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[slow-burn, realistic female (and later mutual) stuffing and weight gain story] ~ M A T I L D A S W A P S G O A L S | a w e i g h t g a i n s t o r y ~ p a r t o n e : a small taste Some of us have a need we know nothing of until it’s too late. In the meantime, it screams through our being, and our behaviour screams in echo. She was able to ignore its presence on her body for a small time. That is until exactly three and a half months ago, when Matilda Nolasco’s little cousin had, all in babyish innocence, decided to point out the problem area while five relatives sat chatting in the TV room. Five-year-old little Allison had just taken a break from climbing all over her dad’s lap, harassing him for a fourth packet of Barbeque flavoured chips while the uncles sat around the TV speculating on the current English Premier League season. Caught in a yawn, Matilda had stretched her arms out high above her head as she sat on the sofa, then slouched back down with her shirt settling a bit too high up on her belly. It was too late, then. A small over-spill of flesh, soft as a baby’s bottom, had been laid bare to outside eyes. Seeing an opportunity for mindless mischief, Allison tittered, sent out a curious finger, and poked Matilda right in the tiny roll her belly had created. She had swatted Allison’s little hand away and yanked her shirt back down faster than she could tell Allison never to do that again in a voice she wished didn’t sound so hurt. Sensing his daughter’s discomfort, Martino Nolasco laughed his heavy-bellied laugh and patted his own beer gut, which had been developing into something rather round, and a touch too large for his button up shirt with each decade that had gone by in his life. He grabbed Allison’s attention with a whistle and a wink. ‘Oh, that’s nothing,’ he bragged, looking down his nose at the little girl with a mocking, sly eye. ‘Bet you’ve ever seen a belly like this!’ and with that, took his round gut up in his hands and chortled like Santa Claus cradling his sack of presents. ‘Ew!’ Allison screeched, fleeing in a jetstream of squealing laughter to rejoin the other kids, who were running amok down the other end of uncle Grant’s house with beaten-up Nerf guns and Bratz dolls whose legs were falling off. Matilda knew her dad had once again come to her rescue and led her out of an awkward situation by sacrificing his own dignity. She tried to persist with watching the television screen, as if nothing had happened. But there was this slow, simmering embarrassment sitting in her sternum that just wouldn’t go away. It wrapped itself around her thoughts, permeating into the grooves of her consciousness like ink. And just like that, with such a simple and innocuous sequence of events, Matilda was to mark the first time in her life she had ever been conscious of being self-conscious — about her stomach. The feeling was strange and new. It was as if she’d never thought about that part of her before, never been aware of its existence as such, as a part of her body, something attached to her. Now, it was all she could think about to keep from losing herself to the influence of a burning anxiety that hung around her chest like a bad smell. The television, then, had displayed to her a disconnected sequence of images and incongruous meaningless sounds until, at last, pushed to her limit, she had to excuse herself. She got up, sneaked away to the bathroom, locked the door, and glared down at her body to conduct an analysis of it. She knew that she wasn’t allowed to call herself fat. She wasn’t vain or deluded. It would have been an insult to real fat people. Xiaoden Wen from science class; she was kind of fat, maybe shapely on a good day, but quite chubby on a bad one, with sides that poked over the sides of her skirt. She would be insulted at the comparative implication, if she ever heard Matilda’s thoughts floating on the broadcast wavelength of ideas. Oh, and then there was Emelia Clark, who was… enormous. The poor girl had to be at least two-hundred pounds, if you were to speak kindly about it, even though the immensity of her stomach made you want to stare at it until your eyes went dry. She would have broken down in tears over such a comparison. No, Matilda knew what was really going on. She had developed a runner’s body, and she still had one, even with her gently-flared hips and her teardrop shaped backside — it’s just that she’d lost something definitive about the “athlete’s hardness”. She was a footballer, not a housewife. An endurance runner, not a pornstar, a dedicated, natural athlete who was, everyday of her life, geared into shape for the sport which she dedicated every last one of her waking breaths to. But at this particular, fateful moment in time, Matilda had stood in front of the mirror in her uncle’s bathroom in shakily-repressed shock, where she pinched a portion of her belly. She released it, observing the subtle differences in its physical behaviour by moving it in different ways and from different angles. Perhaps it was jiggling, but… just a tiny bit. If anything, it was so faint that she wasn’t even sure if she was meant to believe what her eyes were seeing. Her breasts looked unchanged. Or did they? It was too hard to tell. Then she had looked again, closer this time. No — she was being paranoid. They were alright. Her ass looked no different. Hang on. Actually… She tilted her head. No. Yes? She couldn’t tell. Her glutes were meant to be so tight you could see the muscle sinew through her skin. Maybe they did look a little softer today? Or was it the angle, the softness of the light? She twisted back around to face herself. Her belly was the supreme culprit, here, and it felt obvious to her. Even as she tensed the muscles along the core of her waist, which usually stood up like bas-relief carvings, the surface of her stomach had the stubborn appearance of being relaxed when it wasn’t. Which she realised was not right. She stared, then, at a perfectly smooth cushion of flesh sitting smack bang at the centre of her stomach, eliminating all muscle definition in a radius of insubstantiality. When she spread her hand over her hip and ran her fingers down her flank to explore, she discovered some tone had gone missing there as well. She felt her other thigh, giving it a pinch on the inside. There was not much to hold, but she’d only ever been skin-tight anyway. She had stood up and tried to shake herself off. Maybe she was overtired from training and studying, and her mind was not connecting the correct dots in the right sequence. But this sudden arrival of body fat was all too new and uncharted. She nibbled at her upper lip, with a crease deepening between her brows as she felt a sudden influx of ineffable, unearthly instinct, like the flutter of a message from the future passing against your heart so briefly you barely notice it was there… “Well”, she said to her mind, all the way back then, before any chapter of her wild future had a chance to unfurl… Well, until this smidge of unwanted tummy pudge shrank back to the nothingness it came from, she would have to pass it off as a “mild bloating problem” to anybody who might ask. “I’m just having strange bloating problems lately,” she would say. “The doctor says it’ll pass soon,” she would declare. “Medically certified. It’ll be fine.” But, presently, the tummy fat is still there, lurking in a latent sense. Beyond door 33 of the Windomsyde Motel, we find an adolescent Matilda Nolasco slumped across a tan lounge the morning after a long night of liver-poisoning with her graduate classmates. Beneath the rumples of a white shirt, the meagre germinations of a paunch are experimenting with the idea of rising from the onslaught of alcohol and carbohydrates. She has not noticed the threat of the pudge accumulating. Nor does anyone feel the need to mention this new subtle bulge. But the season isn’t quite right for it to fully bloom — not yet, at least. The month is November, and it is deep in the midst of a teenage festival called “Schoolies”; a time of alcohol, of freedom, of wonky legs, puke gushing from open mouths, shiny silver goonsacks sloshing with wine on the cheap, huge cartons of watery beer poured into beer-bongs so long and ridiculously shaped that nobody could ever hope to chug one whole, the feeling of your bare toes sinking into the sun-heated sand of the shore, empty bottles and boxes populating this golden strip of beach, litter on the streets, piss in the gutters because why not, covert sexual acts behind corners, music from all ends of the beachfront mashing into one amorphous sound in the open air, cigarettes and cigars underfoot, and don’t forget other substances. Food has been aplenty. More than ever before, for some. There’s a vibe of liberation at work, here, of free-floating mindlessness in limbo between the end of youth’s epoch and what will be the long grind until death of what we call “adult life” as a worker. If you’re lucky, you’ll only hate your job. The spectre of responsibility awaits. In these final hours before it arrives for good, the whole dizzy gang is in riot before it all comes crashing down. Matilda has slowly recovered through the night. She follows her friends out of the beach house and down to the shore. The late morning sun spreads a biting heat through her cheeks. She’s here to feel free, and she knows it, so she takes her shirt off and struts around in a sleek black two-piece, trying to feel confident. She’s not ugly – not the meanest stunner around either, as far as she knows. Two slightly crooked teeth in the corners of her mouth stop her from smiling with too much liberty. A smidge of baby fat still clings to the bones of her cheeks, with some residual acne lingering above her neck… A boyfriend she once maintained a relationship with outside high school, for all of six months, had tried to tell her she looked like an actress, but even now, she’s still not entirely convinced it’s true. Whenever she looks in the mirror, she sees too much plainness. As simple and unembellished as your average college girl who roams around the mall with her gang of teen friends whenever she’s not at training … all this flavourlessness, in spite of the fact that she’s an Australian citizen of third-generation Portuguese descent. Her father, Martino, is Portuguese, but her mother Jenny is as “Down-Under” as they come. Matilda never seems to be able to explain this combination to anybody. What she is able to do, however, is exude natural talent. Her level of athleticism is obscene for a player in a local league soccer team. She joined the Purple Vale Strikers as a backup as a sixteen year old, and it ruined her chances at a normal life. She’d fallen in true love with the sport. She became like a family member to the club, and she realised she would lay down her life before she let anything happen to it. As she marches down to the shore, there are six friends beside her, towels and inflatable floaties in hand. Four others have stayed back at the cabins. Jen, a giggly Vietnamese girl who transferred to their school two years ago, stands with her towel bundled in her arms like a teddy bear, clawing the sand with her toes. Amy, Tess, Kiera and Jasmine are your typical white girls with white girl problems and varying shades of blonde dyed hair, but for Liana, a crimson-haired owl of a girl, who just sticks around to observe things as if she never has anything to say. The smell of sunscreen and salt water is in the air. Laughter runs like a bubbling brook. Suddenly a ball comes arcing across the sky. Matilda is the first to spot it with her instinctive eye. It hits the sand nearby, sending her friends scattering with high-pitched squeals of alarm as an explosion of sand sprays their towels. Matilda gives out an eager little, ‘Oh!’, and glances around to see where it came from. A bunch of topless boys some distance away shuffle awkwardly as they mutter amongst themselves, glancing in Matilda’s direction and wondering how to get their ball back — and maybe is it even possible to chat up some of the girls at the same time? Raising her hand with calm assurance, she says to her friends, ‘Don’t worry, I got this.’ Lining herself up a few steps behind the ball, she steps in with her left foot, trots up, leans forward and swings her right foot down hard. The ball blasts upwards in a downshore arc. Her arms fly up at her sides with the follow-through as she traces the flight of the ball sailing away. When her foot lands back in the sand, an area of her tummy reacts with a fractional, almost invisible bounce. But she doesn’t pay any notice. Not yet. . . . At her footballing club, Matilda occupies what is called the “right-mid” or “right-wing” position in her team, occasionally drifting into the centre to operate as a play-maker. It largely depends who’s available from week to week; sometimes she’ll be running more than just about anyone else in her team, bolting up and down the pitch, only to halt almost instantly at breakneck pace with the ball at her feet, keep it from being stolen by an opponent who is thrown off balance, then boot it across to whoever’s making a forward run so they can redirect it past the goalkeeper and into the net. Sometimes you will find her tracking up and down the pitch, boxing in opposition players who are looking to make a daring dash with the ball. Other times, she will roam about like a lioness, eyes wide and pinned to the ball as she reads the movement of all the players on the field and positions herself in areas of space where her teammates can pass the ball through to her, where she will catch it at her feet, pivot on it, and make a zigzagging run towards the goals – the ten-yard zone where any sort of magic might happen. As a girl on the precipice of thirteen, she’d been far and away her school’s best player. A natural. No understanding yet, no clue how to time her efforts and conserve her energy, but somehow able to wriggle the ball out of a contest and use it no matter what circumstances she found herself in. She proceeded to win small recognitions such as class ribbons, school awards, and eventually state trophies. She was swept into her school district’s youth academy by the age of fifteen, and by the age of sixteen found herself in Purple Vale Strikers, and was winning season titles in the next year by scoring after being subbed on in the last twenty minutes of every match while she “adjusted” to the team. The adjustment didn’t have to last long. By seventeen and eighteen, she was even granted “special leaves of absence” from the High School Board under “pursuance of excellence” grounds so that she could train for competitions. It isn’t her Portuguese descent that keeps her coaches coming back to ask her to play week after week. Her dedication and skill is enough on its own. She has a winner’s heart, a runner’s body, and a professional’s mind. Her ability to be relied upon has never been under threat. But all of a sudden her belly, with a hint of a paunch having tip-toed along to settle into the middle of her athletic core, is trying its best to establish roots. It may make its presence known – and felt – if not now, then in time. . . . Matilda and her classmates are finally graduating from high school as eighteen year olds. People keep telling them they are young adults now, but none of them can say what that truly means. The New Year swings by to say hello before departing again. Since the Schoolies festivities earlier that year, her tummy pooch has regressed back to where it came from, but she doesn’t exactly maintain this physique. Once more, we find her by the seaside, this time for New Year’s Eve, celebrating what nobody can be sure is to come in the next twelve months of their lives. Having managed to save up something of a holiday-fund, she and her friends find a cheap room in a highrise tower and book it, split the cost, and proceed to crash the place for a three-night bender of getting shit-faced until blackout like rich social media influencers. She’s never really done this kind of thing before, and she’s been hit with a toll for it. The “goon sacks” are out again, beer bottles, wine glasses and Gin casks litter the balcony, while blue hazy smoke drifts in from neighbouring apartments and their bongs, random fights break out in the streets below, clubs grow too packed to be good news, roadside pubs blast music and laughter, while out across the cityscape, the night sky is being bombed by fireworks, painting the girls’ young, upturned faces in shades of pink, green, blue, then pink again. Perpetually in a state just beyond the point of “tipsy”, Matilda has been keeping a constant reserve of food in her hands, treats and snacks available to munch on at any given time. Bites keep finding their way into her mouth bit by bit. Come to think of it, she’s been walking around semi-bloated all day long — all night long, in fact — and all weekend. Friday, Saturday, and then into the Sunday; every last moment of it spent snacking and drinking. It isn’t until she practically shoves her stomach in Jen’s face that a point is made about the state of things. Inside a club called The Pixie Ring, there are no lights except for tall, thick pillars of blacklight bulbs which transmute everything into the luminosity of deep-sea glowing jellyfish. The gang of eighteen year olds find a booth to occupy, staggering and tumbling over one another to clamber into their seats like cartoons, laughing and carrying on, slapping each other’s asses for the drunken fun of it. Matilda is the last unlucky member of the gang to try and occupy a spot. There’s not much room left, so she flops onto the end of the seat, stretching her body out and laying face up to relieve the strange force of discomfort in her stomach. She lays her shoulders and head over someone’s lap. Above her, Jen’s face peers down at her like a mother bowing over her infant. They exchange smiles. Then Jen lets her eyes drift along Matilda’s splayed out form until she sees something, dark eyes halting with amused uncertainty. Matilda presses her chin into her sternum with a grunt to peer down at herself. It’s her slender waist. It’s the belly rising from it, actually. It looks rounder than it’s meant to be. Seemingly unable to help herself, Jen reaches for it, and Matilda feels a hard jab in the side of her tender stomach. She curls away from the poke, then brushes Jen’s finger aside with a snort. She tries to sit up straight, but forfeits, collapsing back down. ‘It’s not the food, it’s the drink,’ Matilda defends herself preemptively, giving herself away. ‘What is that!’ Jen cackles, struggling to be heard over the thunderous music. Matilda feels caught in the act. ‘Uhm — me taking care of myself, maybe?’ ‘Oh-hoh! Yeah, sure, chubby girl!’ Matilda rolls her eyes. ‘Girl’s gotta eat okay? Eating a bit won’t do me any damage.’ Then, out of curiosity, she rolls her head to look up from her lap, and gets a view from underneath of what appears to be a little round roll spilling over a line in Jen’s silver sequin dress — probably where her underwear strap sits. Matilda resists the urge to butt it with her head. Locking eyes with Jen, she smiles ruefully and brings up her hand to pat the under-curve of her friend’s little squishy roll. ‘It’s done you some damage, though. But hey, that’s okay. Give it to me, if you want, and I’ll look after it for you.’ She turns her head away again even as she continues to pinch the bulge curling around Jen’s waist, which feels curiously soft, with a gentle magnetism that keeps her from withdrawing her hand… Jen squeals and swats her invasive fingers away. She sucks her belly in until it’s concave, and says with injured laughter, ‘Mind your own business — gawd. You have to be careful, you know. People can get fat, like, out of nowhere. It can happen for the weirdest reasons. Like, my aunty literally gained half her body weight in a year coz she had to start driving to a new job. And my cousin’s fiancé turned twenty-six then gained fifty pounds just like that because her doctor said she had insomnia or something and it was affecting her metabolism.’ ‘So not being able to sleep is what makes you fat now?’ ‘It can!’ ‘Yeah right. Everyone’s so obsessed with what makes you get fat these days, I swear. What next? Fruit can make you fat too?’ Jen offers a plausible shrug. ‘Who knows, Tild. It can be anything. I swear some people out there just want to get fat or something crazy.’ After the three nights of partying, they return to their homes feeling thoroughly hammered and dusty-eyed, feet dragging with the weight of lethargy. Tess may have collected herself a love interest somewhere along the way, but that’s as easy as trawling for shrimp. Kiera, on the other hand, managed to swap phone numbers with at least three boys. Matilda comes away from the festivities not too worse for wear, and without any of that. The resulting lack of tone in her abdomen and upper thighs is not much to speak of. However, as the off-season for her playing career comes to a close, her team returns to the pitch. As she heads back into the dressing rooms after their first training session, she catches one of her teammates Luci Careen giving her the side-eye as she bends at the waist to step into her shorts. She thinks about sucking in, and almost does, but decides at the last minute that it would be pointless, because why should she? There’s barely anything there, after all. There’s barely a problem. Instead, she gives her teammate a glance that says; what? ‘Nothing,’ Luci shrugs and looks away, packing a hand-towel back into her bag. In spite of anything that may or may not have changed with Matilda’s body, the team’s first game of the year goes swimmingly well. They embarrass their opponents with a tightly controlled 4 - 0 win with Matilda putting herself on the scoreboard with two of their goals. Likewise, the matches after their opener see them enjoying a rapid snowball effect of victory after victory that the girls don’t really know how to deal with. Intensive sessions of training between each gruelling ninety-five minutes of their weekly matches, from January through March, more or less blasts the smidge of fat off her waist, reducing its volume in a strangely unsatisfying way, as if the sudden round softness has only retreated, like the eyes of a snail, ready to spring back the moment it’s safe to emerge again. . . . The months pass like a bullet train before the eye of her soul, and the trees have barely had a chance to shed their leaves to the southern-hemisphere’s autumn when it’s time for her to begin university. There is no gap year — only training and study preparation each weekend. She cannot afford to suspend any sense of routine, lest she fall off before she gets going. It’s the match-day mentality of utter focus she has grown up on, ingrained into her deepest habitual existence. Meanwhile, the little pooch of fat on her tummy has made a gradual retreat once again. It happened very quickly, practically overnight, and never came back. She doesn’t know where it went. It almost feels untrustworthy. But she doesn’t really care. She can see the line of separation down the middle of her abdominals again, and any threat of losing her endurance washes from the grooves of her consciousness like muddy water. If the little pesky paunch tries to make another return, she’ll have a head start this time. It can happen for the weirdest reasons, Jen had told her. You can get fat for the weirdest reasons. . . . Having enrolled to study a Bachelor of Human Movement, the sports sciences faculty is gracious enough to grant her “prior learning” on introductory lessons. Chin held high, she skips straight over the basics, laughing smugly, and crashes head-first into the complex theory. She finds herself promptly thrown out of her depth, sideways, spinning into a style of life about which nobody told her what to expect or how to act, especially among students who are ahead of her well into their second semester, already looking left and right under the onset of bitter disillusionment. It feels as if she needed to be older, for all this… like she’s living the life of an adult stranger somebody has mistaken her for. There is nothing to do, and nobody to waste time with in between lectures — so for all intents and purposes, she is left with no choice but to spend her time bumming around the food outlets in the main complex. With more opportunity to gorge on food than she’s ever been exposed to in her life, she resists the urge to binge on sheer variety for about two weeks. That is, until her third week, when she walks into the main complex one Tuesday morning after not eating breakfast, and is met with the sweltering scent of thick bread, freshly baked, the sweetness of fried noodles somewhere to one side, marinated chicken over the other side, stuffed burritos and sushi behind the glass casing over there at the other end of the court, this fusion of smells bulldozing her impulse control under the overpowering weight of its allure — and promptly realises that if she doesn’t order the largest item off the nearest menu immediately, she will faint from hunger right where she stands. The problem comes when she reaches a point of fullness and can’t dismiss the stupid, silly idea that she should keep going. Why? She has no idea. But she has no idea why she runs up and down the grass pitch every weekend like her life depends on it. She just does it, following the lead of a gigantic, blind instinct that repeating the same action is the best thing to do. You do it, and you do it, and then you do it again, until you get it right. To begin with, she holds it all at a distance, making a tour of the food court only on a Tuesday. By the third Wednesday, it’s as if a hole has been etched into the storage space inside her out of sheer necessity, and now it wants to be filled. Every Tuesday and Wednesday she blows the allowance her parents give her on food, saving none of it. By the time she realises she’s saved nothing, it’s too late. Her efforts to contain it all to a Tuesday and Wednesday have ruptured at the sides like a leaking ship, and she’s going there Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, grabbing breakfast and lunch, then going home to force herself down whatever meal is prepared for dinner into a stomach that is doing itself harm trying to stretch. The soft shape makes a rapid comeback. Within her first semester, Matilda is visited by a handful of chub having returned to pad out the flesh around her belly button. She ignores it. But as the weeks progress one by one, it only sticks around. But it doesn’t blow out of proportion, either. It’s as if it has come pre-programmed with a specific size and will remain right there. No amount of eating seems to make it grow, and no amount of sprinting up and down the pitch each week until she’s ragging for breath seems to make it shrink. But she gets the feeling, faint as a swelling wave unable to stand tall enough to crash, that continuing to eat as large and often she has been will overpower her exercise sooner or later. One night, she has a dream that she is pulling the chain of an anchor up from a muddy sea that won’t stop rolling, small waves building in intensity, because she comes to understand that a storm is coming in from somewhere, though there is no wind, and she pulls and pulls – and her arms are growing tired, but the chain won’t end. Is this, in her hands, even an anchor? It must be an anchor, she can feel its weight, and she pulls, until after hours she realises she was never pulling the chain up, but rather she has been slowly pulling herself down — and just before she can release her hand from the chain, she wakes up. It’s all too clear to her, then. She’s studying goddamned human movement and yet she’s acting like it’s a free-for-all. The very study of bodily performance and the benefits of exercise, how to improve your body’s athletic development, and she’s been letting herself get carried away eating beyond the point of fullness because… for no other reason than because she can. Full sudden, Matilda is granted a view through the window of bodily shame. In a gunshot of embarrassment and guilt, she understands how it feels. She finds herself sucking in whenever she eats, even if she doesn’t need to. Whenever she does eat, she makes sure to eat less of whatever it is that’s in front of her. Occasionally she finds herself letting a forearm rest over her stomach, just in case people’s eyes perceive something that looks too… round? Paranoia creeps towards her from the sidelines, and she glances back at it askance. Her willingness to appear in a bikini drops in frequency. Later on that year, during a spell of hot days through the Spring, she is in the middle of fitting on a two-piece black swimsuit before heading to the beach with her school friends. None of those busy young people have been able to see each other for months. Midway through dressing herself, Matilda stops moving to contemplate her choices. She looks down into the body length mirror beside her dresser. She thinks her belly looks too round above the black drawstrings of her two-piece. All until her sense of objectivity kicks back in, coughing up a last hurrah, tired and used up. Of course, she knows, her stomach is by all accounts normal when compared to the millions of other naked female stomachs. The only abnormality was the fact that she had been so trim in the first place. Any change no matter how small must look like a "fall from grace" when such an unattainable standard had been reached. Perhaps her body was simply doing what it was meant to do, just like everybody else on the planet. But then, returning like a boomerang that laughs in mockery as it approaches; her growing impulse to cover herself in an effort to repress all evidence of slovenliness just as long as it takes for her to bring her defined abs back to life. She vacillates back and forth in her mind. By the end of her torturous deliberation, she decides to bite the bullet and wear the two-piece, proving to herself that she can be braver than any of her silly new insecurities. After all, she is a footballer, and her winning mentality has always been her confident one. Why can it not apply in civilian life as well? Down at the beach, her friends reunite, catching up, telling stories, venting frustrations, but never making any indication or mention of Matilda’s appearance. This alone is enough to send her home happy and convinced that her choice to be bold was the right one. A few weeks later, though, something almost changes her mind completely as to whether it was a good idea, revealing her "brave boldness" to have been "shameful arrogance" all along. Until the day she dies, she’ll remember when her friends decided to take her along for a dip at the Spa & Sauna complex at Pyereville Heights. It is a cold day at the tail-end of Spring, just before the transitional season must give up its place. She has put a shirt on over her swimwear, feeling that she will only draw the stares of stranger's eyes towards her stomach like a black hole — all because of the previous week. She’d lapsed twice in the last four days and eaten so much in multiple sittings that she woke up that weekend and found it hard to button a familiar pair of jeans for the first time in her life. So, having spent an hour in the spa, her shirt, floating weightless as a ghost in the warm bubbling water around her, soaks her in a deceitful sense of comfortability. It vanishes the instant she stands up from the water, and she regrets the decision to wear the shirt. It was meant to be a shield, cover from enemy fire. It is the opposite. All of a sudden she is thrown out in the cold on her ass into the path of bullets from the eyes of strangers, feeling as good as naked. Members of the public swim, walk and talk all around her, and she knows that if anybody would look her way, the first thing they’d notice is her shirt adhering with heavy, sopping wetness around her waist like cling wrap, outlining its shape with humiliating, hyperbolic honesty. She can feel it on her skin. It sticks around her middle. The ghost of the feeling sticks to her body long after, like honey. It lingers through the fortnight, even as she sits at her desk trying to study, unable to stop remembering, returning over and over to the event like she’d missed something. The corner of her lip twists with uncertain dislike of what her eyes see when she lowers them into her lap. She tugs her shirt down, putting the problem out of sight. But… her fingers feel stuck. She cannot let go of the shirt. The curiosity she feels is a powerful vortex. Biting her lip, she lifts her shirt back up again, and has a long, good hard look. It’s still there. Below her shy but perky breasts, there sits a slightly rounded-out pooch. For a while, she stares at it from above without moving a muscle. It looks as peaceful as a sleeping infant. She watches it inch back and forth with the cycles of her breathing — the curved surface’s tiny deflation as it retreats reassures her that she isn’t under threat of having “a bit of a gut” as her father jokingly calls his own mammothian waistline. Then comes the inflation as hers swells out a little, bringing her belly button a little further over her lap as her small paunch asserts its presence with more authority. Then it sinks back again. And it comes out again. The rhythm is hypnotic, coming in and out of being in perpetuity, constant as the tick of a clock – teetering on the edge of being a belly, and not being a belly. “To be or not to be” a belly. It diminishes. Then it expands. It sinks. Then it swells. Swells. The word swirls between her sears… But wait a sec, maybe that’s just it. The swell of it. Maybe she really is just a bit “swollen”. If she hadn’t been eating so many foods that induce bloating in the first place, she wouldn’t be dealing with this in the first place. It’s just bloating. Tracing her finger across the outside of her navel, she digs down into her belly. Before she knows what’s happened, the softened flesh of her tummy has already risen around her pressing fingertip, giving into it like fresh putty. She can even push her fingertip around and watch the little layer of flesh squish around to accommodate it. Well bugger, she says to her sinking heart. It is fat. Fed up with feeling like the world expects her to be ashamed of something to stupid, she scowls and covers up her tummy. She turns her mind aside, mentally fatigued, and resolves to allow not one more thought, nor a care in the world for how she might look, to touch her. She cannot afford to think about it any longer. Nothing, after all, has changed how good she is at playing her sport — so why should it matter that she has developed a mere handful of softness? Matilda takes a deep breath and slides down in her chair, looking up at the corner of the room. A purple object of huge significance lingers in the corner of her eye. She turns to look at it. Hanging on the wall of her bedroom, facing the door, is her spare jersey; dark purple with violet sleeves, the trim white and gold. The bold number 18 is printed in white on the left sleeve. She feels drawn up by a great surge of wind beneath her diaphragm. She gets up from her desk and crosses the room to stand in front of her shirt, raising a hand to smooth the creases out from under each sleeve. A note of pride sings through her heart, thrumming in harmony with the white and blue shield insignia of Purple Vale Strikers SC. 1911. “All Heart or All for Nothing” in tiny cursive text is inscribed in the banner below. That Friday night she is on the pitch, under the floodlights, wearing the shirt, sprinting up and down the pitch, eyes tracing the ball as it sails back and forth in arcs through the night air. Yells pierce the air. Deep reverberant thuds as boots meet ball again and again. A long kick ends with the ball in the enemy goalkeeper’s hands, swapping the direction of play. She comes to a hard stop, small vibrations going through her outer thighs. Distracted by the strange new feeling, she almost misses the ball as it spins off an opponent’s head by accident and bounces towards her. She digs her heel into the turf, switches direction, and meets the ball. She stops it at her feet, then knocks it left and dribbles away with her prize, screaming at her teammates to move up the pitch. An enemy defender sprints at her, eyes analysing the direction of her hips, slowing down to shephard her along the boundary line. But Matilda manages to feint left, then right, then cuts past her opponent’s left even as the ball rolls past their outside leg. Matilda reclaims the ball on the other side, leaving the defender spinning around to begin chasing her all over again. The other defenders are closing in towards her as she bolts into the middle of the pitch. Thankfully Elisha, their midfielder, has read Matilda’s intentions just in time and zooms in to receive her pass, lobbing it over to Kelsey on the other side, who bounces it back to Elisha, who this time has more space in front of her. As Matilda moves along, she once again notices that little loose vibration in her tummy and backside. She jogs up to the corner of the box, positioning herself behind the enemy defenders and hopping from side to side. The Purple Vale Strikers go ahead to win the match 2-0, working like a perfectly-calibrated clock, all its parts and members moving with and around each other in confident, intentional synchronisation, predictive of one piece to the next. In the change rooms the atmosphere is thick with pride. While stepping out of their kits and into civilian clothes, Matilda caves to curiosity and lifts her eyes. She looks at her teammates’ bodies as they dress. Not a single girl on this team is anywhere near chubby. None of them are even soft. Every one of her teammates has no more than ten-to-twenty percent body fat at most, leaving every muscle visibly delineated to the eye. The only exception would be Suri Ahashi, whose tummy has a slight curve to it. Suddenly conscious of her own stomach, Matilda sucks in a little before pulling her shirt over her head. She towels herself down, trying to be swift. When she puts her grey top on, she realises it feels silly to suck in a belly that isn’t really there. No, she’s fit as a leopard. She’s sure of it. She just won a game. She is in prime physical form – what’s the point in acting otherwise? . . . Ten long months later, we find Matilda stumbling through a new year at university. Sure, she’s changed a little; somewhat smarter in a bookish sense, and sure, she’s accustomed to the new schedule by now, but she is no less confused about where she’s going in life than any other shoulder-shrugging student drenched in despondent irony who you may meet in life as a young adult. Just recently, Matilda has been through a shockingly late growth spurt. She’s gained an inch in height seemingly out of nowhere, then those slightly crooked teeth eased themselves straighter with the aid of a stint in those transparent dental bands they’ve been advertising everywhere. Her cheekbones decided to stand out a little further sometime during the last year or so, creating a defined angle from her ear to the corner of her mouth. Grandma started calling Matilda her “little late-bloomer”, but she still feels uncertain about things. Although she’s come to be okay with the way she looks, she can’t help but think that if her face keeps changing, it could morph beyond itself into a network of over-exaggerated, rounded angles. Strangely, she hasn’t played a single game of football for five months. Not even put her laces on. It is a behaviour as strange as the phenomenon of the existent universe is itself. How did something just come into being from nowhere? How did someone as passionate as Matilda just fall out of love? Halfway through the semester, her passion had grown legs one morning and wandered off somewhere as if it had spotted something interesting on the side of the road, said a quick, “I’ll be right back,” and proceeded never to come back. Maybe the stress of her degree’s workload wormed its way into her soul? Maybe she began to feel too good for her team? Maybe she felt bored because she wasn’t being challenged anymore? Who knows… If she doesn't know, nobody will. All that’s certain is that most university study material is thrown onto the internet these days, and she’s been spending less time on campus, but more of it in bed with her laptop, eating the old cheese n’ crackers while watching the International Football Leagues and submitting her assignments in a sequence of last-minute efforts that get her scraping pass after narrow pass. Her teammates ring up now and again, asking her where she is, and if she can fill in. When that doesn’t produce results, they just ring on occasion to ask if she feels like filling in for a game here and there in the future, only to find out she can’t because “too much study to do”. And yet, in spite of it all, she will sometimes make an appearance at the last minute, often without any prior notice, get away with it by being thrown onto the pitch by her coaches who are desperate for her ingrained talent, and she’ll proceed to dribble the ball past defenders, do pirouettes, tricks, and put crosses into the box at narrow angles as neatly as she ever did, which nobody else can seem to match. But now the umpteenth iteration of her pooch has come back, and this time with a dose of arrogance to match her own. You can get fat for the weirdest reasons. That’s what Jen had told her, which she still remembers, returning like an ear-worm of a song you cannot banish. Often she will notice her shirt has settled across a mushroom-like shape she’s never had the privilege of knowing before. Sometimes she’ll toy with its tactile squishiness, absentminded enough that she doesn’t immediately realise she has been doing it for the past ten minutes. Soon, the toying-with-it becomes more of a habit, like biting your nails. She actually doesn’t mind it, as things stand. The way it squashes between fingers. How smooth it is when she brushes it with the pads of her fingers. It’s kind of comforting to fidget with when she’s in the middle of a task, especially if she needs something to occupy her fingers and use brain power. On certain days, she can even feel it wiggle on her stomach with her steps if she has to do some running. The feeling isn’t very pronounced. She has to fold over her waist to produce anything shaped like a genuine roll of flesh. Some days it’s noticeably there, some days it’s not so much. Whenever she encounters a person that is medically overweight, she reminds herself that all she is burdened with is a bulge so miniscule that you wouldn’t notice it until someone pointed at it. Does her size draw attention when she walks down the mall? No. Does her belly look like a bulging pillow under her shirt? No, she’s not medically overweight. Does it hang out of her shirts? No, she’s not obese. Does her belt need another hole poked in it? That would be stupid. Do her hips shake? No. Are her thighs so fat they rub each other as she walks? No. She comes to remind herself about this from day to day, and it comforts her. Sometimes she even mentally paints a picture of herself twice her size, which is all she needs to remember that she’ll never look like that. . . . The year grinds on. The bulge invites an extra inch that she didn’t particularly ask for, but didn’t exactly prevent from happening either – nor loathe the presence of, necessarily. She should. But if she really wanted it gone, she would have put a muzzle on her eating habits before paying the price in the first place. The calendar ticks over into another new year, and by March we find Matilda back on the wide green pitch with the wind-power of a tropical storm filling the sails of her soul. It must have been the Women’s World Cup. Immersing herself in the event blew hot air into her again. She’s practically a new girl. The broadcast had thrown it all at her eyes and down into her spirit; the quality, the talent, the skill, the dedication, the passion. Pure being. Her desire to do something great had stood up on its hind legs and banged behind her ribcage once more, savage as a lioness with all the energy of a thousand winters of hibernation to burn. When she expressed this to her parents, her father egged her on like a zealot, and her mother was just glad to see her daughter get out of the house again. One night after a training session since her return to the club, she waits until she’s relatively alone in the locker room and finds a scale. Glancing around to make sure nobody’s around to watch, she quickly steps on. She fidgets as she waits for the flickering digits to freeze on a final result, then steps off in a hurry. Her backside jiggles gently. She feels it like a quiet murmur. That feeling was not muscle. The scale reads 138 lbs, blaring the number at her eyes before resetting. So she’s five pounds lighter already, since getting her feet back out on the grass. When she weighed herself a month ago, she’d come in at a startling 143 lbs, which itself was eight pounds heavier than the year before, when she’d conducted her little experiment in becoming a bed-potato. Back then, before any of these silly weight-adjustments, her medical weight had reliably circled around 135 lbs, and nothing resembling a bump in her belly was there to be seen. But none of that this year. It’s a new era. Call it experience, or call it growth – either way it has been much easier to balance the dualistic, sometimes tripartite nature, of her duties. University study has settled into its designated spot between training sessions, and vice-a-versa. If she has to defer a game now and then to kill off an assignment, no bad blood is ever spilled over it, because she shows up the next week. The club knows she’s here for good this time. One morning, close to the end of her studies, she is out in the kitchen munching down the last of her breakfast toast when all of a sudden she picks her phone up from the bench to make a call. She’s still hungry as she lifts the phone to her ear, and something is fizzing with warmth at the bottom of her gizzards, pleading for more. ‘Hey coach,’ she trills, pressing the phone to her shoulder with her ear as she places a teflon pan upon the stovetop and fills it with more oil than she intended. ‘Matilda?’ comes Kendra McIvor, her coach, over the phone line. ‘Kendra! Yeah, hi! It’s me. Uh—’ She drops her shoulder to catch a carton of eggs before it slips out of her hand. ‘Just calling to say I’ve got some study stuff coming up, so I have to give next week’s game a miss.’ ‘Oh… well–’ ‘I thought I’d be responsible and let you know ahead.’ ‘Okay. Thanks, Tild’. Only–’ ‘I’m sorry that I can’t do it,’ cutting Kendra off with a nervous laugh that she tries to pass off as care-free. She cracks eggs into the pan. ‘I just–’ ‘Oh, no, no! It’s no problem! Stacy can fill in; she got plenty of practice last year, so she’ll be a good in, no worries. Look, Tild’, don’t worry about it. You’ve been a champ thus far, truly. It’s been really wonderful to have you back.’ A brief pause severs the conversation in two as the implication lingers. Matilda blinks, feeling the need to explain herself over the debacle of last year’s slackness, but after a moment’s hesitation, she decides there’s no need. ‘Alright,’ she verbally nods. ‘I promise I’ll be there next week.’ Just then, her mother walks past outside the kitchen entrance on her way out to work, and Matilda smiles goodbye to her with a silent blown-kiss. ‘Thanks, then,’ she returns to Kendra, taking milk from the fridge and pouring a small dose into the pan. Pausing at a second thought, she pours in another two doses, her actions whipped by a terrible hunger. ‘I’ll be there for most of the games after, I really wanna promise that.’ ‘I’m sure you will be. Thanks, Tild.’ ‘Good luck with the game.’ ‘Thanks, Tild. Good luck with your study. See ya later then.’ Sliding her phone back onto the kitchen bench, she returns to preparing scrambled eggs and drifts away into a realm of guilt-tinted rumination. Funny, when she thinks about last year; she thinks back on all those nights spent snacking in the warmth of her bed. Just at that moment, her stomach goes hollow with a cold pang of doubled hunger, reverberating like a cannon shot. Or is it a blast of shame that she’s feeling? She never used to have this problem of distinction. It used to be clear. This is anything but. A snack-shaped craving sits inside her like an unoccupied plot of land, giving off an irritated rumble from the depths of its earthen core. ‘Shut up,’ she mentally hisses at her tummy, ‘wait your turn.’ Things might have been okay, if it had waited. But alas, by the time she’s finished her second round of breakfast at her desk in her room, something comes unstuck in her belly once again, and before long, she’s cast herself to the gusts of oblivious whim and overdone it on various snacks from the pantry, which had only just been restocked two nights ago. Presently she scoots back in her chair with hot cheeks and scans lethargically either side of her on the surface of the desk, taking drowsy note of all the empty packets and half-finished boxes of crackers lying open like massacred prey. ‘Oh, fuck me for fuck’s sake,’ she mumbles, ‘what’d I just do?’ Already aware that she wants to pretend that she doesn’t know, she nevertheless lifts her shirt up to look down at what she already knows is there. Her tummy is only vaguely soft with its distension. Ever since it’s been regularly exercised again, an imprint of abdominal muscles have resurfaced in two delicate, elegant strips, but… somewhere in the last hour or so, they've been forced to bend outwards, and… there’s something else that isn’t right. She peers closer, squinting gently. She could swear they’ve actually taken on a softness along with the distension. She touches her bloated stomach, letting her hand glide over her skin, feeling its smoothness through her sensory awareness. She wonders how much of all the food inside her will be digested to make its return as softened flesh. For a moment, her heart rate surges. Then it quietens back down again once her train of thought lands upon a realisation. It doesn’t matter, really. Whatever manages to come back as an “inch to pinch” as they say, well it won’t last long by the time she’s back at training on the weekend. And that’s the whole point, after all. Isn’t it? To reap the benefits? To just train harder and reverse the consequences? She can undo whatever damage she does – and that’s how she’s lucky enough to possess the occasional licence to actually enjoy herself. With a nervous blink and a short sniff, she covers her belly with her shirt and lowers her head over her study notes, trying to shift her train of thought and transplant it onto academic tracks. You can get fat for the weirdest reasons. That’s what Jen had told her, years ago. But it doesn’t really matter. Matilda knows she’ll never get fat. . . .