She was always a heavy girl.

Well, not always. She was born almost a month early, 2 pounds underweight and clinging to life by the slimmest of threads. Her mother, as she sat, alone and cold, in the hospital bed, felt so much guilt that she swore that her child, if it lived, should never lack for anything. Her own body had already stolen enough.

Their new child stayed in the hospital for one long, stressful month. The new parents heard only a few scattered messages. The baby was alive. She has a cold. She’s better again. Now she has pneumonia. She’s too thin- too small- too weak- prepare yourself for loss. It’s not possible, said the doctors.

The new parents kept waiting. They had made a child together and had no desire to give up so easily. Finally, after even longer with nothing, the hospital telephoned them to come in.

They came, nervously, skittishly, but they came anyway, ready for whatever news awaited them. They stayed an interminable hour in the waiting room, freezing together in cautious misery, then the door opened and a doctor entered.

“Mr. and Mrs. Anderson…”

He stopped for breath. The parents waited, hand in hand, breathless. Time paused for a moment.

“...everything was a success. Your daughter is completely healthy.”

Time resumed. The parents breathed again, full with joy and love. They smiled slowly, unsure, but widely all the same. Everything was in order.  

The doctor disappeared for a moment to retrieve the baby. The father turned to the mother.

“What should we name her, Hannah? Our child...it’s...it’s completely wonderful.” A tear of happiness flowed from his left eye.

“I don’t know, Herman, she is… she is…”

The door opened again, and the doctor walked slowly through, the baby warm and secure in his arms.

“...she’s our hope,” finished the mother, laughing and crying at the same time. “Hope.”

And so was Hope Anderson brought into the world. Through sickness and pain came she well and healthy. Her parents, starstruck with her existence, gave her everything- toys, clothes, food, and love, but especially food. She was born so far underweight that her parents feared any lack of food more than anything else.

You readers who work or live with children will know this: when a child has something good to eat- snacks and sweets especially, but really anything they like- they will eat it. Hope was no exception. Provided with plenty of food as she was, she ate a lot- while playing, while reading, while walking, while watching television, everything. Constant snacks, lots of sweets, and six meals a day resulted in a Hope Anderson that weighed just over 200 pounds at the start of first grade.

200 pounds on a six-year-old girl- especially a girl who, like Hope, was just 2 foot 10- is is a very strange thing, both for the girl and for those around her. Hope was so large that she had never learned nor been able to properly walk- only waddle like a penguin, and that only very slowly. All of her clothes, large though they were, were all far too small for her enormous form, so some part of her was always on display, either the lowest third of her massive belly or both halves of her massive butt, visible through leggings stretched to transparency and the lack of underwear she preferred.

If any of you were to visit her school close to passing time, you would have seen, first off, a massive gaggle of small children rampaging to class, then a few stragglers leaving the bathroom and getting drinks, then, far behind all of them, an extremely fat first-grader, red-faced and sweaty with the effort of moving, toddling to class, every part of her too-large body- from her chubby feet to her second chin, from her big round belly to her flabby butt- jiggling and wobbling beneath her too-small clothes, invariably transparent, invariably riding up and down. Finally, she would burst into class some minutes too late, tousled and drenched in sweat, and there would be no more to see.

Despite the fact that she was so slow- despite the fact that there were a lot of chairs she couldn’t sit in- despite the fact that she couldn’t stand up alone off of the floor, she still had friends, because almost everyone in elementary school is nice enough to have at least a few friends. For a while Hope had something almost like a normal life.

But what Hope couldn’t possibly know is that her days of school were numbered. She was nearly too fat for a lot of things in just first grade; it wouldn’t be too long before she really was.

Hope began second grade with an extra hundred pounds on of her already enormous body. It was then that she really began to have a lot of problems. Her enormous rear needed two of the smallish school chairs to sit comfortably; she also began to need help to stand up out of those chairs. This was when her friends began drifting away, uncomfortable or unwilling to lend the aid she needed; they drifted further when even more pounds added themselves to her and the things she could do grew lesser and lesser. By November- 315 pounds- she could no longer reach far enough to fix her clothes when her belly- now a flabby blanket that reached halfway to her knees- flopped out of her pants and jiggled in the cold fall air. By February- 340 pounds- she could no longer stand easily up off of the toilet, a place which she visited frequently enough to get nasty names attached to her, which in turn drove her to eat still more. In April- 360 pounds- her massive butt, already wide and flabby enough to begin hanging off the edges of her chairs, shattered their legs, and by the end of school in June- 385 pounds- she started requiring help from one of the two people who stayed close enough to be called friends- a wispy boy named Thomas and a stocky girl named Jane- simply to walk from class to class. And still she ate, constantly sating a yawning hunger that never filled and never ceased. She ate while waddling, snuck snacks while in class, stuffed herself to bursting at lunch and then wondered why she was starving thirty minutes later. Through all of this, though, when any reasonable elder would have balked long ago, her parents continued to spoil her, feed her, buy clothes that she outgrew in days, money spent and spent and spent with no end in sight. They had promised their daughter would want for nothing, and they did not intend to break the promise now.

She was their Hope, after all.

Hope began the third grade from the seat of a mobility scooter- a “birthday present” made necessary by her leg-crushing weight of 445 pounds. She could barely walk even with support now, and then only for a few steps at a time- just enough to go from scooter to bed, to toilet, or to couch, and back again. Alone, she could do nothing at all. When she stood, her belly hung over her knees; when she sat, it hung between her legs, swaying gently with the motion of her chair. Her rear, always a prominent feature, hung well over both sides, obscuring a fair portion of the seat with its flabby mass. Hope, being just eight, was well before the age anyone should develop breasts; nevertheless, she had them, shapeless blobs on top of the bigger shapeless blob that was her belly. Her arms were quite swollen as well; it took up all her limited energy to write, feed herself, and propel her scooter.

With such little exertion in her day, Hope’s weight climbed ever higher; by December she weighed in at an absolutely ridiculous 507 pounds. At this point even her scooter was struggling to carry her, and it was growing difficult for her to stay fed enough to make it through the day. So, after the Christmas holidays, Hope was seen no more in school. A few kids wondered about the loss of “the fat girl” but, in time, they forgot her. Only Jane and Thomas remembered, and once they finished up the year they made the trek to visit their large friend.

Of course, Hope was now exponentially larger. Being housebound, she had absolutely nothing to do except eat and relax, and these she did with gusto- enough to add still another seventy-five pounds on her already overburdened frame. She spent her days, from sunup till sunup again, firmly planted on the living room couch, which over time had transformed from a respectable piece of furniture to a cesspit of discarded food, sweat, and other emissions best left unmentioned. Her belly, already enormous when she returned home, was even more enormous now, hanging over the edge of the couch and flopping limply with each motion from its lazy owner. If she was leaned forward- which she had to have done fairly frequently for cleaning purposes- it brushed the floor, folding over itself in a sweaty mess. Her butt wasn’t much better, a flabby expanse of rear end that extended well over the center cushion and halfway across the other two. Her chest had grown as well, swelling and drooping across her front, affected by gravity just as much as the rest of her too-fat frame, especially given her lack of clothes- her sheer size and generally gross state of existence meant that any shirt or, worse, pair of pants she had put on her would be very expensive and quickly ruined. It had been a long time since she stood up and even longer since she had taken a step; it was highly likely, given the fatness of her feet, that she was no longer able to. This was likely just as well. Her tiny lungs had enough difficulty coping with sitting and eating- who knows how they would have taken motion.

This was the scene that greeted Thomas and Jane when they walked through the door; their friend, someone they knew and cared about, transformed from a very obese but still extant little girl into a completely useless blob that smelled a lot like a very large gym sock. They tried small talk, but nothing was really the same. Every word she spoke would be followed by minutes of wheezing and a copious outpouring of sweat; every action was followed by an angry grumble from her stomach, as having taken that action meant that her insatiable belly was receiving that much less food. The final straw came when Hope, far beyond the point of control, let loose her bowels right in front of them; disgusted with the smell and the situation, Thomas and Jane bid a displeased farewell and left for the last time.

This final goodbye came as a rather strong blow to Hope’s heretofore somewhat comfortable existence. Her only two friends left in the world had deserted her for good purely due to her size and its aftereffects. Logically, this should have provided incentive to lose some weight; Hope, however, was only nine, and this notion seemed ridiculous to her fat-addled brain. Thus, she turned even more to food, the one thing she had left. She ate until her belly hit the floor and her butt broke the couch; she ate until she needed oxygen to breathe and a feeding tube to take over for her tired jaws and useless arms; she ate until, at the age of just eleven, she was an entirely helpless, totally useless blob, dependent on machinery and the care of others to simply exist. She had on her little frame one hundred pounds for each year of her life and more besides. Her belly, once large enough to reach the floor from the living room couch, now flopped heavily over the end of her reinforced bed; her butt, now simply two pallid smears of fat stained with endless emissions, itself looked to be on its way to the floor; her breasts, equally pallid, equally shapeless, looked to be moving in the same direction. Her feet were slowly being swallowed by her ankles, two nubs of chub that hadn’t felt the floor for nearly three years. She could just barely maintain control over her arms; though she no longer had enough musculature to reach her mouth, she could, at least in theory, still write if absolutely necessary, though there were no guarantees of her being able to hold a pen with her flabby fingers. Her mouth, surrounded by two baseball-sized cheeks and ringed with three or four thick chins, played host to a feeding tube through which various pureés were forced at all hours of the day; it had been a year or more since she’d been able to muster the energy and oxygen to speak. The latter of those now had to be sprayed through a tube in her nose just for her to stay alive.

So Hope lived; a living blob, kept alive with medical science and useful only for the production of fertilizer, and that was a stretch- her noxious output, of which there was plenty, was difficult to transport. Hope was nothing but a consumer, a drain on her parent’s finances. She stayed in her room- for where else would she go?- and did nothing all day but drink her slurry and stare at the wall.

Her parents still had Hope. But she had lost it all.