Plush Interior

Lesley had this deliberate, sashaying walk to her that was infinitely cute to watch. The fat around her hips and her thighs, pushing against the substantial gut that bulged in her office slacks, looked cumbersome to navigate the world with. And yet she did. Every day.

Clutched tightly to her abdomen, belly and breasts squished and straining, was a stack of books balanced within a clear plastic box. These she set down on her desk before plopping her rounded backside, too, atop the lacquered wood. Exhausted, she rested one hand atop the dome of her midriff, rising and falling with each laboured breath, and puffed out her fleshy cheeks in twin bulges.

“Miss, you’re late!” someone at the back yelled, to which she smiled.

“I’m definitely going to have to get on them about timetabling, it just makes so much more sense for you to come to me.” Finding her thermos somewhere within her luggage, she took a long, greedy slurp, and wiped her mouth delicately with her thumb. “Digestion,” she announced with a click of her tongue. “Favourite subject, as I know many of you joke. Don’t think we don’t know; I have ears everywhere.” She stabbed her finger in the vague direction of her students, but couldn’t chase the smile from her lips efficiently enough to be threatening. “But this is the best topic, and I thought I’d kick off the term with something really special for all of us.”

Her class, a mix of teenagers between sixteen and eighteen, hung on her every word. Some leant forward in their seats, elbows on the desk with feet or pens bouncing to the cadence of her voice. For her part, and in stark contrast to everyone else in the room, Lesley was almost entirely motionless as she balanced there, legs crossed ahead of her by the ankles, because her thighs barely allowed anything more.

“Do I have a volunteer?” she asked casually, emphasising each word playfully. When no one made a sound, she simply shrugged. “Come on guys, it’s not as if this is out of the blue; you’ve all been at this school for years. Do I have to get the hat?” She scanned a moment longer, before sweeping over to her laptop. Her finger slashed at the trackpad adeptly as she found the app, before a small voice accompanied the raised hand.

“Jo! Perfe- Oh God sorry; it's Naomi, isn’t it?” Lesley widened her eyes at the few kids laughing in front of her. “Very mature dear, come on down to the front, please. Is this you volunteering or were you pushed?”

“No! No,” said the girl quickly. She slipped the hairband from her wrist and began tying back the blonde locks in a tight bun.

“You sure, hun? Just point…” The fatty belly wrapped up beneath Lesley’s white button-down shirt received a few healthy pats as it growled.

Naomi laughed, not without some nervousness. “No, we’d already sort of voted in the group chat… a few of us had put our names in. Where do I…?”

“Just here love, compose yourself. So; what I’ll be doing to ease us ever so gently into this module is introduce my stunning volunteer here to my digestive system. I have a few toys that’ll help us track her on the way through to give you a proper idea of what happens within your own bodies. Unfortunately, Naomi will not be joining us for any of our future lessons but, on the bright side, she will be receiving infinitely less homework.”

The girl put up her hands in shy celebration, cut off quickly by her embarrassment. She’d turned the deepest shade of scarlet.

“If you’d like to undress for me, dear, so we can get right into it. If it makes you more comfortable you can keep your underwear on, but from this point onwards I will just consider you to be meat. Okay?”

“Okay,” Naomi whispered, before biting her lip.

“Now, bodies are a lot less complicated than they seem on the surface,” Lesley began, flicking the powerpoint up on her laptop and switching on her projector. A picture of a crudely drawn stick man in two halves faded in, neither side touching. “This is you; this hamburger-looking fella. We start at this massive hole in our face, some of which need to learn to keep zipped, Sarah. We trace this aaaaall the way down the oesophagus into the stomach, which is literally just a hollow bag. After that we have the intestines - more hollow tubes - before dropping out of, you guessed it, the anus. Very funny.

“So what you’re going to realise is that Naomi isn’t really going to be inside my body until much, much later on in the practical. She’s going to be passing through this corridor through me as my organs work to break her down and leach nutrients from the resulting chyme. By the time she’s actually passed through into my body’s architecture, there’ll be very little left of her that is actually recognisable. You all set, hun?”

The girl chirped, “I-I’m ready!” with the kind of panting fervour that bled fear half-smothered. With her teacher’s instruction, she cleared a space on the desk and placed her feet one over the other. These she slipped carefully into Lesley’s waiting maw as the woman knelt with her tongue spread out like a runway. There was a little murmuring at ‘how fat Miss Fincher’s arse’ was, but neither of them paid any mind. Naomi folded down her teacher’s throat, feeling the plush interior like wet pillows. The stomach was warm on her feet, hurting slightly like a dull itch, and as more and more of her bulked out Lesley’s already large gut, she made great efforts to quell the panic.

“No, I can’t… wait, stop,” she said as her chest constricted both with fear and teeth. “I’ve changed my mind! Someone helllrphhh…”

The silence was uncomfortable. Some whispered, but found no response. The class was struck in that moment when a girl’s screams for help went unanswered, save for the messy swallow of her devourer. She was barely audible when Lesley sealed her lips, and sat back on the desk.

“Well that’s a shame, isn’t i-hruuurph… guh, excuse me. Right; what’s just happened, someone, tell me. Josh.”

The boy - because that’s what he had been reduced to - stammered, “Well yo-you ate her.”

“More specific. Uhm… Charlotte?”

“The bolus mixed with your saliva and travelled down your throat to reach the stomach. Where she’s kicking.” The girl added slyly. Lesley’s middle struggled under its own fat, wobbling occasionally with the efforts of her prey within. Naomi was indeed kicking.

“How’d she taste, miss?” someone jeered from the back row.

Lesley shook her head, feeling her plump frame rock with the movement. “Huge lie told by predators. Sorry boys; if she says you tasted good, she’s just trying to stop you from struggling. Humans are raw meat. At best, prey will taste inoffensive, maybe of salt and little else. More than likely the predator has to contend with soaps and spices which smell amazing, and taste like soap. Ever tasted soap? Worse yet, they’re sweaty horrible things you end up regretting.

“Bringing it back: Charlotte, that was excellent, except that Naomi wasn’t a bolus. The term only refers to chewed-up food mixed with saliva, but very close. A common misconception is that digestion happens all in the stomach; that’s false too.” Lesley grabbed her jaw, waggling it loose as she revealed her sharp, white teeth and the pink cavern beyond. “Digestion is the breaking down of food. It begins with chewing, but that isn’t the only thing the mouth does. Saliva contains amylase, which is only relevant for carbohydrates, and lingual lipase. In essence, my spit has already made some efforts toward breaking down Naomi’s fats. As the joke goes, no spitting in my class because I’ll melt,” she said, doing a little dance to let it all wobble.

That did get a few laughs. Within Lesley’s guts, her food came to the realisation that it was fighting a battle it couldn’t win. The air supply felt toxic, stinking of vomit and strong coffee. Sweat spilled from her pores, mixing with the rising fluids and causing the walls around her to balloon outward slightly. That’s what she felt, anyway, within the ribbed and churning boundaries of Lesley’s stomach that ground against her skin relentlessly. She heard a heartbeat in the tissue around her and felt it throb. Squelches and horrific growls as if from some nebulous monster that lurked somewhere with her inside that woman’s fat body.

“Help me!” she screamed, shrill and piercing. It didn’t penetrate the blubber. Naomi’s head dipped below the waterline.

“Guh~HwoOoOouUurhp, God she was good...” Heaving herself up a little further, Lesley sat entirely on the desk. The girl inside her stiffened. Softened. Another hiccup, and she was certain her meal had passed.

Someone in the front put up their hand. “Didn’t you just say…?”

“Bingo.” She snapped her fingers. “Someone’s listening. Can someone tell me why certain individuals, not naming any names, eat a lot and end up very fat?”

No one.

Lesley clicked her tongue. “It’s an evolutionary trait. Humans eat because it feels good. The more resources a body has to work with, the more likely it is to survive. I will last a lot longer on a desert island than any of you, and not because I’m the bigger predator. I have a lot of fat reserves that mean I can endure a long period of time before my body will begin to physically starve. So to prompt me to eat these big, hearty meals, my brain releases lots of endorphins that make me want to continue that behaviour.” Fist to her mouth, “BruUuurph! She could have tasted awful, but my stomach feels all this weight inside it and gives me the biggest neurochemical high five you can imagine.”

The groans emitting from her overly stuffed midriff filled the classroom like a babbling river. It looked so taut and densely packed that one could use it from a drum, and Lesley smacked it occasionally in demonstration of that exact principle. She digested the girl seemingly effortlessly, and enjoyed it like a second lunch.

“So while I have all these happy feelings going off in my brain a few other interesting things are happening. For instance…” Lesley reared up on one side, twisting her hips before letting out a strained, if vibrant, guff of intestinal gases. The class signalled their collective disapproval. “This is biology at work; if you can’t be mature, leave my class, please. Now, that was what is known as the gastrocolic reflex. It doesn’t matter how stretchy my insides actually are; my body wants to ensure that it has enough space. It does that by shunting old food along the intestines to make way for the fresh meal. You’ll hear people say that such and such goes ‘right through them’. That isn’t the case; last night’s dinner just got a helping hand.

“What Naomi’s just done by stretching out my stomach is send a message to the rest of my guts urging them to make way. Sometimes that triggers flatulence, sometimes that means I need an urgent trip to the bathroom.” A hiccup transitioned into a sicky-sounding belch that puffed in her cheeks. “Got it at both ends…” she muttered.

Lesley’s stomach made no distinction between crushing living and dead prey. It treated the mass of softening food with the same purposeful vitriol that melted skin and fat into slurry, sloshed muscle away from the skeleton and liquefied what of Naomi was already mostly water. Blood, eyeballs; anything soft became softer until a slick pool of slippery meat slopped back and forth with her captor’s amorous massages. Bones bowed, bitten with acid and saturated through before snapping under the relentless assault of Lesley’s abdominal muscles.

A few faces went pale at the first few crunches. The teacher made it clear exactly what was happening, pausing for effect before deliberately and methodically massacring the girl within her. What was vaguely person-shaped became compact and meaningless, cradled within her hips. She unfastened her fly and let the mass sit within her, settling, before squishing her arm between her breasts and her bloated stomach to emphasise the latter.

“A complex mixture of enzymes and hydrochloric acid have pumped into my stomach to literally melt my prey.” She jiggled her belly. “We’re talking a Ph of around one or two, so this is seriously nasty stuff. It’s why if you’re badly sick it can actually burn you. I’m breaking down the proteins into individual molecules so that they’re able to pass through my intestinal wall, once she makes her way down there. There’s a little valve at the bottom of the stomach that will gradually introduce her to the rest of my gut once she’s fluid enough to slip through. We’ll come into metabolism around lesson three or four, but for now all you need to know is that mine is really fast. That’s how I know my intestine is already getting involved.”

She swung her feet up underneath her thighs and twisted to pull a small camera from the box on her desk. “Another volunteer please,” Lesley said without looking up. When no one said a thing, she pointed at a girl in the front row. “I won’t eat you, come on.”

Handing her the camera, Lesley hooked it up to her laptop and began projecting a strange ultrasound-looking image that shifted as the lens trailed her belly. “Little higher love- that’s it. So here, right underneath my ribs we have my stomach. This is where most of the prey is going to stay for a while. Yeah; guys if you need to step out for a minute that is totally fine.”

A few took her up on the offer. The rest looked enamoured. Lesley took a small sip of her coffee, and earned a few ‘ooh’s as the black and white image shifted to accommodate the rise in liquid.

“Eeuurrhhk, excuse me! So if we move a liiiittle bit to the right - your left, hun - we’ll start seeing the first bits of my intestine. The entire point of this organ is to absorb the things we’ve eaten. There’s a little bit of digestion that takes place here too, but it really isn’t a lot. It’s why eating someone anally really just isn’t a good idea outside of recreation. See a few of you girls taking notes, love that. So if we zoom in just a little bit, I know the quality isn’t amazing, but you’ll see these little bumps, do you see that?

“The intestine has a huge surface area because, the larger it is, the more able it is to absorb through diffusion. This is the first point at which we can say that Naomi is inside my body, because her broken down molecules are passing directly into me, into the bloodstream, to be utilised in building up and repairing me. When someone says ‘you are what you eat’, they are exactly right. What I’m doing to Naomi is absorbing her, flushing her through my cells and using her to replenish what needs fixing. Anything leftover will get stored as fat, along with everyone else I’ve eaten.

“Thanks, love.” Lesley took the camera for herself and let the girl sit back down. She trailed along the labyrinthine passages of her guts and they watched as bits of the prey inside flaked off and surged through the solid barrel she had for a belly. As time went on, the weight diffused from a hefty lump beneath her tits to a healthy curve that spanned all the way down to her pubis. A few of them reckoned they could see the flash of Lesley’s underwear as she heaved her swollen middle upwards, and let it crash back down with a wobble.

They watched, enthused and fascinated as she laid back on the desk, her belly a lazy hillock that groaned organically atop her. “Won’t go as in-depth because it’s never on the exam,” she said through a yawn, “but what I’m experiencing now is a shut-down of all unnecessary functioning. Like my consciousness. Digesting is hard, especially something this large, so my body’s restricting blood flow to my extremities and my brain to focus most of my efforts around my digestive system. What I want to do after a huge meal like this is sleep and absorb it all. How long have we got…” she craned up to check the clock. “That’ll do. If you guys want to come up and explore with the camera, go grab a drink… Basically we'll take the next half hour as a break and come back for quarter-to. Alright?” She answered the bubbles in her stomach with a gut-emptying belch, and laid down before falling asleep.

She was awoken by the alarm she’d set on her phone, vibrating ripples of fat through the belly she’d left it on. Eyes watering, her tongue splayed out as she yawned and sat upright. Her middle squelched and slopped as the meat within folded and relaxed.

“Last fifteen minutes, alright,” she gasped, stretching. “Naomi is what - who can tell me?”

“Shit!” The children laughed at the comment.

“Faeces. Excrement. Waste. Poo, essentially. What I haven’t absorbed, or haven’t been able to absorb, things like hair and bone among other things, have massed in my large intestine or colon. It’s actually a lot shorter than the small intestine, but physically looks a lot larger. This is where a lot of the moisture is absorbed by my body. If it wasn’t for the desiccating properties of the colon, it would always come out like diarrhoea.”

Lesley stripped her shirt up over her head, leaving herself in just a bra, and threw the big plastic box onto the floor. She joined it, kicking off her pumps before dropping the trousers.

This time there was no complaint. They watched their teacher rest her fat buttocks on the lip of the box and let rip a heady gush of air before the thick logs began piling out from between her parted cheeks. True to her word, each sausage was spiderwebbed in long strands of blonde hair like sinew, and weighed down by chunks of the poor girl’s bones. They sprouted from the muddy expulsions like mushrooms on the forest floor, shanks of splintered, sharp white to contrast the intestinal brown muck. She strained harder, momentarily around something large and wide, before a shit-stained skull plapped wet and cracked atop the mountain, missing the lower half of its jaw.

Lesley regained the power of speech as her anus closed, and her urethra opened. “So what you’ll notice is that a lot of Naomi is just gone. The rest of her’s coming out now as liquid in my urine, but also in my breath, and the perspiration emanating from my skin.” She wiped with the roll stashed underneath her desk and redressed. “And the more eagle-eyed of you will notice how… hard… it is to fit back into these… clothes, gah. What’s not waste, and not used, ends up as fatty deposits throughout my body. Men generate more visceral fat, forming that beer gut, while women store it more subcutaneously under the skin. That’s why my bosom is a little more tender right now and my hips stick out further. I also have belly fat, but it's more jiggly than it would be if I were a male predator.”

Breathless, exhausted from the lecture, Lesley sat back once more upon the desk. “Uuurhp. Does anyone have any questions?”

Silence, before the bell rang.

She smirked, patting her stomach. “Go on then; hometime. I won’t keep you.”

The class collected up their books - those who’d been taking notes, at least - and left in a steady stream. They gave the box a wide berth, even as their belchy teacher covered it over with a lid to help keep in the smell.

Very soon, only one other person remained in the classroom, lying on the desk and looking as pasty as talc. “Hometime, Rachel, come on; you doing okay?” Lesley called. She waddled her way up the aisle in the only way her body would let her, and put her fleshy hand on the girl's shoulder. “Too much for you?”

“A little,” she said weakly, looking very close to heaving. “You just… you killed her like it was nothing.”

In a quiet, caring voice, “This is biology, Rach, predators eat prey like that in the wild every single day. I’m teaching you the mechanics, alright? These are the things you need to know for the exam. I’d like you to pay a little bit more attention in my class, please, I’m seriously not impressed.”

“I cuh-can’t,” she sighed, eyes failing to stay open.

Lesley shook her head. “Right.”

She moaned deliberately as he put his weight on the bed, launching next to her with a plate full of food. The smell made her mouth water.

“You’re coming to the gym with me tomorrow,” he said before swallowing.

“Whatever gave you that impression?”

“You’re struggling to get up the stairs, Les; you’re coming to the gym with me.” And that was that.

She stripped nude and laid supine with her full stomach wobbling inside her. The salivating was pavlovian, she knew; she couldn’t possibly eat another bite. And yet, as she listened to her boyfriend gulp down mouthful after mouthful of his own lasagna, she considered whether it wasn’t worth stuffing herself just a little more.

“Who was the excess?” he asked, slipping the plate to the floor before lying next to her. He gently worked his fingers into her softening guts, working a slurry of digested mass through her intestines along with peristaltic contractions. He was very good at what he did. She craned up, tangling her fingers in his hair before pulling him down into a long kiss that tasted of mince and tomato, and a belch of raw meat.

Lesley moaned, “One of the kids decided my class was too intense, so I transferred them.”

“Mmmrph, I bet they love it when you take control there.”

“Not as much as you,” she giggled. “I’ll need to put in the paperwork for the extra casualty on Monday or Sophie’ll flip. It’s not a problem, it just means we might lose funding and I-mmmh.”

He cut her off with a long kiss as he clambered atop her hips, working her guts beneath him as he had done so many times before. “Weekend,” he sighed as their lips brushed, “switch off.”