Cake 01 [contemporary fiction]

Title: Cake
Author: Harper Kingsley
Genre: contemporary fiction
Character: Dahlia Quinzant

CAKE 01-

One day, Dahl looked in the mirror and hated what she saw. The person looking back at her did not look like her, the person she was in her head.

She didn’t know when it had happened, but at some point she had stopped taking care of herself. She’d ceased grooming unless she was going somewhere, and her eyebrows had grown bushy and out of control. She could see the shadow of a mustache on her upper lip and there were even hairs bristling from her chin.

But what really got her attention was that somehow she had become fat. Not “pleasantly plump” as she’d always called herself, but unhealthily overweight. She didn’t know how she could have missed it happening, but there it was.

Standing naked with a towel wrapped around her hair, she could not deny what her eyes were showing her: Flabby thighs, and cankles she couldn’t get her hands around. A stomach that bulged out in odd layers that stuck out farther than her breasts. Arms that jiggled and swayed when she held them up. There were even layers of fat encircling her neck, odd rings of flesh that held sweat in their folds when she touched them.

Dahl looked at her face and didn’t like what she saw. Instead of one chin smoothly transitioning back to join with her neck, there were three chins. Her face had grown round and her cheeks seemed almost to press in against her eyes, making them seem small and hidden away.

Dahl looked at herself–really looked at herself–for the first time in two years.

“Shit,” she said.

/END

* * *

“Cake” is a webserial focusing on the life and times of Dahlia “Dahl” Quinzant, a young woman that realizes she has a weight problem and decides to do something about it.

Though she has a negative response on first realizing that she has let her appearance go, there will be no fat-shaming, or if any occurs in the future the characters involved will be made to face the error of their ways (even if it’s just Dahl telling them to STFU).

Segments will be between 200-1000 words on average.