up time I'd otherwise spend pinned down by my own weight. I always felt like I slept exactly as much as I needed to. At the same time, I had less energy even during my waking hours, such that it even seemed a hassle to pay attention to television sometimes. My body temperature cooled to just several degrees above room temperature, but I never felt cold, probably due to being extremely well insulated. I also found that I needed to eliminate far less frequently, which was a massive benefit to both myself and my alter-ego who only had to haul my massive carcass to the toilet about once every two or three weeks; and yes, I always did use the toilet, right from the start!

When I was only conscious for two hours a day or less, that actually left barely enough time for the only two things that I recall remotely caring about in the depths of my fugue: eating and affection. You are probably not surprised by one of these, but might be wondering about the other. Well, when one's limbs are almost entirely pinned under much more than fifteen times the weight your body was designed for, even turning one's head seems like a massive chore, but eating was always good. I only really felt awake when I was eating; it was the only thing that I looked forward to. I was completely absorbed in my gastronomical adventures, wondering about what my companion might serve me this time in the few minutes I hazily aroused myself, or sometimes was prodded to arousal, immediately before feeding. Tasting and feeling the warm food slide down my gullet was the only lasting pleasure, even as I believe that my food intake began to drop off somewhat, my breakfast and dinner not moving as quickly through me as it once had. Despite this, I was not aware of any displeasure resulting from my situation.

Indeed, I was hardly awake long enough to even contemplate such things. I recall only the afterglow of eating washing over my consciousness, each time as good as the last, each occasion blending together into an endless chain of breakfasts and dinners. I was barely even aware whether I was on the floor, the couch or in my alter-ego's strong arms despite the fact that my weight had to have been approaching or even surpassing his own in the last few months. He would hold me and then would stroke my enormously expanded body, hands passing over a torso and belly with a waist larger around than his own despite how much bigger he was than me in stature. I would purr for long periods of time, I remember that, purr with my eyes closed and feeling safe and cared for. The purr would thrum through my entire body, rippling my extensive flesh and making the huge surface of my abdomen vibrate like the surface of a drum. My own bulk was more an asset in that because I would remember how I used to imagine myself being just this size many years ago.

But in actuality I did not think about how big I was very much at all, I could have been half my size or twice as big and it wouldn't have mattered. There was something... indescribably good about the way his hands felt passing through my fur and over the expansive pink skin of lower belly which extended far past where I could reach with my toes. I was so content, I never thought about anything changing, not once. Not even as I have vague recollections of my alter-ego feeding me by hand because my rampant neck fat had made eating from a bowl or plate difficult. I'm not quite sure if that was real or merely imagination, however. Over a week had passed after my forced awakening before I managed to get a single thing into my mouth to soothe the burning huger and thirst, and by then I had already lost a substantial amount of weight.

I've mentioned that day already in terms of its abrupt conclusion to a life that had seemed to be going swimmingly well despite how I was letting myself be devoured by pleasure, my mind atrophying even if my body couldn't. However, it was only abrupt with respect to the blur of days my life had become. I am certain it took more than one missed meal for the first hunger pang to even brush against my consciousness. Between the turgid state of my digestive system and my reptilian metabolism, it could easily have been several days before I even realized something was amiss.

I remember dreaming wistfully of salmon steak with a side of lamb tartar, my mouth watering profusely so that the fur and fat bulging around my jowls dampened. Restlessly, I 'awoke' into a state of semi-consciousness, but having a much sharper feeling of the world around me than my usual haze. It took several minutes to realize what it was that was distracting me, prodding me awake like a gadfly. You see I had forgotten completely the sensation of hunger.

I hope that I do not have to describe the feeling of hunger to you, but for me, the sensation was quite puzzling at first. It was more like a persistent craving, a mere desire, though an unusually acute one and I found myself drifting in and out of consciousness, barely able to distinguish between dream and reality; indeed that was the sum of my existence at that point. But always my mind fixated on the subject of food. After a long while it dawned on me to wonder when it was that I had last eaten. Shortly after that, my hunger became more than mere craving, I began to actually feel it in the depths of my vast belly, the first ember of a discomfort long forgotten. It worried my sedate mind like a sore tooth.

But with all the machinery in my body slowed to a state of near hibernation, it was startlingly hard to rouse myself. It was like a sensation of paralysis, but paralysis equally of mind as of body. I continued to drift in and out, one moment the seconds seeming to crawl by as my mind fixated on a growing sense of wrongness, the next, shadows jumping by degrees between one blink and the next, followed by a night both short and interminably long.

By the following morning, I was definitely sure something was wrong. Time slipped less, but my thoughts were still sluggish in my chilled brain. I felt rather like I was drunk and began to wonder when exactly I had lapsed into my current state. I knew then that I needed to restore heat and life to my colossal body in order to think properly, but in my current state, it took a monumental amount of mental effort to tap into my ability. Only the hunger allowed me to do this. It drove me on, giving me both purpose and something to focus on because I would have quite happily gone back to my dream world if I could have.

But even with my fabulous biological control, I could not come back all at once; I had been years in getting into my present state of somnolence after all. Stoking the cool embers inside of me, reenergizing all those cellular gears and mechanisms had to proceed step by step. Indeed, if I had been somehow able to warm my body back to a more reasonable temperature, I am sure that I would have promptly died of heat stroke. As I forced my body to begin radiating more heat from the core outwards, however, I was wracked by chills and shivers, my own flesh feeling like an icy blanket. I shook with the coolness of myself, all of my vast collection of lard trembling from muscle spasms deep below. I tried to pull my paws inward but was blocked by my own bulk. I was forced to make do with hugging my vast undercarriage with four paws, the limbs utterly lost to sight under the various folds, but it felt like holding onto a pile of soft, squishy snow.

This by itself was more discomfort than I had experienced in years and I desperately wanted things to simply return to how they had once been. But cutting even through the cold was the desire, no, a growing need for food. The sheer urgency that hunger could provoke in me was startling, even as my shivering grew more violent as I continued raising my metabolism and vigor returned to long dormant muscles.

The pull of dreams and constant sleep faded and I felt more myself than I had in years, though I was also completely miserable. From the depths of my self-absorption I began to wonder for the first time where my human counter-part had gone. Why was he allowing this to happen to me? I did not recall this being part of our arrangement, but then as I scanned my most recent memories, I found that I remembered almost nothing but the various vague impressions I've already described to you from the past several years. I even had to piece together retroactively that several days at least had to have already passed since the last time I was fed. Some time later, I deduced that it had also been at least that long since I had last seen my human counterpart.

Still feeling groggy and chilled to my bones, I finally began to pay some attention to my surroundings and my place therein. I was on the sofa in the living room, resting in a familiar place. I could see my large soft form sinking into the cushions around me. Ahead of me, rising over my head was the arm of the sofa, and beyond that, well, it had honestly been hard to tell. However much I had weighed then, my torso had already progressed far towards the aim of subsuming my head. The flesh of my back even rose over the tops of my ears and pushed them forward while my thick, flabby jowls were crowded by a much larger ruff of thick flesh that grew all around my head and fell heavily in front of me so that I could not even see my front paws from under a thick mass of mostly white fur. I recalled that turning my head had gotten to be bothersome rather a long time ago, but that morning I found that I had become so engorged that I was literally unable to move my head more than a few degrees left or right and even then, fat and fur tended to crowd around my eyes forcing me to squint.

I found it likewise impossible to move my ears against the fat pressing them forward over the crown of my head. This might not sound troublesome to a human, but I had once been very used to casually tuning my hearing in whichever direction I wanted. My pointed ears were also partially folded down which muffled everything around me while at the same time making the sounds of my heart beat and gnawing, empty stomach distractingly loud as they echoed through my fat-filled frame. My sense of smell, as it turned out, was by far the most useful of my available senses. It provided concrete evidence in the form of faded scents that my alter-ego had not been home for at least a week.

Still having to heat my massive body one grueling degree at a time, I continued to shiver violently and, for the first time, considered my situation as more than an inexplicable cosmic misery. "What happened?" I thought to myself, and more importantly, "What am I going to do now?"

However, it did not take me long at all to realize that the answer to the second question, at least for the near future had only one possible answer and that was, "not much."

I had lost an awareness of many things during my long descent into ennui, but I was not completely taken by surprise by the extreme state of my own obesity. I had been at least vaguely aware of the dimensions of myself the whole time, constantly reminded by pets, pinches and belly rubs on my soft form, even as all my extremities were slowly encompassed by my expanding girth. What came as a shock, however, was the feeling of my own massive weight. That might sound silly to you, but it had been a very long time since I had last even tried to move on my own.

I tried at first only to make a minor adjustment to my body where I lay in the comfortable hollow of the couch cushions. I was not expecting much, knowing I'd gained a massive amount even since I stopped trying to walk on my own, but I was not expecting to not even budge myself half an inch. My paws, first one, then two, then all four, felt utterly insufficient to the task, weaker than ever I was, even as a newly formed kitten. Granted, my range of movement was nearly nonexistent and my whole self was still sluggish with a cold-blooded metabolism, but still, I managed only to push my paws into the cushion of the sofa under me, or else the cushion of my own soft padding that seemed to be everywhere around me. The fabric or the flesh dimpled, but the mass of me was like a block of iron, utterly immoveable. It did not bode well for my future endeavors.

But even worse for me, as the day progressed into a second night of actual consciousness and the minutes ticked by with nearly unbearable slowness was the fact that my increasing metabolism further stimulated my growing hunger.

As my body temperature crawled into the low 90's, I was still shivering, but I hardly cared because I was also ravenous. It felt as though I had never been hungry before in my life, and perhaps after not eating for - how long? A week? Longer? - I really hadn't ever been as hungry as I was then. However, despite raw hunger and thirst clawing at my insides and my mind now sharper than it had been in years, I was still left with the nearly insurmountable problem of my own staggering weight.

Despite the long haze, the shape of myself was not unfamiliar to me. Even in that moment of growing desperation, I did not feel trapped inside of myself, perhaps as if my slender self were submerged in a gigantic sack of lard many times larger than itself. No, not at all; I recognized my burgeoning, bulging shape as my body, all me. It was just that my shape - which I still felt was right and proper - had suddenly become a massive inconvenience.

Despite my frame not having changed since I had weighed a slight ten pounds, my engorged body took up a full seat cushion on the sofa. My middle had sunk deep into the cushion and this was the primary reason why I could even feel the fabric under most of my paws, at least when some aberrant sheet of fat did not catch under the soft pads. My overall shape had long ago evolved from more than round or even a chunky, ponderous cylinder. No my curves flowed over one another, the skin loose, bunching and folding around my buried legs, taut and smooth over my extremely broad back and belly. My flesh billowed out at my sides as well as under me and piling on top of my back. I knew I was at least as wide as I was long, perhaps a good deal more so, and my flesh was so deep, it would have been impossible to get more than two of my paws on the ground at a time were I resting on a flat surface.

I already mentioned how the fat behind my head eclipsed even the points of my ears, but the flesh rose even further than that, first in three or four hot dog rolls behind my head over where my neck had once been and then rising still higher into a dome shape centered over the small of my back; there was not even the hint of a crease along my back from my spine anymore, the fat was so thick. If I had to guess at what the overall shape of my body was at this point, if one could say I even had a shape, it could only have been a vague, broad wedge. Despite being pretty evenly proportioned, the excess flesh did taper somewhat towards my head and forequarters, though that left my rump and large sack of a belly with significantly more mass than one might have thought at first glance. Though honestly the mountainous heap of silver and black furred flesh that I was probably did not even resemble a cat at first glance.

I found my warming muscles had slightly more strength in them now than a light summer breeze, and then I was pushing and pawing at the soft cushion under me, however futile that might have been and despite my almost complete lack of a plan moving forward. I felt strongly that I ought to at least get off of the couch, but as for what came after that... Well, perhaps after spending goodness only knew how much time sitting in the same spot I was feeling slightly querulous at the position, even though I knew things would not improve much or at all once I was on the ground.

I still had fairly strong muscles, especially for a light feline, under my titanic bulk. I could feel the bone and sinew deep inside my frame pushing with condensed power, drawing up flesh and indeed shifting my solid core of muscle, organ and bone slightly in the swamp of fatty connective tissue surrounding it on all sides. But my flesh had more than enough give to it to accommodate the inch or two of leverage I had where my limbs could reach past the subsuming, draping fat. I could not even begin to roll myself over, but you also have to remember that my abundant fat was not some liquid pool. It was all connected to itself and to me, even as it was able to slide in layers between skin and deeply buried muscle. So when I pushed as hard as I could, my flesh tugged back with the weight of gravity behind it and it was not long before I realized that this heavy softness was going to be an even larger problem than getting leverage past the depth of my own torso.

I needed to be stronger than I was, stronger than I had been the day I'd given up on walking which was the last time I'd enhanced my musculature. I also needed to be approximately a tenth of my current size, but first things first. I willed the already bulky muscles buried deep in my frame to get still larger, the fibers tougher. But this itself would take a while and I found that I had a lot of time to weigh on matters while I was pinned there on the couch under my own weight.

In a burst of sudden illumination, I realized that I had control over the signals my empty belly was sending to my brain and almost in the same moment, I was able to quiet the searing pangs which had been tormenting me all through this long, arduous process of awakening. But even as I took control of my hunger, the matter of having been apparently abandoned remained pressing. For one thing, while I happened to have a very large stockpile of stored calories on hand as it were, I actually could not do without water and I realized with some alarm that I was already quite dehydrated, having run through the significant supply of retained bodily fluid I'd had in the week or so since I'd been suddenly cut off from sustenance. I did not know how I was going to manage to quench my growing thirst any time soon, but the fact that my alter-ego had not been home in at least a week's time had even more alarming implications that only now I was able to consider.

Even though I had the memory of the purpose with which my original self had decided to clone me into the body of a cat, namely to live out my fondest fantasies of greed and indulgence, I also remembered another key reason why I wanted a clone rather than living through this myself. It was the reason why I had gone with a cat even though I was perhaps even more fond of dogs and foxes as alternative shapes. Cats were small and discreet creatures, though I could hardly say the same of myself currently, only imagine how much larger I would have wound up if I had started out as an 80 pound Labrador instead. A big part of the reason I existed was to be a backup in case something bad happened to my original body. And I honestly could not think of a reason why my alter-ego would abandon me save if he'd had an unexpected accident or done something stupid.

I could not rule it out. Certainly I could not rule out random chance, but neither could I rule out my other self having perhaps at last grown weary of the slow grind out of the stagnant middle class and decided to try to take a shortcut. I remembered him experimenting with adjusting the features of his face to mimic other people. He'd once come out of the bathroom the spitting image of Jim Carrey, at least from the neck up, and that had been almost ten years ago now.

I racked my brain through my recent memories, trying in vain to recall anything my other self might have said, any hints of what he was doing with his life in the months leading up to this mess I now found myself in. But there was nothing, nothing but a fog of endless meals, dreams and purring satisfaction. Nothing real, my life had lost all hard edges to it, it seemed to me, lost utterly. But I felt deep in my bones that I would never just abandon myself, even if my other self was hardly differentiable from an ordinary domestic cat with a larger-than-life appetite. I had to assume that misfortune had taken my original self, or else he'd come across the law in some clumsy attempt to fast track his life; the government or a worse power.

It was bad enough to contemplate the likely death of my original self, the person who had actually lived the memories that lived inside my head, but even worse, depending on what had happened, the apartment in which I was struggling to even move around in might not be safe, and I had already spent a week or more in slowly rousing myself to a point where I could even think about such things. The fear crept down my buried spine and made my heart beat so fast I had to command it to slow down with my ability.

All of a sudden, the walls of my world took on a menacing shade and the weight of my enormous body was a heap of shackles loaded on my back. I redoubled my efforts at internal sculpting.

You may be wondering why, if I had total control over my biology, I did not do something more elaborate like extend the bones of my legs or even lace my fat with muscle fiber so that I could actually move about on my fat alone. Well, let me assure you that sitting there for another day and night while my muscles grew into a truly hulking shape deep inside my mountainous bulk, I had plenty of time to consider more extreme modifications.

Call it timidness or maybe merely an acute sense of aesthetics, but I found the idea of altering myself from a regular cat shape deeply unsettling. The feeling I had was akin to my reservations towards tinkering with the function of my own brain. Knowing that I was soulless, even worse, a copy of a soulless man, I knew that my personality, memories, thought patterns, me entirely, was made up of the grey stuff between my ears. Theoretically, I could have made myself smarter, deleted unwanted memories, even made myself constantly happy by feeding the right chemicals into my brain. But clearly, there was severe danger down that path. I thought it would be easy to slip into madness, lose the person I was or my essential humanity itself. I knew I lacked the wisdom now to even experiment with such things, though it was my hope that I might eventually gain enough in the future when it inevitably came time to be more. But now was not the time for that and likewise, even though I thought that my life might be at stake, I did not feel up to the task of creating and using tools which I did not understand fully or feel I could control.

Though I nearly changed my mind about all that when early the next morning, there came a knock on the door. In the silence that pervaded the small apartment, the sound was deafening and startled me awake from a 'brief' nap despite the way my ears were still muffled and pointed in the wrong direction.

Naturally, I could not do much but sit there. Though I could pronounce English at least somewhat intelligibly, I found the prospect of speaking to another human suddenly terrifying. I hoped desperately that whoever was out there would just give up and leave. Though, if my counterpart truly was gone, someone had to come through that door eventually.

The person outside knocked a second and a third time, but after a while of sitting in trepidatious silence, the door the only thing between me and an exceedingly worse turn of events, I finally heard footsteps walking away along the path outside. I sighed in relief, but thought, "What about next time?"

The prospect was difficult to even contemplate given the past two decades of my life and the fact that my mind was only just now emerging from a years-long fugue, but I knew then that I would have to leave this place. 'Where will I go?' I thought and had absolutely no idea. I supposed then that wherever my fate lay, it would have to begin with hauling myself off the thrice-cursed couch; easier said than done.

Laying on top of a deep mattress of my own soft flesh, the meat sinking below the reach of my paws into the cushion under me, and my flanks piled up like silos to either side of myself supporting a small hill of yet more heavy meat heaped up well over the top of my head, it honestly still seemed like folly to try to drag myself anywhere, let alone out of the apartment. Just two weeks ago, I had been an immensely smug and self-satisfied creature and though my entitlements had been brutally snatched away, part of me resisted what I knew had to happen.

In the same way in which I had hid my injury after failing to leap up to the counter, I had an immense aversion to even attempting a task at which I knew I was certain to be clumsy, that would require multiple attempts and sustained effort and at which I was certain to look foolish while trying. It was a silly notion in the light of my very serious problem, but if I had not known that, if nothing else, I would soon be dead of dehydration, or perhaps worse, picked up and sent to an animal shelter where I would soon become a national news story and likely worst of all, trending, I don't think I would have even tried to get myself off that couch. Sheer desperation and necessity drove me to sacrifice my immense dignity which had swollen to almost a size to match my own corpulence at that point.

With the time having been spent swelling my well hidden muscles to ridiculous proportions under the soft sagging surface of my body, I planted my paws into the thick couch cushion and began testing my redoubled strength. There was certainly a difference, however, the change only made the effort of shifting my engorged frame feel like I was trying to lift a car rather than the foundations of a building. I began to be acutely aware of the hundreds of salmon steaks, the thousands of chicken hearts and duck livers, and the tens of thousands of tins of tuna which had sustained me and whose mass even now clung to me in heavy folds and dragging, rippling bulges. My body was a monument to two decades devoted to greed and self-indulgence and a shadow of smug satisfaction at what a glutton I'd become crossed my mind even as I struggled with a body builder's strength to even scoot my forequarters over to the edge of the couch. It was devilishly slow, dragging work - literally! - but I made progress nonetheless which was more than I could have imagined yesterday. My legs were all of them completely swamped in soft skin and heavy lard so that even as I moved a paw, I had to push fat out of the way of its placement lest I step on myself, but I dragged myself inch by hard-won inch regardless. My fast-twitch muscles tired quickly, however, and I actually felt overheated at long last for the effort, the heat spreading through my still-cool outer layers of pudge that surrounded my core.

Quite unbidden and unwanted, I felt an erection coming on, my spiky prick emerging from its sheathe into close, cloistered folds which had long ago buried it three times over. I should not have been surprised. After all, laborious movement at such an extreme size as my own had been a delicious fantasy of mine. Well, my size certainly met that criteria, in fact, I was even heavier now than I had imagined myself being in all but my most ludicrous fantasies. But my sudden arousal was worse than useless and I felt only frustration since pretty clearly there was nothing that I could do about it.

Well... had I more energy, I might have tried something along the lines of rubbing my titanic thighs together... but I already had a headache from dehydration, the back of my throat dryer than the litter box my alter-ego had sometimes teased me with in odd moments, and I was in no mood.

Needing rest, it was surprisingly easy to nod off and I was startled at how many hours I had lost when I blinked back to my senses; the golden late afternoon light was streaming in at a low angle through the windows. I'd finally returned to a regular cat's metabolism, but I was clearly still a damnably sluggish creature. Lashing my tail against my thick buttocks at the thought - this was hampered somewhat by a heavy fold from my tail-head which rested on much of its length - I planted my forepaws under me and pulled myself forward, my head and shoulders sloshing forward on the mattress of my chest and belly, until I could peer over the edge of the couch.

You probably would not think twice about a distance of perhaps two feet, but to me, in imagining my massive weight crashing down all at once, it seemed like perilous drop. Indeed, that was why I had taken the severe effort to turn myself the 90 degrees just to look down. If I had just rolled over, assuming I even could given my vast width, I thought that I was like as not to land on my back. I imagined my paws waving around futilely in the air, my mammoth flanks, each more than three times the width of my shoulders proper, precluding the possibility of flipping back over. I'd be just as helpless as a turtle in the same situation, and just as dead most likely. No, I had to do this as carefully as possible.

I sat there kneading the edge of the cushion for a long time, my paws lost utterly under a thick and heavy curtain of neck/chest meat that spilled out ahead of me and over the edge. My chin and lower lip depressed into the same bolus that hung out in front of my face so I had to keep my lips closed lest my own fur and fat creep into my mouth. The trepidation I felt was not, I think, unwarranted given the capability of my mountainous physique, but I knew that somehow I was going to have to make this happen. Either that or I'd end up losing my life or my freedom, or both. My restless paws began pulling my heavy self forward, the skin dragging over the fabric under me and at my colossal flanks.

The familiar mass of mostly white fur that hung out in front of me scrunched slightly as friction resisted and its soft surface wobbled alarmingly with my jerky left and right movement, my whole body dragging over a wide area. My smothered paws pushed forward with desperate effort against not truly the weight of my body, which rested fully on the cushion, but rather against friction and the tug of spring-like softness as my accommodating flesh gave way only to try to pull itself back with increasing resistance. Because of this, I could only move in a sort of ratcheting gait, shoving at least some of myself forward until the skin under me finally deigned to slide along a bit. Then I could work on pulling other sections of skin along after it.

So before me, I watched the round mass of heavy fat give a sudden lurch downward on the left side, some skin bunched against the edge of the cushion finally giving way. The skin surface shuddered as the heavy mass fell to be caught a couple inches lower, the sharp tug to my skin surprisingly uncomfortable. It bounced gelatinously and I could feel it collide with and then rest against the front of the couch and in the same moment, the movement jostled free the right side of my extensive brisket and it followed with a likewise heavy movement that carried up through the skin around my jaw and buried neck. I could feel the heavy mass dangling, its weight pulling on my neck and collar area; my erection was not going away any time soon. However, I thought less about that and was more surprised at how much more I could see, especially of the living room floor, now that the mass of my lower neck and brisket was hanging below me rather than pressed forward against the ground. I took a moment to savor my expanded field of vision, knowing that it'd be my last chance before getting down onto the ground. I knew that it would be a hell of thing lifting myself up onto anything even if a heavy-duty ramp were provided.

The weight of hanging flesh out ahead of me accelerated my efforts to claw my way out of the depression my weight had sunk into the cushion over the course of... however long I'd been resting there. The sensation of so much fatty bulk hanging ahead of me and supported by nothing but my own hide was more than a little uncomfortable to my surprise, hurt like a pinch but without any sense of compression and spread out all over my lower neck, chest and shoulder area as I leaned further down inch by inch. Even my cheeks and heavy jowls fell forward as my forequarters dropped slowly over the edge, the fur of my chest the only thing protecting my skin from a serious rug burn. The heavy fat over the crown of my head fell forward further over my ears so that I felt more than half deaf and hearing mostly the sounds of my raspy breathing and thudding heart. Folds of skin gathered unusually around my upper cheeks and at the corners of my eyes and brow as I leaned towards the ground, making me have to blink rapidly to keep my field of view clear.

I had to take a break after I had managed to ooze my forequarters down the front of the couch even though I did not particularly want to. With my head and front held suspended by the greater mass of my rump and belly, blood was rushing into my head and all I could hear was a roaring thudding of my pounding heart in my ears. My cheeks became hot and flushed and it was still hard to keep my eyes open; the heavy flanks hanging down now on either side of my body were crowding around and compressing the fat-filled ruff that already surrounded my face. But it could not be helped, I was already exhausted for the effort of getting this far, I'd forgotten the feeling of tired burning muscles, and I as far as I was concerned, I would have preferred it stayed forgotten. The air whistled in the back of my throat in a wheeze that I could more easily feel than hear at the moment due to my muffled ears. I probably should have taken the time to expand or at least reinforce my fat-congested airways, but the sound was not really getting in the way of my breathing proper and more importantly, it was part of the character I had been playing for over twenty years now, the fat, spoiled cat... and admittedly this too was something of a turn on.

My paws rested on the front of the couch, pressed into the fabric by the sheer volume of my hanging neck and brisket even though its weight was directed downwards. I knew I ought to start pulling myself down again soon, but as the heat of blood and my own fat pressing around my head swallowed me up, it was startlingly easy for the deep fatigue I felt to pull me down... down...

I started awake with a whistling gasp, already sliding forward inches before I knew what was happening. Ahead of me, my brisket was already down on the ground, the backs of my forepaws dragging along limply against the fabric of the front of the couch while above me, I could feel the huge mass of my lower body gathering speed as the flesh oozed past the tipping point, only friction keeping me from a full and immediate collapse, but not for much longer.

Reflexively, I planted my hind paws, but the sheer weight of sliding flesh was intolerable. My legs themselves were straddling a pile of meat deeper than they were long; it was impossible to get any leverage and even in the moment I knew that if I had tried to dig in my claws, they were more likely to be ripped out of my feet than do anything to halt my increasing descent forward. I ended up doing the only thing I could do, I pushed forward with all of my artificially enhanced strength, dragging the brisket which already lay on the ground, and tried to get my forequarters out ahead as much as possible just as my hips and extensive paunch slipped over the edge in a rush and my immense weight came crashing down instantly.

My rear half came down on top of me with the same boneless dead weight of a sack of potatoes. I face planted on the smooth, cool tiles of the living room floor and things suddenly went dark as my own fatty, fur-covered rolls piled around my face as it felt like, again, the weight of a car was bearing down on my head and neck. I struggled with my forepaws, but all I could feel was my own heavy, doughy flesh and my left paw was pinned completely under my chest in a way that was quickly spraining my shoulder. I could feel my ass sticking up in the air, the fatty region which enfolded my crotch pressed up against the front of the couch. I exhaled half involuntarily as there was a lot more weight pressing down on my diaphragm than normal. It was not until I tried to draw my next breath that I realized that, between the floor and the heaps of my own flesh piling around my face, I was essentially smothered.

Immediately a situation which had seemed merely embarrassing became much more serious. I could do basically anything with my body if I wanted, but most of those things took time and as I was now, I definitely needed to breath! But as I strained with my lungs, all I received were stale wafts of my own cloying musk which was especially ripe between the deeper fat folds. My special awareness of my body informed me that my blood oxygen was already dropping at an alarming rate. Despite my appearance to a marine mammal, my enormous body actually had very high demands, not only in daily calories, but also of oxygen. I struggled a little, but again, my body was so massive that most of what I could feel with the three paws that I could even move was my own prodigious flesh. If the floor had been carpet, I would have died then and there and you would be ignorant of my story. Fortunately for me, and for you my dear listener, the floor was tile and quite amiable to my fur-covered softness sliding across it.

My paws ended up being worthless, ensnared as they were in my own expansive bulk. I'm still not sure how, but I remember the moment when I tried straining with the strength in my back, thrusting my massive rear against the front of the couch, only then did I find my chest beginning to slide over the smooth tile. And as is the nature of friction, once I started moving, I kept going to a fair distance such that when I finally sloshed to a stop, safely oriented on my belly, I could not even feel the sofa behind me with my outstretched toes. I paused then, resting on my ample reserves and took several deep breaths of relief. I lifted my head very slightly and shook back the heavy fat sitting on the crown of my head until it resumed its normal position on top of my ears rather than leaning onto my forehead. 'Surely,' I thought then, 'things will get easier from here.'

Five minutes later, I had already changed my mind. As it turned out, dragging more than fifteen times my body's mass in dead weight was grueling work, even when the load was clad in fluffy fur and being dragged over a smooth tile floor. Surely, only the tile made it possible for me to move at all as the friction against my huge profile would have been far too much to budge, but the smoothness also worked against my paws as I tried to gain traction. I learned early on that I could only really gain a grip by pressing my soft, pink beans against the tile grout which provided not only much needed friction, but also a very slight edge into which I could dig my small toes. But even with this strategy, the effort needed to pull myself forward even a foot was backbreaking. I don't remember ever wanting to sleep as much as I did then, but I also desperately wanted water, the latter need growing stronger as the hours crawled by. I still was not sure where I was going to find any within reach either. It was not as though my alter-ego would have set out a water dish for my immobile ass.

Night had already fallen and by the time the birds outside had begun their morning chorus, I had managed to pull myself the length of the living room and into the hallway. As dry as I was feeling then, I was sure that I only slept three or four hours the entire night, quite sure. Fortunately the bathroom was the first door on the right.

My entire plan rested on the hope that my alter-ego was not any more enthusiastic about home maintenance than I remember myself -him- being. Clearly, the faucets on the sinks in either kitchen or bathroom were unreachable, likewise was the filtered water dispenser set into the refrigerator or even the toilet. I had to wrack my complacent, fuzz-filled brain for locations where water might be found close to the ground. And let me tell you, after having devoted two decades towards fattening myself in conceited self-pleasure, my mind did not feel up to the task of actual problem solving. I did, however, have a lot of time on my paws to think things through and a dry, splintering itch at the back of my throat to motivate me to think.

In the end, of the choices available, I went for the bathroom because I was confident that the most toxic substances would be found under the kitchen sink and I did not want to bother myself dragging my fat-laden skin across any abrasive or caustic spills or leaks. So, panting, I continued to haul my bloated, mountainous body over the threshold of the bathroom door, counting my lucky stars that my alter-ego was not currently seeing anyone at the moment and was so not encouraged to keep any of the doors in the hallway shut on a regular basis. The cabinet doors ahead of me, however, were definitely shut.

My paws, hilariously small in the scope of the rest of me, rather like the size of my head, stopped and probed for gout and paw-holds on the tile every few inches I moved. But when the cabinet was finally looming above me, looking then like a long lost temple with a secret treasure hidden within, I had to pause and again, analyze the situation.

If I had been a quarter of my weight, I could have just trussed the cabinet open with my paw; it was a lot heavier for a cat than a human, but unlike a normal cat, I understood concepts like leverage among other useful things. Being as big as I was, however, there happened to be a rather large and heavy roll of fat spilling over my paws from my front. I knew I needed to hook my paw under the cabinet door near where they met in the middle, but as I reached out ahead of myself, mostly I only accomplished smooshing my bulging front against the door. I tried not to reach directly out from under the heavier protrusion of my brisket, but even at an angle my flesh was just as deep or deeper than the length of my paw, and even with the hyper-physique I had with my muscles under the flab, the weight pulling down on my extended paw was too much to bear for any length of time.

With a lot of pushing and pulling and fighting against the heavy softness enveloping not just myself but seemingly the entire area around me, I managed to hook two digits around the underside of the cabinet door, a huge fatty protuberance piling into the door above it. I gave it a tug, and to my relief, the door opened a bit, but I was soon dismayed as the weight of my own flesh pressing against the door across a wide area increased exponentially as I tried to swing it open, even after I had tried to adjust my huge body on the floor specifically to avoid this as much as possible. I lost my tenuous grip and my fat slammed the door shut for me with an uncomfortably loud bang. I recall vividly how I hissed in frustration and lashed my tail again against my barn-sized butt.

It took several more attempts to open the cabinet. In the end, I was simply too fat to manage the task directly. Instead, I resorted to actually wedging the door in the soft flesh of my expansive brisket and then adjusting my entire body where it spread out over the floor so as to move out of the way of the door's opening while keeping it ajar, my flesh stuck in the gap; it was a delicate operation to say the least what with the effort needed to even budge myself an inch using paws with which I could barely reach the floor.

Once one of the doors was open, I scooted my gargantuan self over, pressing my distant left flank hard into the wooden door, and scrambled to open the second; I actually needed the extra space, my girth was so vast. Here, I now encountered another spot of good luck, the cabinet lacked a true floor, the various soaps and toiletries were left simply standing on the tile floor below the sink. I had not actually been aware of this and realized belatedly how difficult it would have been to drag my sagging, earthbound form up the four or five inches a cabinet bottom would have been elevated off of the floor proper. I accepted my good fortune in this regard with only dull acknowledgement, however, because none of this would matter a wit if what I was looking for was not here.

I plowed ahead into the standing bottles and extra rolls of toilet paper with all the grace of a charging rhinoceros. I bowled the toiletries aside less with my paws and more with my body itself due to the sheer difficulty I had still in reaching past the extent of my corpulent form. Things piled up in front of me as I pushed and dragged myself forward over the ground like a slug, pushing uncomfortably into my fatty brisket with some hard edges, though the objects themselves were largely obscured from my sight. I heaved with my upper back and shoulders to drunkenly wobble my heavy brisket left and right. The fatty appendage's weight told in how I was able to eventually pile the debris ahead of me to either side.

Near exhaustion, I pulled myself on my fat-filled belly to the very back of the cabinet where the water connections for the sink were hidden, just a couple inches above head height for me. By scent alone I could tell that my expedition would bear fruit, the scent of moisture and mildew unmistakable. This was good because my dehydration had already reached a point where I was not sure I could have managed to drag myself all the way to the kitchen sink anymore. I reached up with my neck until I could feel the weight of fat pulling down not just on top of my head, but all around my face and even my multitude of chin rolls as I withdrew my chin and lower jaw from their usual embrace. I stuck out my tongue and licked the disgusting, rusting metal where the tap came out of the wall. Sweet moisture!

There was not much of it, but there was a steady drip from where the tap connected to a hose leading overhead to the sink above. In fact, with the pace the drops came, about once every ten seconds or so, I was surprised my alter-ego had not come in here to fix it sooner. Surely everything under the sink would have been destroyed by mildew and mold in another couple months. But my counterpart's negligence would now prove to be my salvation. I shifted my absurd bulk some more until I could rest open mouthed and let the drops fall one by one onto my waiting tongue. It felt like manna from heaven as I relaxed and sank into my supportive flesh. The only problem was that when I allowed myself some well earned sleep inevitably, my mouth closed and my head tilted forward, causing the drops to land right on my snout or forehead. So, sleeping at first was difficult, but my skills were up to the challenge.

I spent five days under that sink and by the end of it, the fur on the entire front of myself was perpetually damp and reeking of mildew. To my delicate predilections, it was an abhorrent state, but I was as incapable of cleaning any portion of my body as I was of touching my paw to my nose. It did take rather a long time to rehydrate myself, so long that I frequently fantasized of ways I could possible reach up over my head to adjust the knob controlling the water flow and perhaps increase the pace of the leak, but I was totally unable to even roll myself over as I'd thought from the start. My flanks were like giant, heavy blocks, wedging myself onto my belly and even if my soft flesh could remold itself a little, my overall shape could not flow so radically. I was much wider than I was tall and that did not change even if some human were around to rotate my burgeoning self onto my side for me.

With the ability to perfectly control my metabolism, however, I had no need for food and could even quiet the sense of immense hunger I ought to have felt into a subtle longing in the back of my mind, more psychological than physical. Fortunately for me, this also meant that I could utilize my vast collection of stored calories with perfect efficiency and no need to worry about malnutrition. I just needed a steady supply of water and I was already making adjustments so that I would require less of it in the future. Considering how big my body was at the time, it was not surprising that I burnt through calories at a rate disproportionate to that needed by a ten-pound cat. In fact, I was quite sure I was cannibalizing my hard-earned bulk at a rate easily eight times as much as twenty years ago when I first started myself down this road. My excess skin and fat itself needed nourishment, but at the time, I remember being alarmed at how rapidly I was burning through what I still felt emotionally as my own flesh, even though my extra weight had caused me no end of problems ever since my alter-ego had left me to fend for myself without warning.

Curiosity as much as anything else drove me out of the damp, stinking hole where I had lain for days, that and the fear of whoever was at the door eventually returning. Over the course of five days, I had not only replenished myself, but managed to store enough extra fluid in the various superfluous tissues of my body to last me at least a week without another sip. I could easily have stored a lot more, expanding my blood supply and swelling my mountainous amounts of spare tissue, but was limited by the supply of water. Irregardless, like an explorer packing for a long expedition, I ventured forth from the cabinet, scattering damp debris in my wake, my fur damp, stinking and sticking up wildly in all directions even in the small area of myself that I could see. The door lay to my left, but first I turned my head towards the right for a slight detour.

The detour was all of about three feet, but when one had to drag oneself along by the belly and the tips of one's paws, even that much of a distance was not inconsiderate. But even as I pulled myself forward, I noticed a difference in my condition.

The scale set against the bathroom wall was a wide glass platform, but even then, I was not completely sure if it was sufficient to hold my girth without some of me slipping off of the sides and onto the ground. Even when I had managed to pull myself up the half inch or so onto the smooth glass, I was not sure I was not leaving some substantial bit of myself off of the weight measurement. However, even with the difficulty I had in sliding my massive form up the tiny ledge onto the scale, I was a little surprised I was able to do it at all. I felt strongly that the over-muscled frame housed within my mountainous body was getting far more performance out of my lard-stuffed carcass than it had a week before. So I knew that I had already lost a significant amount of weight when I looked down at those numbers "152.6 lb." Seeing them, I felt strangely... hollow. I also felt more than slightly angry at myself for not knowing how much I had weighed to start with.

At this point you might be wondering why, after having railed on so about the extreme difficulty my size made the simple matter of crossing from the living room to the bathroom even to avoid a death by dehydration, I was not elated with the clear feeling of having lost a good portion of my oppressive flesh. Please remember, dear listener, that I had spent the previous two decades of my life, fully two-fifths of my entire life subjectively, devoted to the pleasure I took from overeating and watching -feeling- my body grow. I have already mentioned that, despite being surrounded by a veritable warehouse of lard, I did not feel as if I was trapped in some cumbersome and heavy suit. I identified with both my size and shape and though I was perhaps naive when it came to certain realities that came along with such expansive weight and girth, I felt something akin to shame and loss when I thought about the many pounds I'd clearly already lost. Did I mourn for my lost flab? Maybe that is a step too far, but it did feel somehow wrong to confirm to myself that I was actually losing weight even as, at the same time, I knew cognitively that it was completely necessary and a lot more weight besides would also have to come off before I found another comfortable place to live... but even then, I had my suspicions that I would never again find an environment so willing to cater to my unique needs as my alter-ego understood them. And despite this, the sense of wrongness lingered. Just examining my body for the differences I could now feel even if I could not see them yet reminded me of the years of effort spent in attaining such an epic, if hilariously impractical and useless, size and corpulence. I was consciously wrecking the monument to my own greed and pleasure that my body had become.

I had to tear my eyes away from the digital scale readout before I became too disgusted with myself to move at all. Time was wasting after all, my heightened senses informing me of the limited water supply I had managed to squirrel away inside with all the lard wobbling and dragging at my flanks. As I dragged my still-too-heavy body over the smooth floor and back into the hallway, I could have sworn that I could almost feel the pounds evaporating off of me, consumed in the fires of my hunger which I forced myself not to feel. Fantasy, I know, but it seemed all too real. In fact, the illusion distracted me for a good long time until I finally looked up and realized that I still had no plan on how to get out of the apartment.

My solution was three entire days in the doing, and by the end of it, so much time had passed since the start of all of this that I was dreading the passing of every hour, sure that the landlord would come calling next at the door even if my alter-ego had somehow managed to disappear in a way that drew no attention back to his home. I was assisted slightly, quite slightly, by my ongoing weight loss which may have been a little less rapid than you might be imagining given my previous descriptions. It 'helped' that once I found an empty plastic container I was able to chew into an open vessel, I was able to collect the water dripping from under the bathroom faucet. Then later, there was the discovery of several packages of crisps, cookies and wafers left on the ground level of the kitchen pantry.

Normally, a cat such as my dignified self would be a strict carnivore and while I usually kept up the facade for appearances sake, I had long ago altered my digestive system to handle all of the many wonderful foods I had enjoyed as a man, potato chips being near the top of the list. My palate remained that of a cat, however, so the cookies I found in the pantry tasted sickeningly sweet to my predilections, such that I was almost nauseous as I was choking them down in large mouthfuls. Despite the taste, however, the mere sight of food seemed to trigger within me a deepest compulsion to eat that I... well, I could not ignore, even if I had been inclined to do so.

You might be wondering how I wound up in the kitchen pantry, well, as fortune would have it, the door was not set properly into its jam, only mostly closed when I found it. It was another startling piece of good luck and not just for the food which I was able to reach with my gelatinous earthbound form. You see, inside the pantry were also the brooms.

This part is what took the majority of the three days I spent in enacting my grand design. With my paws hidden under the thick fat draped over them, it was exceedingly difficult to manipulate the broom, which to me was like an enormous log akin to a telephone pole. The light plastic shell at least was light and did not hold much difficulty for me to drag across the kitchen, dusty bristles held between my teeth as I dragged and pushed myself along. Between the weight loss and just sheer practice, I was getting better at gliding along my vast fuzzy tummy. Finding the grout lines with my paws seemed almost second nature to me. However, at the foot of the door, I had the damnedest time just lifting the broom straight up so that it leaned against the wall. It would have been so easy if I could have just rolled onto my side or back, freeing my paws to face a direction other than straight down towards the ground. But my flanks were still far too wide for that. Perhaps I should have done something about that, like truly liquifying my fatty flesh so that I could roll around as easily as one might submerged in a water-filled balloon, but I still felt uneasy at the prospect of any 'extreme' modifications. Besides, I was sure that I would be able to get it upright "the next time..."

I ended up pulling the broom's bristles clear under my ample chest until I could manipulate the base and the pole with my forepaws. This caused the doughy lard of my brisket to quite literally wrap all the way around the shaft of the pole as I pulled it up and in towards myself, but it was actually not too uncomfortable. After it was upright, I then had to set about the more delicate operation of nudging the door lever with enough force to open the rear door of the apartment. Easier said than done working not just with a cat's mittens, but a pair buried past the toes in a deep, heavy slush of warm skin and fat. I ended up taking several breaks from the effort from sheer frustration at my ineptitude, dragging myself back to the bathroom to suck down the collected water or to the pantry to root around for crumbs or spend hours - more hours than I care to admit - trying to knock down more boxes of dry goods to devour hungrily. I wont bother mentioning how many packets of dry ramen I managed to crunch down blandly before making my final exit from the place I had known as home for many years.

As for my eventual success, it could not have come any sooner, or perhaps it is more right to say it could not have come any later because if it had, I would not be able to tell you this story. Only by pulling in the broom tight to my chest and actually using my flesh wrapped around it as a stabilizing force was I able to finally nudge the lever up with a heavy shove from my upper back. My forequarters lurched upward so much that I could actually feel my expansive flanks changing shape against the ground as I pulled the broom and many extra pounds of surplus meat along with me. The sharp "clack!" of the door was like sweet music to my ears as not for the first time, my ample flesh leaning against it did the work of pushing the door open for me. Ahead of me now, the world loomed and I was more terrified than ever.

Already, I have described for you the seeming hugeness of my apartment home, most of which was far too high above for me to ever reach, but looking out the door now for the first time in many years, I felt every bit the part of a tiny, helpless and frankly disabled cat. The wind blew in unfamiliar scents both enticing and frightening. Fearing that my eyes would soon pop out of my skull, I forced myself to look down. With difficulty, I studied the unfriendly metal of the door frame ahead of me as well as the rough concrete of the small patio which filled half of the minuscule backyard. No more smooth tile to drag my soft and vulnerable hide over, it seemed. I had not quite considered this aspect of locomotion outside the controlled environment of my home. But I had no more time for hemming or hawing as at that very moment came more rapping on the front door across the kitchen and living room behind me!

Feeling like my overworked heart was about to leap into my throat I "threw" myself forward over the four inch drop onto the smooth, dusty concrete; which is to say, I lurched forward rather like a very thick and inflexible inch worm. My fatty brisket brushed lightly over the precipice and crashed down onto the concrete below with an audible slap of limp meat. I scrambled and pushed with my hind legs and haunches while pushing up with my forepaws and arching my back with all the might I could muster. I managed another laughable 'hop' forward, landing with the door frame pressing into my belly with enough force I could feel it in my diaphragm. Wheezing with the impact, I continued to scrabble with my claws, finding the friction of the smooth concrete greatly increased from the tile while at the same time I had a lot more traction available for paws also. I grunted and clawed at the ground in desperation, my flesh bouncing and wobbling as I struggled to push along the mattress of wide belly and chest fat on which I rested, but there was no gliding anymore. My torso still felt like an automotive sitting on my back and my belly had an indelible grip on the porous surface of the gray concrete under me. The fear for my skin again had me regretting all of those crackers and disgusting cookies I had forced down my gullet in the past couple days.

But in my desperate struggling, I felt a rippling shudder travel down a portion of the right side of my body, the sensation familiar because I had felt it before while I had been stranded on the couch. It was my skin ratcheting loose and sliding forward as tension released itself over a wide patch of skin under my elephantine frame. I took a breath to steady myself and then tried planting my left feet and pulling forward with all the force I could muster on my right. The stretched skin south of my solar plexus pulled away from the ground first, shuddering forward, followed by a second wave rippling across the forward portion of my right side which had been the first to move. Achieving this success, I forced myself to calm down and move with more coordinated motion, now on the left side. This time I gained enough inches so that my navel now rested on the ground, leaving just my hips and lower paunch, which I could feel ballooning out from between my hind-legs as I kept pushing forward, stranded on the threshold. It was getting harder to move with more of me on the concrete, but with a few more left-right lurches of my titanic and heavy self, I could feel my soft lower belly finally collapse down somewhere behind my hind-paws. There was a stinging pain as it brushed hard against the metal door frame, but there was no time to worry about that. Whoever was out front was knocking again, and there was a feminine voice, but I could not make out what she was saying. More frantic knocking and jiggling of the door handle followed shortly thereafter.

I wanted desperately to close the rear door, but could not see how I could do so quickly, not when my movement was again a fight for every inch. Ponderously, I shoved and manhandled my soft, quickly aching bulk off to the side of the door, my chest sliding off of the smooth concrete to plop onto dark, odiferous soil that tickled my nose. There was a neglected but hardy topiary sitting right next to the door, a sad attempt to make the tiny, crab-grass infested yard more appealing. Not caring in the slightest how it looked, the shadows between it and the wall of the apartment looked to me like salvation, and as luck would have it, they were. I shoved my huge self into the cramped space which could have easily held several cats together comfortably, but held me in place like a sardine and with much cracking of small branches and painful jabs into areas of my body I'd forgotten I even had.

I then heard the sound that I had been dreading this entire time, that of keys rattling into the lock of the front door. I stilled my breath, forcing my heart to slow down. My huge body craved oxygen and the lack of it made my vision swim, but I was in complete control now. I laid still, trusting entirely on shadows, the stripped pattern of my broad back, and plain old dumb luck to preserve myself.

I heard the front door open and not one, but several people entered the apartment I had just left. Just behind me, I heard the rear door squeak on its hinges as it came to rest just slightly ajar. I was grateful for this, but it also muffled the sounds of the people talking inside the apartment. I only caught a few snatches of conversation.

"...sure he hasn't been home?"

"No, I... ...he's paid up to... ...two days from now."

A lot of scuffling sounds followed as the people moved around the house. "Anyone been in..."

The female responded, "No, not that I know of, officer."

The talking continued out of my ability to hear them, damn the fat covering my ears! When they returned, someone was just outside the rear door. I heard plastic rustle against tile - the broom! - and then the door just behind me was pushed open. "Door's open." said a gruff sounding human. I closed my eyes shut, willing myself not to quiver with fear, but images kept running through my head of rough hands handling my soft body, of cameras and cold metal cages. I probably wet myself a little, but with my grimy state at the time, it was honestly hard to tell.

Behind the man standing in the threshold of the door just a foot or so away from my hiding place, another man's voice rang out clearly. "Did he keep any animals?" I had not known that I could get even more frightened, but I did, it felt like I was falling right out of my skin into a cold embrace of a howling wind.

"Not that I know of." said the female. "He had no deposit for one."

A tension-filled moment of silence passed before finally, a terse sigh and shuffling feet from the door moving inward. "There's nothing here." was what I heard before the door boomed shut, locking me, I realized instantly, out of the only home I had known for years. I had plenty of time after the sounds of movement had faded away out around the front of the apartment building and down the path to contemplate my new life as a stray cat.

At my size, moving backward was no simple matter as I was fighting my heavy flesh and the grain of my fur, but there was not enough space ahead of me to move forward so I had no choice. Fat piled up around my face and over my mouth as I strained with my hind-legs, barely managing the same left-right lurching movement I had conjured earlier, my tail lashing vigorously the entire time. But the act of coming free was less of a release and more of a drawn out sigh as I dragged my wide form over the soft earth steadily deforming under me. I simply relaxed when I had had enough, allowing my body to support me and my once against exhausted muscles. I looked at nothing in particular and before long found myself waking up from a nap goodness only knew how many hours long. It was late in the afternoon and the shadows were thick in every corner. I realized almost with a start that I was still outside, by myself. If the act of losing weight did not feel right to me, then being outside felt even less so, however, I knew that this was the correct course of action. But it was hard even to contemplate the amount of life adjustment that I would have to resort to in the days, weeks, months, and yes, years ahead of me. I eyed the thin metal gate separating the tiny yard from the rest of the well landscaped apartment complex. It was closed, but the latch was not locked. I began to wonder when my streak of luck would peter out as I pulled myself slowly back onto the concrete path leading away from my home and towards the rest of my life, such as it was.

-Thanks for reading! The story continues in the full version.

To purchase the full novel with interior sketch art, please go to - [link coming soon! =3]