The Videos
by TR

Okay, I confess...I did a awful thing. I didn't know it at the time...no that's not exactly true: I knew it was wrong when I did it. I just didn't realize quite the extent of my wrong-doing.

I have to blame my wife to some degree. Maybe it wasn't her fault that our lovemaking had cooled, but she could have been nicer. And she could have eased up on her dieting. When we got married, she was chubby. I liked her like that, with her nice bouncy breasts, her round ass, her soft little pot-belly...but then she went on a diet, and lost forty pounds. By conventional standards, she looked great, and anyway I still loved her. But she didn't turn me on nearly as much as she had before. So things went downhill.

She didn't do much...she'd work out, come home, clean up the house, and then sit around watching videos all day. She loved watching videos. I'd pick up two or three for her every night after work, and she'd watch them the next day.

"Why do you watch videos so much?" I asked her one day.

She gave me this look.

"Beats reality," she said, turning back to the set.

This infuriated me. Here I was, busting my butt working and supporting her and trying to make her happy every way I knew how...this was the last straw. Then I had an inspiration.

Subliminal advertising.

All I had to do was put little subliminal messages in her videos, telling her to gain weight. An occasional thirtieth-of-a second message in a video isn't noticed consciously, but the subconscious notices--and pays attention. It was easy for me to do--I work at a television studio.

At first I thought I'd put in messages telling her to eat. But I realized it wouldn't do much good--if she just started eating more, she'd get upset with herself and be even more depressed. Or maybe she'd just work out more, and negate any effects.

So I put in messages about how wonderful it is to be fat...that fat women were beautiful and happy, and had great sex all the time. And about how thin women were unhappy.

I put these messages in every video she watched. I also added the capability of adding messages to television shows. I made some minor changes to the remote so I could to it at the press of a button.

At first, nothing seemed to happen--she didn't change her behavior at all. Then one night we were watching a show about fashion models (for once, we weren't watching a video!). I pressed a button that subliminally inserted a picture of concentration camp victims.

"Jesus," said my wife, "they're all so skinny. They'd look better if they put on a few pounds."

It was finally working! I couldn't believe it!

"They're no skinnier than you," I said.

"Really? You know, I wondered about that. Do I look like I've lost weight recently? It kind of seems to me like I have, when I look in the mirror--but according to the scale my weight hasn't changed a bit."

"I don't know. I think you would look better with a few more pounds."

"I wonder..."

So the next day I not only gave her the message that fat women were beautiful, I started giving her messages about food. About how delicious it was to eat all those wonderful things she'd been denying herself--milkshakes, fried chicken, chocolate shakes, doughnuts...

I got home a few the next evening to find her watching a video...and eating. She was curled around a bucket of fried chicken, with a bag of fries, a chocolate milkshake, and a dozen doughnuts within easy reach.

"Gee," I said, "go off your diet?"

She smiled.

"Oh, you have to splurge once and a while..."

She ate until her belly was quite swollen. Then we went to the bedroom and had the best sex we'd had in over a year.

The next morning was Saturday.

"Uh-oh," she said, "my tummy's all flat again."

"I'll take care of that," I said. I took her out for breakfast. She had a ham and cheese omelet, homefries with sour cream, coffee, orange juice and a stack of pancakes.

"Still splurging?" I asked her after she ordered.

She grinned lasciviously.

"Why not?" she asked, "afraid I'll get fat?"

"You know me better than that."

"I sure do..."

From then on, things were wonderful between us. In less than two months she was back up to what she'd weighed when I married her. Her tummy bulged decadently, even when she hadn't eaten anything. Her hips were nice and curvy, her bottom plump and full, and her breasts re-asserted themselves. She'd quit aerobics, complaining that she jiggled too much.

Then she put on still more weight.

"I'm up to a hundred and eighty, " she told me one day, "that's the most I've ever weighed! Do you think I'm too fat?"

"No, you look wonderful."

"Well then...do you think I'm fat enough?"

"Yeah, but a few more pounds would sure be nice."

She smiled, "In that case you better get down to the bakery before they run out of eclairs. I'm hungry."

So I went into town. I _was_ too late...the bakery was sold out of nearly everything.

"Business must be pretty good, " I commented to the girl at the counter.

"It's terrific!" she said, "This last month we've been sold out nearly every day!"

"Must be nice, " I said. It was fun talking with her, she was such a plump, cute little thing.

"Only trouble is, " she said, "Is now I have to buy my own pastries. I used to get the leftovers free." With that, she took a bite of the Napoleon she had hidden behind the counter.

"I'd think you'd get tired of them."

"That's what you'd think. I don't know, lately I've had this great appetite. I must have gained twenty pounds in the past couple of months."

"I wouldn't worry. It looks good on you."

"Really? Funny, I kind of think so too."

_Odd_, I thought, walking out of the bakery, _it's almost as if..._

Just then I saw a chubby woman waddling out of the video store across the street. I recognized her as being one of my neighbors, and recalled she'd been quite slim only a few months before. It hit me: every woman in town has been watching those videos I altered--and they were all getting fat! I'd never bothered to take the subliminal messages off of those videos! It was a small town, so there weren't all that many videos in the rental pool--every woman with a VCR had been getting subliminal messages! And quite possibly, the television inserts back-propagated through the cable network as well.

I got really nervous at that point. I started checking videos out so I could erase the insertions I had made, but that was really hard. I didn't know which videos I'd altered, or where they'd been altered.

And everyone kept gaining weight. Though I'd targeted women, a lot of the messages were gender-neutral, so the men gained some weight too. And of course, even people who didn't watch videos probably ate more than usual, since others had changed their lifestyles to include lots of fattening food.

Also, people's tastes had changed. I cringed one day when I heard a bunch of teenagers taunt a slim teenage girl woman about her weight--"Stickgirl" they called her.

"Stickgirl" was one of the pejorative terms I'd used in my messages.

My wife, of course, having received more subliminal messages than anyone else, had continued to gain weight and was now up to two-hundred-and-twenty pounds. Now she walked with a kind of waddling motion, leaning back to counterbalance her serious potbelly and heavy breasts. Our sex life was better than ever, or would have been if I hadn't been so worried about being caught.

When sixty percent of a town's inhabitants start gaining weight, it's pretty obvious that something's wrong. A group of smart scientists from the Center for Disease Control came and investigated and soon figured out the mystery. Somebody noticed that only people with VCRs had gained weight, found the videos I'd tampered with, and checked the video store's records. My name popped up right away.

And that's why I'm in prison now. I do regret what I've done. But oddly, the people of the town generally aren't angry with me. A lot of them like the extra weight on themselves and their lovers (of course, it's because I conditioned them to like it!) and the nice fattening diet I switched them over to. Some of the thinner, anti-fat people have moved out in disgust, and fat people from out of town have moved in. The place has been kind of a Mecca (or a Castro Street?) for fat people and their admirers.

My wife (now at two-hundred and sixty pounds and counting) has told me she expects I'll receive a hero's welcome when I get out of prison and return to our town.

Hell, maybe I don't regret what I've done!