Obese isn’t the right word. Gargantuan? Something to explain the growing enormity of the poor fellow in unit 112 who’d become, at once, more repulsive yet more intriguing. Obese was last season, perhaps, for our neighbor had ascended to the next echelon. The rock n’ roll t-shirts he preferred—with their images of skulls, fire, and vice—had once shrouded his burgeoning bulk like a circus tent, but now barely contained his expanding mass. In the courtyard people referred to him by his nickname “Tiny.” So we all were in for a surprise when Roberta De Something-or-Other, a voluptuous young lady from the 220s (Mary had heard she was a dancer, and we guessed it wasn’t in The Nutcracker Suite), started banging down doors. She called on us to tune our sets to channel seven. What a shock to discover the fellow from 112—the one who displaced half the water in the complex pool when jumping in, who cast shadows the size of bakery trucks along stucco walls—was right there on the tube, a close-up of him as he gorged one hamburger after another. Sparkling beads of sweat slid down his massive jowls, and his close-set eyes squinted from camera lights (and likely a Guinness Record of indigestion). A graphic appeared on the screen indicating WINNER! and confetti fell from the rafters onto the stage where not-so Tiny sat at a table with a stained, colossal bib the size of a bed sheet covering his chest and belly. Hoots and hollers sounded through the open windows and doors of our apartment neighbors—one of us was now a “celebrity.” I turned to Mary (born and raised in Auckland, moved from Kiwi Land in her twenties) and noticed a grim look of despair, curdled lips framing her diminutive mouth. I said, “Only in America,” to which she solemnly nodded. Soon credits scrolled over the commotion on stage, the camera pulled back and panned, the host waved and blew kisses, and our neighbor from 112 closed his eyes and expelled a turbo-charged burp. People in the complex (including Mary and I) made a dash for the courtyard. We exchanged tales about our apartment superstar. “I read him one of my poems once…” said a sunken-eyed woman I’d always pegged as a junkie, “trying to connect.” “Saw him hovering around my patio whenever I barbecued ribs,” said the guy (Gerry? Gary? Larry? Harry?) from a few doors down, “like a stray dog seeking scraps.” But there was quite a hiccup in the conversation when Roberta, the purported dancer, confessed that, to thank Tiny for volunteering “out of the blue” to help fix her car headlight, she’d had sex with him. “On top, like riding on a waterbed.” After that revelation everyone disbanded back to their respective units, although we guessed there’d be more hoopla upon our super-sized neighbor’s return, a few days perhaps before everyone would forget about the kitsch we’d witnessed on channel seven and everything would return to normal.
Roland Goity lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he writes in the shadows of planes coming and going from SFO. His stories appear in many fine publications, including Fiction International, Talking River, Raleigh Review, Eclectica, the MacGuffin, PANK, Bryant Literary Review, and Word Riot. He edits WIPs: Works (of Fiction) in Progress (www.wipsjournal.com)
–Art by Denis Olivier