literature

Mobility is Overrated

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    I'll be the first to admit that I was having a very hard time following Kylie into the clearing. If this counted as hiking, I suddenly understood why nobody did it anymore. Of course, the people who once made hobbies out of this led vastly different lives than myself or Kylie, but it was hard to imagine how strong a person would have to be to accomplish something like this and even remotely enjoy it.

    Both of us were wheezing and sweating harder than we had in our entire lives. From up ahead, my friend called out to me, barking that I needed to catch up. I asked her to slow down, but she wouldn't.

    "No more delays, and no more breaks! We need to get this over with so we can get back in time for supper.'

    "Damn right," I retorted. "I don't wanna spend too much time here. I'm already starving."

    Kylie scoffed. "Wow. Selfish, much? I thought we were coming to appreciate the thing, not to tag it and run away. Didn't expect to hear you complaining so much."

    "Hey, you're the one who wants to see it!" I shouted back. "I could care less, so don't push me. I only came because you begged me not to make you go alone. You should be thanking me, Kye."

    Kylie paused, letting me catch up a bit. A sigh escaped her lips, just barely distinguishable among the rhythmic pants and wheezes. "Whatever. You're right. I'm sorry. I really do appreciate you coming. Exercise just... makes me cranky."

    I shrugged. I knew the feeling very well.

    "We're almost there, anyhow. Look—see how much ground we've already covered?" She gestured along the underbrush. "Doesn't that make you feel good?"

    I glanced back at our scooters, parked where the trail was actually intended to end. They'd gotten stuck in the brush back there, so the only way to continue to Kylie's destination had been to hobble over the more rugged terrain on foot. Judging by the distance, it looked as though we'd managed to waddle nearly an entire eighteen feet forward without a rail or harness in sight. I hadn't done something like that since elementary school. Over the course of the journey, I'd only taken three breaks, but by then I'd already eaten nearly everything in my bag.

    "I'm a little proud," I admitted, "but I mostly feel stupid for heading this far in the first place. Now I'm gonna have to walk all the way back, too."

    Kylie groaned. "Don't remind me."

    I can safely say that our little excursion was a pretty significant life experience, for better or for worse. It caught me off-guard; there were so many things about my body that were easier to appreciate after taking it offroad for the first time. I hadn't walked on anything other than carpet and tile in nearly a decade, so I'd almost entirely forgotten how it felt step on things like mud and twigs. I definitely wouldn't say I enjoyed a moment of it, but... at least it was interesting. The crackling, mucky stuff below my feet felt more like creme brulee than actual solid ground.

    Undoubtedly, one of the biggest reasons Kylie was doing so much better than me was the pair of boots she had on. She'd told me I should bring some, but I hadn't worn anything like that in years. I'd cut shoes out altogether in fifth grade, when the township finally blocked public schools from requiring scooter-bound kids to wear footwear. I'd figured buying a pair just for this trip wouldn't have been necessary. Evidently, I'd been severely mistaken.

    Another significant new experience was that, for the first time in my adult memory, I found myself having to step over an obstacle. That was an ordeal in and of itself. It was a thin log, stuck sort of mid-shin height up through our makeshift path. Clearing it was a challenge. I was forced to bring my one leg up so far up under my belly that I could feel the other side of the apron drag upwards over the skin of the upright thigh. Then, I nearly toppled forward when the great slab came crashing back down. Thankfully, the second leg was a lot easier to maneuver.

    I was on fire. My chest was burning with each breath. Everything was too heavy to lift. Everything swung around when I moved even slightly. Everything hurt.

    Both of us were sweating like pigs after the first eight or nine steps. Never in my life had I been so soaked with my own perspiration; not while getting changed, not while walking into the bathroom—not even during sex. It was awful. I missed the mechanically conditioned coolness of my Benevo scooter, and even moreso the relief of setting my weight on its cushion. By the time Kylie spotted the grimy metal of the thing she'd come here to see, she was glistening from head to toe with sweat. Her shirt no longer had wet-spots; it was a single, dark, wearable wet-spot, sopping with perspiration, slopping off her torso and slapping against her hips with each swaying footfall. I imagined mine had met with a similarly disgusting fate, but I almost didn't want to look.

    "Oh wow! There it is!" Kylie switched off her phone's navigation app and sprinted towards the decrepit machine as fast as she could. The change in velocity was basically undetectable regardless of her efforts. She was still moving as slowly as ever, despite wasting a whole lot more energy.

    "It's gorgeous," she puffed.

    I chuckled. "It's cool."

    "Cool?" Kylie demanded. "It's a piece of history!"

    It was a 2017 Dodge Challenger. More than likely, it had been painted some bright, lovely color upon its manufacture, but the hull had long-since rusted into a dank, gravelly orange on every surface besides the ruddy green windows. This almost worked as a sort of camouflage for the vehicle, which was barely discernible beneath the autumn leaves. Kylie began brushing them off with a stick, careful not to scratch the decrepit machine. It was a lot like I'd imagined, with the obvious exception of that excessive rust and decay.

    Everybody my age knew what these sorts of old cars looked like. They always cropped up in classical movies and old photographs, and we learned a lot about their effects on 20th and 21st century society in our history classes. Back then, people used them to travel long distances, but they were too big and bulky to bring inside. If you wanted to shop, you could drive your car to the store, but you had to get out and walk all the way into the building by yourself, then lug your purchases through the entire place on foot. This was fine for a long time—certainly better than the trains or horses they'd had before, without a doubt—but still a far cry from our current modes of transportation.

    Eventually, modern human proportions and the height of climate change forced those old models out of the picture. We still technically use automobiles, but they don't remotely resemble the tiny pods people used back when this thing was originally churned out. Cars today are at least big enough to fit a couple of scooters without anyone having to get off, and they don't use separate steering mechanisms. It's all integrated with the driver's Benevo. With this thing, you'd have to get off your Benevo before you got in, lug it all the way around to the backseat or the trunk, walk all the way back and drive here, with a perfectly good seat and steering wheel resting somewhere else in the vehicle. It was asininely overcomplicated.

    Kylie's obsession with preobesity was more than irritating. None of our friends could help cringing sometimes at how much she worshipped that era. She'd gone through obsessive phases before, sure, but none of it was ever this intense. She'd wanted so badly to be of that era that some of us worried she might start starving herself just to look like the poster of Marilyn Monroe she had on her wall. It was a genuinely terrifying thought, especially for her poor parents.

    Nearly none of us had ever seen one of these old machines in person, since they were virtually nonexistent outside of museums these days. This one, however, was sort of a local secret. Kylie's dad had made the mistake of telling her all about how he and his friends had made a pilgrimage out to see it back when they were our age, and now his unrelenting geek of a daughter was obsessed with doing the same thing. Her boyfriend had maintained the good sense to stay home for this excursion. Of course, I'd gotten dragged along instead.

    Oh, the things I do for Kylie. And my reward? Getting to stare at this shitty, broken, ex-vehicular husk.

    Generations upon generations ago, someone had bought this boxy little thing in perfect condition. They'd probably spent so much money on it that they had to take out a loan to pay it off. Now, it was as much a part of this forest as any rock or twig. Mushrooms twisted out of the hubcaps, and some extremely irresponsible bird had apparently made its nest in the glassy cave behind one of its shattered headlights.

    We found a nearby log and sat there for a while, staring up at the thing and talking while we caught our breath. I was a little bored, but it did feel a lot nicer to indulge Kylie's curiosities while I was on my ass than it did on my feet. She went on and on about it, and I ate the rest of my food while I listened. She tried to video call her boyfriend to show him the scene, but he didn't answer. I thought he just didn't want to be bothered.

    Then, after about fifteen minutes of rest, Kylie got the worst idea of the night.

    "I wanna see the inside."

    "Yeah? How do you expect to do that?"

    She grinned. "I'll open the door and go in."

    "There's more rust on that car than metal, Kye. I don't think you can get in, even if it's unlocked."

    Of course, she took that as a challenge, and I cursed myself for suggesting it in the first place. I watched as she heaved herself up—an ordeal which took an entire minute and a half of trial and error, since the action of getting up off of such a low surface was so alien to her.

    Each of our body types had its pros and cons. I was a little bit pear-shaped and had really big legs, so walking was a lot harder for me, but getting up onto my feet from sitting wasn't really something I had too much of an issue with, at least compared to most appley people I know. Kylie, on the other hand, was about as close to spherical as a human being could get, which meant her center of gravity was pretty high up in her body. I watched her stumble and flail a little as she hoisted herself upright, wobbling harder than I'd ever seen somebody wobble without purposefully shaking their body.

    From my relatively comfortable seat, I was able to watch more closely and appreciate just how awkardly Kylie moved as she headed towards that car. Each step required three distinct body motions. First, she had to swing her leg out to the side to get one thigh around the other. Then, she'd jam that leg back down into the ground, splashing mud up onto her big brown calves and sometimes all the way up onto her shorts. Even though everything was so wet, I could swear I felt the impacts all the way back from my seat. After that, she'd have to wait a moment while her body settled; everything moved on its own for about thirty seconds after each footfall, but she'd typically only wait fifteen to twenty for things to stop shaking too violently before embarking on the next feeble step. Each part of the cycle had its own distinct sound: a piercing grunt for the lift, a pitiful whimper for the stomp and a series of huffs and sighs for recovery.

    Eventually, she made it to the car, sweating so badly that I was beginning to get a little terrified of the way she'd smell on the way home. I watched her slip her fingers under the handle, then heard her swear as she tugged it and received nothing more than a light jiggle in response.

    "Goddammit," she muttered. "I don't think it's locked, but you're right about it being stuck tight."

    I nodded. "I told you, it's not even worth trying. Don't pull too hard, by the way, or you might rip the handle off altogether before the damn thing opens up."

    "Just let me... ungh..."

    I watched in horror as Kylie leaned back, putting her full weight on the car door and finally straining the thing past its limits. It snapped away from the vehicle like the small end of a wishbone, swinging about three feet out and flinging Kylie out into the mucky ground. It stuck in place, halfway open.

    I gasped; then, even though I knew it shouldn't have been funny, I couldn't help but laugh. Despite its viscosity, the mud had splashed up like water under Kylie's weight, and it was suddenly all over her body. She coughed weakly and flashed me a thumbs up to let me know she was alright. Her belly had clearly slammed her lungs pretty hard on the way down, and I was sure it'd knocked the wind out of her. That was a lot of weight to be carrying without the shelf of a scooter beneath it. I was immediately thankful that her fall had been cushioned by the grime, even if that meant ruining her outfit—otherwise, she might've been much more seriously hurt.

    Her body wobbled pendulously for about a minute as she laid there, switching periodically between bursts of laughter and deep, methodical breathing. "Holy shit," she finally choked out, "that was such a bad idea."

    I laughed. "You think so?"

    Through eyes teary from laughter, I watched her swing back and forth for a bit, unable to roll onto her side with so much bulk hanging off her body in every direction. Eventually, her laughter gave way to frustrated grunts, and soon, she asked for my help.

    "Uhm. Sara? Could you help me up? I think I'm, like... stuck."

    "Ew, no! You're the one who got yourself into this mess. I'm not getting myself all dirty and sweaty for nothing."

    Kylie struggled a bit more. I could see her getting anxious.

    "Sara! Seriously! What if this is like, quicksand or something?"

    That remark snorted me into a new fit of laughter.

    "Seriously," she begged, "please, can you at least help me figure this out?"

    I know what you're thinking. Yes, I was being a real bitch, laughing at her struggle like that. And no, I don't feel like I was justified in refusing to help her get up. Hindsight is 20/20. At the time, though, I was just way too pettily angry about the events of that day to feel sorry for her.

    You have to understand, I wasn't merely tired from that walk. I was in actual, physical pain all over my body, and I was living with the dreadful knowledge that I'd have to get up and do it all over again just to get back home. This wasn't the sort of exhaustion you get from plugging your scooter in at one of those really low old-school outlets or using a bathroom harness that doesn't do much of the work on its own. This was agony. This was my lungs screaming and my throat burning, my thighs and pussy so tenderly chafed that I was practically salivating at the thought of the gold bond powder I kept on my bedside table, my belly sore from hanging vertically longer than it had in years and my upper arms much the same from swinging viciously back and forth as I flung them around to balance my waddling gait.

    What made that pain even worse was just how vastly pointless and unnecessary it felt. As a society, we'd evolved past this sort of thing several lifetimes ago. As much as she hated the experience, I knew Kylie felt like there was something noble and rustic about moving the way our ancestors did, as though we were reconnecting to some ancient time by stretching our atrophied muscles and shambling around on two feet as they once had. I simply couldn't relate to that sentiment. How was it any different from anything else we'd left behind? Was there something equally noble about spearing an animal and eating it raw, or shitting in the back of a cave and then going to sleep in the other corner? To rekindle that sort of life would be akin to pointless self-torture, not a step towards a wiser or richer existence. People like Kylie wanted to feel like the homosapien at the end of that ancient March of Progress drawing, trying vainly to convince themselves that they still possessed the upright physiology that nature selected for us before we started making decisions on its behalf. We'd ascended since then, though. I felt we had about as much in common with the man in that drawing as he had with the apes in line before him. They were great in their own right, but we'd adapted the way we needed to. Why cling to the last step instead of marching on?

    With all of that in mind, I was lowkey having a blast watching her writhe like this. However, as her face grew more and more genuinely concerned, I had a hard time keeping up the grudge. The anger dissolved quickly, and I soon started to feel pretty bad about my obviously bitchy way of handling the situation. Reluctantly, I stopped laughing and tried my best to be helpful. I didn't have the stamina to get up and physically assist her, but shouting advice at her from my seat was still a lot more supportive than berating her from the same angle.

    "Stop trying to roll on your side like that," I offered. "You're not gonna be able to do it."

    "Well then what do I do?"

    "Lean forward, like you're sitting up to get out of bed."

    "But my hands will get all muddy." She groaned. "I don't want to have to get this crap all over my scooter, or the inside of the car."

    I groaned. "First of all, stop with that 'inside the car' stuff, Kye. The thing may have opened up, but there is no chance in hell you're getting your body through that tiny door. And secondly, yeah, I think you're gonna have to get them dirty. There's no way you can roll yourself up like that. You look like a marshmallow that someone's trying to totally cover in chocolate fondue."

    "Thanks," she grumbled. "Bitch."

    I watched as she planted her hands in the mud behind her and forced herself upright. She was so round that it didn't look like she was bending as she sat up. Her head and shoulders simply slid up onto the top of the ball while her legs stayed in place.

    "Now how do I get up?"

    "Like I said, the same way you'd get out of bed in the morning."

    "But there's no pulley here or anything!"

    I pointed at a scrawny, malnourished tree beside her. She sighed, nodded and wrapped her thick fingers around its neck.

    "Okay," she wheezed. "Here goes."

    She pulled, but her body didn't move at all. Instead, I watched the roots pull up slightly from the ground on the other side, then yelled out so she wouldn't bring the whole thing down on top of herself. Evidently, Kylie weighed a lot more than the slippery muck that held this plant in place.

    "Wow. Nice," she muttered.

    "What about the car? Can you use that for leverage?"

    "I can try," she sighed, examining the mud that was splattered all over her body. "I'm already pretty much disgusting at this point, so I guess it can't hurt."

    Still parked on the cushion of her ass, Kylie slid herself over to the machine and clambered up onto her feet with the bottom of the doorframe in her hands. As she lifted herself, the girl and the car groaned in sour harmony. 

    "There you go!" I shouted, clapping for my friend as she worked her way up. Soon, her tall and mucky body was totally upright, eclipsing the gaping doorframe in its entirety. I could tell her useless muscles were trembling beneath her body because her blubber was vibrating in a way I'd only ever seen it do when she had her scooter's massage function set to maximum intensity. I was about to congratulate her, but the mischievous expression on her face when she turned to me over her shoulder gave me a really bad vibe. I knew what she was about to say, and I was ready to say no before she opened her lips.

    "Now's the perfect time. Dare me to go in?"

    "No."

   
"It's right here, though! It's so close!" I watched, wide-eyed, as she grunted, bent over and dipped her head in to peek around the vehicle. "Look, Sara, I think I even see some old stuff in the backseat."

    "Kye, if you get stuck in that rusty-ass box I am not going to help you get out."

    "I'm not going to get stuck! It's fine."

    Immediately, the upper roll of her belly slid over the bottom of the doorframe and her ass made full contact with the frame on all sides. Fat muffinned into and out of the car, locking her in place. She got stuck.

    "Shit."

    I didn't laugh this time. I was mad.

    "What the fuck, Kylie? Why don't you ever fucking listen to me?"

    There was no delay. She knew right away she was stuck. I could tell she was already crying.

    "Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god." She blubbered, then screamed, kicking her useless legs as high up as she could in a desperate attempt to prompt a reaction out of the doorframe. They were so heavy, though, that she only managed to kick her toes about a half a foot off the ground each time. The whole car shook, digging further into Kylie's porky body. She cried out for my help, but I had no idea how to give it.

    "Want me to call you an ambulance?"

    "Yes, please! An ambulance would be good, or like, the cops, or my dad. The fire department. Anything!"

    "Uh. I'll try your dad first, okay?"

    "Sure."

    I reached into my pocket, grabbed my phone and grimaced at how sticky and fuzzy the screen was, soaked with my own sweat. I wiped it off as best as I could with my shirt—which, granted, wasn't much drier than the phone, but still helped—and attempted to call Kylie's dad. Quickly, though, I ran into a problem.

    "Uh oh."

    Kylie sniffled. "Uh-oh what?"

    "Shit. Kye, my phone's not working."

    "What do you mean it's not working?"

    "Like, the call's not going through."

    "Not going through? What? Like, it's not even ringing or going to voicemail?"

    "Exactly," I said. "Goddammit, Kylie, I think it's not getting service."

    "Shit, really? How do you know?"

    "It says it in the top left. 'No service.' Can't miss it."

    "I thought you had to go to like, Antarctica for that, or the middle of the ocean or something."

    "Nope. Says it right here."

    "So we're all alone?" Kylie hushed.

    "Yep. Looks like it."

    There was a moment of near-silence, infiltrated only by the sounds of birds and Kylie's pitiful sniffles and gulps. Then, suddenly, she loosed a bloodcurdling shriek and started kicking her legs even more violently than before.

    "Sara! I need to get out of here now! I'm gonna starve to death!"

    She was flailing again. The cellulite sea of ass above her legs swayed rapidly back and forth as she limply shook each of her sausagey legs. I heard something like a fart, a sound which I'm fairly certain was actually the dying breath of the car's horn as she accidentally elbowed its steering wheel. Either way, it was embarrassing.

    The lowermost tip of Kylie's naked belly, which hung out the bottom of the car while its t-shirt was bunched up inside, was dragging in the tip of the mud. It rose and fell as she wept, dipping down, then picking back out of the muck arrhythmically, occasionally splashing some to the left and right if she moved around too much. It was getting dirty in its own right.

    The anger from before was gone. Now I just felt bad for my best friend. She was so helpless, I couldn't stand it. I couldn't bear to watch her become any more pitiful than she already was, kicking and screaming, wedged in this ancient oil car. At that point, I'd already stood up and begun to hobble over. She couldn't hear my footsteps over the sound of her own panic.

    "Calm down, girl, I'm on my way. Just wait a minute." 

    She moaned. "It hurts so bad!" Her voice was straining highly and she couldn't stop whimpering. If it weren't for the visual, I might've thought these were sounds of pleasure, rather than pain.

    "Then stop moving, Kylie! God. I'm on my way, just relax. Give me a minute or two, please."

    It didn't take long for the agony to start back up. My chest was up in flames once again, I was wheezing, and the sweat was flowing everywhere it could. I was already parched; why my body thought jettisoning so much more water through my pores would help the situation was absolutely beyond my understanding. 

    I sprinted towards Kylie's disembodied lower-half fast as humanly possible. After about a minute and a half of waddling, I cleared the eight feet of space between myself and the car with record-breaking speed. When I finally got to Kylie, I prodded her butt and asked her what she wanted me to do.

    "Try grabbing my ankles and pulling," she begged.

    I did. She screamed in pain, but the pudge didn't budge.

    Next I grabbed her hips and tried to sort of feed the blubber through the hole with my hands physically, like kneading dough. I think it could've worked, but the rust scraping on her skin was too painful and grossly unsanitary for her to withstand.

    "Can you go out on the road and look for help?" Kylie asked. "There's gotta be somebody out there."

    "There's nobody out there, Kylie. Nobody else is this stupid."

    She groaned.

    We tried all sorts of things. I was so exhausted, I wanted to die. Kylie felt similarly, albeit due to embarrassment.

    "You better not take any pictures of me back there!"

    Needless to say, I didn't. Why would I want something this depressing on my camera roll? She looked like a bag of cottage cheese stuck halfway out of a mailbox.

    Eventually, that bag of cottage cheese pitched me one more idea.

    "Can you try the mud?"

    "Mud? What do you mean?"

    "Like, lather it on the part where I'm stuck. You know, like butter."

    "On your naked ass, Kylie?"

    (At this point, her pants had fallen nearly all the way down.)

    "Ugh, whatever! How do you think I feel?"

    "Point taken."

    "Can't you just try it?"

    Reluctantly, I did. I lathered her up with the stuff, pushing and kneading to get it into all the necessary spaces and generously pouring it into the spots where her ass cupped against the sides of the frame. It dribbled out over her bumpy ass and slipperied up the whole thing.

    I wanted to vomit, but not as much as I wanted to get this over with and go home.

    "You owe me one for this, Kye. Big time."

   
"Trust me, I know."

    Now, as I was blatantly discarding my dignity by rubbing mud around the lip of my best friend's lower body, I couldn't help laughing a little at how ridiculous this all was. In the year 2017, this car was manufactured with way more than enough space for any normal person to fit their entire body effortlessly into the door. Two of them probably could've squeezed into the frame at once, I'd wager. Today, though, a girl like Kylie—who is easily one of the skinniest people I know—takes up the entire frame with her hips.

    "I'm gonna pull you on the count of three, okay?"

    "Okay," Kylie whimpered. She was shivering; the mud and the autumn air were cold on the exposed blubber of her butt.

    "One... Two..."

    The mud worked a hell of a lot better than I thought. Too much better, perhaps. It worked so well that I hardly would've needed to apply any pressure to yank her out.

    I didn't know that at the time, though. I pulled with all of my weight, and as a result, seven hundred pounds of soft, muddy body shot out over my form of me as I fell back into the mud, unable to scream with the wind so firmly knocked out of my lungs. If I were as skeletal as the sort of person who probably drove this car, I'm sure I would've broken a couple of bones against her weight.

    Thank God we were normal sized. Instead of one of us crumbling beneath the other's fatness, we just sort of distorted and bounced away from one another like two water balloons colliding in the air. Our wet circumferences flattened out and clapped loudly against one another, then bounced politely into the mud. Plop.

    "Ohmigosh, thank you so much," Kylie sobbed. "I'm so sorry. You're seriously the best."

    I assured her it was okay, trying to ignore the pain of having been slapped against her so hard. My entire front half was wrought with the resonant stinging aftermath of a too-hard high-five, and my stomach felt like someone had reached the whole two feet through my belly just to punch it. 

    We were a mess, clothes soaked and folds caulked with mud. I felt especially bad for Kylie, whose pants were down by her ankles. Her lower half was protected by her underwear alone at this point, and the skimpy lingerie she'd picked out for her boyfriend that night didn't look like much of an efficient insulator.

    We were lying that way for the next five or six minutes, trying desperately to catch our breath. Eventually, after swishing her legs through the mud for a while, inspiration struck Kylie. She turned to me and grinned, neck furrowing and for maximum chinnage beneath her mischievous smile.

    "New idea."

    I raised an eyebrow. "What's that?"

    She sat upright with a considerable amount of effort. Then, she began scooting through the mud-slick on her ass. The natural lubricant allowed her to glide pretty easily over the muck, drastically reducing the workload of her legs. I bursted out laughing. A wash of relief flooded my body as I realized that I wasn't going to have to walk after all.

    We slithered along the ground like that, bobbing and swaying to nudge ourselves along. This method of transportation was incomparably more convenient. It was faster. It hurt less. Instead of stepping over the log, we could pick it up and move it from this height. We never had to stop and find a rock to sit on, because we weren't nearly as tired and were already sitting the whole time. We cracked up the whole way to our scooters, tears streaming through our makeup and running down our chins. It was the silliest thing we'd ever done, but we were too messy to get any messier. Altogether, the return trip wasn't even a quarter as awful as the initial hike. It was actually kind of a cakewalk.

    The lady at the drive thru saw how muddy we were and gasped. She must've thought we were crazy or part of some weird fetish. In hindsight, it made for a good laugh.


    Something changed in Kylie after that day. She'd always spent so much time worshipping and romanticizing the past that I don't think she'd ever really stopped to appreciate what what a wonderful world we actually had. That was probably why she had always been so underweight—things like practicing walking and controlling her portions had kept Kylie well below the eight-hundred pound baseline, which all her doctors and relatives agreed was a needlessly stressful and dangerous way to live. I was skinny too, for my age, but next to Kylie I looked like a supermodel.

    It wouldn't stay that way for long, though. Gradually, Kylie's eating disorders started to relax and then dissolve, one by one, until her days of measly four-digit caloric intake were eventually gone for good. Over time, I watched her tear down the ultra-vintage skinnyculture propaganda posters that lined the walls of her room and replace them with more modern decor. She started streaming books and videos from living authors and really legitimately enjoying them, rather than only ever immersing herself in the old-world classics. For the first time, Kylie seemed like a girl who wasn't born in the wrong generation, and I was proud of her. After our trip to the Challenger, I never saw her try to walk again.

    She did so well with herself, in fact, that it wasn't very long before walking was no longer an option. Just two years after the car-hunt, while I was hovering at a petite nine-hundred pounds or so, she was positively glowing at nearly a whole thousand. That was too fat to be even marginally more mobile than that ancient, rusty Challenger she'd once wedged herself into at the underbrush of the forest. Too fat to walk, or crawl, or even stand halfway up. She was weaker than an infant and heavier than a refrigerator, but she was still more mobile on her Benevo than she had ever been on her own two feet!

    It's funny how things work out that way.
A perspective on bipedalism from a hypothetical distant future.

This was a quick story written as my first response to a prompt in the Weekly Weigh-In writers' group. The prompt was "Distant Future."


Feedback is greatly appreciated.
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Hey, so I know this story was made about… 6 years ago, but I was wondering: when exactly does this take place? Like how far in the future is this? I’m just curious and would like to know more. Thank you.