An obese woman in a threadbare dress sits on a vinyl green chair, the kind of chair that is usually seen in a diner, the kind of diner that no one wants to be seen eating in. The rust-encrusted legs of the chair strain under her enormous weight. The obese woman's unwashed flowered dress is hiked above her knees; her knees are red and scared and dimpled with fatty flesh. Her meat-hook hands are pressed into her knees as though the bottom half of her has no choice but to lift up the top. She wears no bra and no deodorant. She no longer shaves and has forgotten where her hairbrush lives. The fat woman's name is Billy Rex, named after her father and her childhood dog, in which order we are not sure.
Surrounding obese Billy Rex is a stack of magazines, numerous cartons of half-eaten food, two warm containers of diet soda and a dog-eared and stained photo of a girl in a baby swing wearing a pink dress and smiling for the camera. There is no other trace of a smile in the house of Billy Rex Peevis.
On the floor to obese Billy's right sits a dog. The dog is white and brown with spots of black and is her most faithful companion. She reaches down and with the asthmatic wheeze of an ancient hanging bellows, pets the dog on the head. "Good boy," she exhales as motes float around the pair. The silent dog does not acknowledge his master's hand, for he is stuffed and covered in dust and has been for a long time. Chicken, the dog, met his maker one day in late June almost a dozen years prior when almost totally obese Billy sat on the couch in the trailer on Snowberry Street with such a huff and a puff that she sat on the dog and killed him. At first, she thought she'd sat on a pillow or a box of Twinkies. But later she realized she sat on Chicken. Obese Billy could not bear to part with his presence, so she stuffed him herself with newspaper and propped him up in a sitting position with his head always quizzically tilted with a sideways smile, staring at the master who suffocated him.
The air in the trailer was as hot as the cheese-induced farts out of obese Billy's ass, made hotter still by the broken fan, the shredded blind that did little to hide the noonday sun and the mass of flesh that covered her skeleton. She filled the single-wide trailer like a cat in a litter box, perched to pee, nearly wall to wall on all sides. It also happens to be true that Billy Rex once pissed in the middle of the living room because she didn't have the energy to go the fifteen paces down the hall to where the real bathroom sits.
Sitting is almost all that she can do. She lifts her right ass cheek and hears the separation of flesh from plastic; a wet smacking noise drifts through the trailer. She is preparing to stand. Viewed from the outside, if gifted with the remarkable sense to be able to detect such a thing, one might see the trailer shift slightly from side to side as obese Billy makes her way to the kitchen. The linoleum strains under the mammoth calves, and German beer steins shake on the shelves with her every weighty step.
She shares her boxed food with roaches and mice. Sometimes, they dare her to reach into the box before they depart out of the hole from which they emerged. Her gray black fingers reach into whichever box they find first and bring crumbs to her gums, for her teeth have long ago been discarded. No one told obese Billy that, eventually, her gums would recede, causing her false teeth to be rendered not only false but irrelevant. Maybe Chicken found them before she killed him; maybe he chewed the teeth of the hand that fed him and the ass that felled him. We may never know.