Butterplump Carnival (Patreon)

[6 word request: traveling carnival makes country boys thicc]

Lyle walked slowly along the dusty carnival road until he got back to his three buddies, George and Wallace. “So,” he said, scratching his head as the four turned to regard the hirsute man swinging a heavy mallet at the target on the “Test Your Strength!” game. He opened his mouth to speak, then fell silent again. George turned away from the ring-toss game he’d failed to win for the past ten minutes to look at Lyle, who kicked at the dirt uncomfortably.

“The fuck is it, Lyle?” George asked. He tossed the ring; it bounced off the bottle he’d been aiming at the. The greasy carnival employee shrugged and spit a mouthful of tobacco-brown goo into his cup. George sneered and turned away.

Wallace scratched his muscular chest, yanking at the collar of his skin-tight t-shirt. “Hot as fuck out here,” he grumbled. “Anyway, did you ask that fucker if he stole Kevin’s hat?” Wallace asked. The grizzly-bear-sized man across the way swung the mallet again, ringing the bell. He puffed up his broad, hairy chest and set the mallet down, grabbing a large stuffed bear as a prize. He adjusted his hat–a black hat with the name, “Kevin,” written in bright red script–and sauntered their way. The big oaf wore nothing but overalls.

“I think it’s actually… Kevin…” Lyle began, taking off his glasses to polish them on his shirt. George and Wallace stared at Lyle, dumbfounded.

“The fuck you mean, ‘It’s Kevin’?” George asked. The tallest of the group, George was dwarfed by the lumbering stranger with Kevin’s hat on by a couple of inches. Kevin, their buddy since all four of them were little kids, had been the smallest of their crew. When the others hit their growth spurts, working all day on their dads’ farms, they blew up into well-built men. Kevin didn’t live on a farm and his mom made him eat mostly vegetables. As his buddies’ bodies blossomed with brawn around him, Kevin had remained short and scrawny. This guy coming their way looked to be three times the size of little Kevin!

“I mean… he recognized me, and his face… kind of looks like Kevin’s…” Lyle said.

The stranger in Kevin’s hat, wearing only a loose set of worn overalls otherwise, approached them, patting his bulging gut. “Hey there, guys!” he said with a smile. “Check out this thing I won! You still losing at that ring toss, George?”

The three men stood, dumbfounded. If they squinted, the large man’s chubby face vaguely resembled Kevin’s, if he’d been fed massive amounts of weight gainer and growth hormone during the past five years.

“Kevin, how the… how the fuck…” George couldn’t complete his sentence. He took a step back, clearly bewildered now that he was no longer the biggest man in the crew. “You weigh like 300 pounds!”

“340,” said “Kevin” as he grabbed his solid keg-belly with both hands. “Although after all that fried dough, I may be closer to 350.” The big brute let out a deep, rumbling fart and wafted the air with his beefy hands.

“Kevin, you…” Wallace began. Eye-level with “Kevin”’s nipple, Wallace approached, clearly squaring up his muscular shoulders and thrusting out his well-developed pecs as he got closer to the enormous man. He used to treat Kevin like he was his scrawny kid brother, but this man towered over him now. “You know you’re not supposed to be like this, right?”

“What do you mean?” Kevin said, looking down at his body with an eyebrow raised. “I look the same as I always have!”

Lyle giggled as he watched the normally overconfident George shrinking back from Kevin. “What’s the matter, George? You afraid Kevin’s gonna take revenge for all the times you pushed him around?”

Kevin let out a hearty laugh. “Whatchoo talkin’ about?” he said. “George wouldn’t dare push me around! He’d have to lift a little harder at the gym and eat a few extra steaks to pull that off.” He gave George a playful shove, but the broad-shouldered man went flying, landing on his back in the dirt.

Wallace and Lyle stared at their fallen friend for several tense seconds. “Uh, do we… call the doctor or something?” Lyle asked.

“Kevin, we gotta figure out how this happened to you!” Wallace said, attempting to give Kevin a shove–but failing miserably, unable to budge him.

“Aw, Wallace, you and those little muscles are so cute…” Kevin reached out and pinched Wallace’s nipple. The shorter bodybuilder twitched away and swatted at Kevin’s big hands. His resistance was barely noticed.

“Quit that!” Wallace said.

George had dragged himself off the ground, still marveling at Kevin’s bulk. “You went to get fried dough… and came back like that?” George said, slowly backing away.

“Where did you get the overalls though?” Lyle asked.

George turned and jogged off toward the carnival’s “Vittles Boulevard.”

“George! Wait up!” Wallace shouted.

“You guys! I wanna go on the ferris wheel!” Kevin said, jumping up and down like an oversized child. “Lyle, come with me? But don’t shake the cart–or I’ll toss you so hard you go into orbit!”

“Jesus, you probably could,” Lyle said, clapping his hands over the meaty side of beef that was Kevin’s arm. “Okay, fine. I’ll take this big galoot on the ferris wheel. You go after George. He’ll probably spend a thousand dollars on fried dough trying to eat his way into being the biggest guy in our crew again.”

“Aw, George is so cute,” Kevin said, shrugging his big shoulders. “Why’s he so intimidated by me? My momma says I’m just part buffalo.”

“Kevin, that means your mom fucked a buffalo,” Lyle said.

“Ha! That’s funny, Lyle. You’re funny as fuck!” Kevin got Lyle in a headlock. With ease, he squeezed Lyle’s head until it was the shade of a plum.

Wallace turned from that ridiculous scene and chased after George. As he jogged through the dusty roads of the carnival, he couldn’t help but notice how many XXXL-sized men there were. He passed by a couple of cowboy-hat wearing farmers who looked big enough to play professional football. Tying balloons outside the house of mirrors was a clown whose tbhick shoulders were almost as broad as he was tall. As he turned onto Vittles Boulevard, he couldn’t help but notice half the men enjoying the deep-fried foods looked like professional powerlifters.

“George, dude,” Wallace said as he caught up to his buddy, who waited in line with laser-focus on the man serving funnel cakes behind the counter. “George, when we got here, you and I were like… bigger than most of the other people at the carnival.”

“I know,” George said. “And now we’re surrounded by all these ogre-sized dudes. It’s gotta be the fair food!”

Behind them, a roller-coaster car hurtled by. Thickly built, bearded men raised arms as thick as Wallace’s legs as the car approached another hill.

“Nobody seems to think anything’s wrong,” Wallace realized aloud. Two men, each around 6’6” tall, got into a playful shoving match. Their barrel-sized bellies squashed into each other as they shoved back and forth with so much force Wallace worried about getting squashed if one of them got the better of the other. “Just all these… massive dudes. It’s gotta be the carnival, right?”

George ordered a dozen funnel cakes when he got to the front of the line, slapping down cash. He rubbed his hands together as the carnival worker doused them in powdered sugar.

“So you want to just… get big like all these guys?” Wallace asked as George handed him a funnel cake. “You really want to be this gigantic?” A nearby man turned, his bulbous buttocks knocking Wallace off his feet. The muscular man went down like a rag doll. The man behind the bump moved on, barely noticing he’d just unmoored a man with his gigantic glutes.

“Bro, we’re like the smallest ones here! I fucking hate it,” George said, chomping into a funnel cake. He pointed at the big ferris wheel, its top half visible above the rows of tents between them. They watched big Kevin and Lyle, squashed into a cart together, rising up the fifty feet to the peak, then dipping down out of sight. “All except Lyle. Remember when people used to call us ‘the Huge Crew’? Kevin used to be the runt. We used to be the biggest guys in town!”

Wallace eyed the funnel cake suspiciously, patting his ripped midsection. “Dude, only you called us that,” he said.

Wallace’s mouth went slack as he noticed the ferris wheel again. Now, crammed into the cart with Kevin was a bespectacled giant bursting out of shredded clothing. The two pointed off at something toward the horizon, giddy as schoolchildren, as their cart stopped at the top.

“Holy shit,” Wallace said as he realized that the man who had to be Lyle was now nearly the same size as big Kevin. The ferris wheel loudly creaked as it turned, every one of its passengers now over 300 pounds. ”George, I don’t think we have to eat the funnel cake to get big!”

He turned to find himself facing a portly man shoving mounds of funnel cake into his mouth. The slovenly man’s clothes looked stretched to their limits. He belched and the seat of his pants shredded down the middle. “Yo, Wallace, why would you think I need to get big?” the sweaty slob said. Even compared to other behemoths at the fair, the man standing where George had been was massive, bloated out with so much flab he looked like he may weigh 500 pounds. “I think I’m pretty big enough,” he said, rubbing his big, jiggling gut as he belched again. “Although I gotta say, even all those funnel cakes didn’t take the edge off my hunger…” He started waddling toward the chili-cheese dog stand.

Wallace had never felt so alone–or small! He felt like an absolute runt now. A passing giant patted him on the head like he was a little kid. He swatted the hand away, furious. He could bench 405 pounds! He could squat a dumptruck!

“Hey! Wallace!” called a deep voice he didn’t recognize. He turned to see Kevin and a mountainous man with Lyle’s glasses approaching. “You’re looking a little underfed!”

A hundred feet away, George had climbed onto a rascal scooter and was driving it from stand to stand, rubbing his aching hips as his belly spilled out in front of him.

“Hey Wallace, bud, there’s a guy in a tent giving out free clothes!” said Kevin. “We got Lyle this sweat vest and some jeans that fit his big dumptruck ass!” Kevin gave Lyle’s ass a slap, resulting in a thunderclap. “You should swing by! I don’t know if they have anything for a petite little dude like you, but…”

Wallace’s gut started to rumble. He grabbed at his abs as he backed away, running into what he thought was a stone wall–but it was just another brick-shithouse-built man, towering over him. “No, I… I don’t wanna be… all… big…” he said, suddenly belching. Kevin and Lyle laughed as Wallace felt all the lean definition of his muscles starting to fill in with flab..