"The Big Shamu"

Another quick story? Yeah. Surprise! I joined the Weekly Weigh In Writers group on Deviant Art and this week's prompt by Extra Baggage Claim was WHALE. So...

Enjoy!

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Jamie loved to swim. She loved to feel her body cut through the water with ease, and she loved to flaunt that body in any kind of swimwear, especially bikinis. Jamie had very impressive abs that were her favorite thing in the whole wide world. She would rub her abs, talk about her abs, show off her abs at the slightest provocation. She was always eager to share just how hot she thought her body was.

And whenever she talked about how hot her body was, it was inevitably followed by talking about how not how someone else’s body was. Jamie loved to nitpick the figures of everyone around her. Even her friends who were equally vain and stereotypically hot felt the sting of Jamie’s nitpicks, a comment about a pound or two gained, a pinch of any little bit of softness, and snide remarks about what people were eating.

Jamie was the queen of “Do you really need that?” and “Maybe seconds aren’t the best idea.”

Yes, Jamie was often critical and cruel, and there was nobody she was more critical and cruel too then her co-worker Stacy. Stacy was a rather large girl, someone that Jamie considered to be a real pig, or more accurately, a whale. Stacy never did anything to Jamie, and, due to Jamie’s relentless teasing, did whatever she could to stay out of Jamie’s way. But there was one place that Stacy and Jamie had a tendency to cross paths because they both loved to take advantage of one particular company perk.

They both loved to swim in the company pool.

Stacy had always loved swimming. The pool was where she felt her lightest. It was so freeing and fun- Of course it was whenever Jamie wasn’t there.

Whenever Jamie was in the same pool, she would mock Stacy relentless, for her lack of speed, her lack of grace, and especially her figure. She loved to tease and poke and pinch Stacy and call her names like Fatso and Lard Ass, but given the circumstances, the pool, Stacy’s size, and her name beginning with an S, Jamie’s favorite name for Stacy was “Shamu” or more often “The Big Shamu”. There was just something about adding that Big for added emphasis that Jamie really loved. Obviously, Stacy did not share that same love.

What Stacy did love was what ended up happening to Jamie.

The vain and cruel Jamie, the bane of Stacy’s otherwise happy existence, went on vacation and while swimming in an exotic lake contracted some kind of extremely rare virus. It was lucky that it was extremely rare and hard to catch or it would have caused a global panic.

Jamie caught a virus that made her fat.

Well, it didn’t make her fat per say, but it did lead to an incredible increase in appetite and a crashing of her metabolism. Theoretically, Jamie could have avoided gaining weight (and her vain friends were always quick to point that out), but that would have taken an extreme amount of effort when it came to planning and sticking to an insanely strict diet. And that would have been helped by knowing something was up in advance, but of course Jamie didn’t realize anything was wrong at first.

Vain Jamie couldn’t accept that she was gaining weight, that she would ever gain weight. So she started craving more things? Who cares? She could eat whatever she wanted without getting fat. Pants were getting snug? She must have shrunk them. More snug clothes? Most be her time of the month. Still snug? Water weight. Nothing to be worried about.

By the time she was actually concerned about her rapid weight gain, and went to a doctor to get diagnosed with an extremely rare jungle obesity virus, it was too late. Jamie had fallen into all new bad habits and was a hopeless junk food junkie. And all of the junk food and her crashed metabolism left her too tired to workout with any kind of regularity, so that pounds had piled on and they would continue to pile on because there was no magical pill for Jamie to take.

Nobody prepares you for catching an obesity virus, and Jamie found herself in a whole new fat world where everything she had previously known was in reverse. Jamie no longer loved to show off her body now that she had gone from being slim to being thoroughly obese and seemingly getting fatter by the day. She didn’t even like to look at herself in the mirror since she had turned herself into the kind of person she used to make fun of.

Jamie’s precious abs were gone, replaced by a big blubbery belly that was a swaying apron of fat in front of her. Every day she would hold it in her hands and hate herself as she kneaded the spongy fat like it was bread dough and felt its immense weight in her chubby hands. She would pinch it and jiggle it and feel the flabby fat ooze through her sausage fingers. The rest of her body had grown incredibly fat as well.

She had thunder thighs that made her waddle and a blubber butt that was soft and saggy and covered in cellulite just like her thighs. Her breasts had grown bigger but sagged more and were far outpaced by her gelatinous gut, and her arms had grown flabby bingo wings. Even Jamie’s face had grown so fat, with pudgy jowls and a doughy double chin that she was barely recognizable.

But she was still recognizable, and those who remembered her as being a vain and cruel victim who loved to nitpick others reveled in her downfall.

“Do you really need that cupcake, lard ass?”

“Maybe a second slice of pizza isn’t a great idea, piggy.”

“You’ve really let yourself go, Jamie. You’ve become quite the fatty. Maybe it’s time to give dieting a really serious chance before you break the scale.”

“What a fat loser you turned into, right Fat Ass?”

“Why don’t you show us your abs now, Blubber Gut?”

“Oink. Oink. Oink.”

“Moooooooooo.”

These were just some of the comments that followed Jamie around, and she felt deep down that she deserved every single one of them because she was a lazy pathetic fatty like she had always made fun of, and she had always been vain and cruel so this was the karma she deserved.

Now Stacy was happy being fat. She loved her body, and had a much more positive mindset than Jamie. She knew she was beautiful, that all bodies are beautiful. And there was a real part of her that felt bad for Jamie and wanted to show her some love and positive attention and help her get through this.

But then she saw Jamie in the pool.

Jamie had crammed herself into a one piece swimsuit that her blubbery body was still positively bursting out of because the water was where she felt most at home, and it was the only place she felt light at all.

Stacy ran into her and couldn’t help but notice that Jamie was now the far fatter of the two. And she needed to say something.

“Gee, Jumbo Jamie. I guess you’re the Big Shamu now. Huh, Fatso?”

And that’s how Jamie learned her lesson the hard way and never said another mean thing to anybody ever again.