Emma Thorn

Emma Thorn was always a big girl, and no one but the clinically blind could deny this. She was popularly regarded as the girl no one could cheat on, as once you were her boyfriend, you virtually had no eyes for anyone else as she had a notable characteristic of completely occupying anyone’s field of view with every square inch of her body.

Newspapers churned out reports of childhood obesity epidemic ad nauseam, and pictures were constantly taken of her in various stages of trying to shed the less useful parts of herself. Emma on a treadmill, Emma eating a salad, Emma walking to school instead of taking the bus, Emma always with a sad face. Emma was a big girl but she had a big heart too, if one discounted all the cholesterol buildup in her arteries.

Emma was close to accepting her fate as one who occupied both sides of a sidewalk until the aliens came. They came in droves and droves and spoke strangely and nodded quickly. They looked like eels with rudimentary arms and legs, who preferred to order little robots around to perform their tasks instead of trying to do everything themselves. The most adventurous of the aliens tried eating a hamburger with his own hands, only to give up when he could not master a powerful grip on an object that was so organically complex to them. The alien ended up giving the hamburger to his pet robot to break up into a slush so it could slurp it through a metallic straw.

At first the people of Earth were afraid. The people of Earth were well versed in alien lore and many of them went around with their anuses well protected against probes and wore devices on their heads sold by snake oil salesmen that supposedly prevented their minds from being examined thoroughly. Tin foil hats quickly became a fashion item. Fortunately, the aliens were not much interested in the rear ends of the most advanced species of the planet, and did not care too much either of what their thoughts were. They had higher aims.

They were good aliens, but in practice that usually meant aliens with good intentions. They sucked up carbon dioxide into their spaceships and ejected oxygen, thereby staving off global warming. They mediated between nations at war and put their differences to rest. They grew foodstuffs out of nothing and rained it on areas where the populace was starving. They conjured water where droughts prevailed. They cloned animals that were about to go extinct and recreated ones that had already done so. They added new knowledge to every field of expertise known to humans.

The aliens were deeply loved.

They had gained the trust of the community so greatly that they were allowed to do almost anything. And so they attempted the one experiment they had landed on Earth for.

The aliens got everyone to gather in town halls and schools and hospitals. They were going to give them a new drug, they said, that would help their society, but they were not quite sure yet how potent it was. There was a tone of warning in their address, but no one cared. Anything more by these wonderful aliens could never be bad! Their technology was so advanced, so how could they be wrong?

In the town halls and schools and hospitals across the world they gave injections to every person of every race and gender and age. Emma Thorn was no exception, and she was as elated as everyone else at what the aliens were doing for humanity. She just couldn’t see what they were up to this time.

The next day nothing special happened. The aliens said the effects took time to settle in, and that there was a chance the medication was not having any effect at all. Still, no one was having any ill feeling towards them. Feeling their work on the planet was done, they bid adieu, climbed into their spaceships and headed back to their distant home.

The magic came with the second day. People started seeing things differently. They reported the world seemed more colourful, more alive. People seemed genuinely happy instead of pretending that they were. Then they noticed other people differently. It wasn’t obvious at first, but it was distinct. No one could find an adequate way of expressing this change in the beginning, but soon the tidal wave of change had begun to give voice to something the human race had never felt or experienced before.

Fat people were really, really attractive.

Skinny people were dreadful to look at. There was no good way of reasoning it out. They simply had nothing. The space they occupied was worth nothing. Supermodels induced every kind of horror in a normal person. At first everyone pressured them to eat more, but a great many refused as they still believed being fat was wrong. Thin people got so difficult to look at that the community began killing them off en masse. It didn’t matter it was wrong--they needed to be exterminated, like vermin. Thousands were hanged, burnt, shot, gassed, and stabbed to death.

The high-flying places skinny people took up in society were filled in by the overweight. In bleak Darwinian terms, it was the survival of the fattest.

Emma Thorn was always a big girl, and every boy in school was now anxious to bed her. She climbed from the bottom rung of the school’s social ladder to the very top on the first day back to school after the injection. She was adulated by all; envied by slimmer girls and the singular object of desire of every red-blooded male. She became head of the student council. At the canteen queue everybody moved out of line to allow her impressive bulk to move up to the front.

Emma Thorn’s influence did not stop there. A talent scout spotted her and got her involved in tv. Soon she was hosting gameshows and giving interviews in afternoon talk shows. Emma Thorn--culture, sophistication and style resonated in those three syllables. She left school early to pursue a serious career in film and television, and never looked back at the dingy, beat-up school that once scorned her so deeply.

Her first role was in “Staying with Rachel”, a semi-autobiographical B-grade flick about the changing fortunes of a schoolgirl following the arrival of the aliens. Critics took no notice of Emma’s talent until she perfected her craft in “Weight Wars”, about a thin woman who desires to be fat and locks herself in her house with one month’s supply of ice-cream and nothing else. Her acting was described as “at the pinnacle of her career”, “titanic in scope”, and “massively moving”. Computerised special effects were used to shrink the naturally wide waistline of Emma throughout the film.

Emma Thorn continued to gain weight during her meteoric rise to success. Like her character in “Weight Wars”, she was a great lover of ice-cream, and constantly kept three tubs of varying flavours near her at all times. She sometimes forgot if she had slept with a man the previous night and nearly suffocated a few of them on the rare morning when she would roll over on her side and totally envelope them within walls of adipose tissue.

Soon, a life of excess grew tiresome. Emma had sampled every single flavour of ice-cream and every type of cuisine from all around the world, and still she hungered for more. The last man she had squashed during a course of lovemaking mentioned something about politics before he was smothered to silence by her sweaty breasts, and that planted an idea in her. Her cetacean girth rumbled for power--not only over her own fat, but the fat of others, and indeed all the fat the world could offer.

It was an easy conquest. The world was already in love with her, save a few jealous imitators and indifferent skinnists: rabid fanatics dedicated to being slim who lived in remote areas by themselves. Right away Emma Thorn knew what she needed to do to gain the support of all humanity--she would eat any opposition. She pitched a covert cannibalistic war under the cover of a sassy Hollywood glamourpuss with unusual night habits, ambushing opponents while they slept and swallowing them up with one mighty gulp. She bribed the police off, and where money failed, sex prevailed.

When Emma Thorn had ascended to become President of the Entire World, she had become much more than the simple chubby girl she started off as. She had truly become a monstrous woman, towering above the average person by three times their height. And her appetite had no equal. She chowed down everything now, animal, vegetable or mineral, and nothing could halt her appetite. She ate bicycles, computers, sofa beds, coffee makers, clowns, tennis racquets and sculptures. When those became too small she devoured cars, houses, shops, radio stations and apartment complexes. When those became too insignificant she slurped up lakes and ravished entire forests.

She swallowed the Earth. She swallowed the Moon and Mercury and Jupiter and all the other planets. The Sun was extremely hot but it too was gobbled down as her stomach had grown incredibly tough from her bizarre diet. She waded through space and swallowed other worlds and their civilizations, and eventually found the aliens that had helped her to power. Their protests went unheard as she too put their planet in her mouth and chewed it up to pieces.

Her ribs started to ache after she had swallowed the planet of those aliens. She assumed it was tiredness from wandering through the universe, so she decided to go to sleep. Her stomach and body could take no more, and she exploded in an enormous bang.