Over the fence
  It was a chill October afternoon, just a few days before Halloween.
 The local boys played ball under a sky streaked with fading sunlight, the crisp air carrying hints of wood smoke and fallen leaves. The cold bit at their fingers, but fun drowned out the discomfort—until someone kicked Jake’s new ball just a little too hard.
 The colorful sphere arced over the fence with mocking finality, landing in the tangled weeds of Mrs. Hesper’s backyard.
 Silence fell.
 At 18, Jake was the oldest in the group—broad-shouldered, stubborn—the designated myth-buster whenever dares arose. But this wasn’t a dare. This was her yard.
 “Just leave it,” Marcus warned, his voice thin. “That old witch’ll turn you into mulch.”
 Jake scoffed. “She’s a grandma in pajamas, not a demon.” He vaulted the fence, muscles tensing as he landed in the overgrown hellscape of Mrs. Hesper’s domain.
 The air reeked of decay. His ball, bright and defiant, rested against a rotted tree stump. He bent to grab it—
 A shadow swallowed the light.
 “Do you know,” creaked a voice, “what I do with trespassers?”
 Jake straightened.
 Mrs. Hesper loomed over him, a grotesque silhouette. Her neck was a sagging column of flesh, wobbling with each breath, crowned by a double chin that spilled over her collarbone. She wore only threadbare shorts and a bra, her stomach a monstrous, pendulous mass that hung to her knees, veined and quivering. Milky eyes gleamed with hunger.
 “Yeah, I’ve heard the stories,” Jake lied, backing up. “They’re bullshit.”
 She snatched the ball, jowls trembling as she grinned. “Want it back, big boy?”
 Before he could react, her jaw unhinged with a wet crack. She shoved the ball into her maw, throat bulging obscenely as she gulped it down. The lump slid into her gut, which sloshed and expanded, pressing against Jake’s chest.
 “Go on,” she purred, patting the bloated mound. It gurgled, liquid churning like a swamp. “Fetch.”
 Jake turned to run but tripped over a bed of thorned vines in his panic. Mrs. Hesper lurched forward, bulk swaying, neck flesh wobbling. Her hands—doughy, yet inhumanly strong—clamped around his biceps.
 Her jaw widened again. Impossibly. A black, slimy pit ringed with jagged teeth.
 Jake screamed as she yanked him in, his cry cut short by a wet, guttural gulp.
 Her throat pulsed, stretching to accommodate his broad frame. His body bulged grotesquely against her skin, sluggishly sinking down her gullet. His shape—arms, head, shoulders—briefly distorted her throat before slipping past her chest, vanishing into the depths of her gut. Her belly surged outward, round and taut, as he disappeared inside.
 For three days, her house shuddered.
 Mrs. Hesper’s body ballooned. What was once a sagging belly swelled into a grotesque, sloshing mass, gurgling and churning as it worked through 180 pounds of struggling teen. Her neck thickened, her double chin cascading into rippling folds of fat. She had gained 300 pounds—her body a monument to gluttony—and she relished it.
 “Ssssuch a good meal,” she slurred, heaving herself down the hallway, her belly scraping the floor. Jake’s form writhed under her skin, fists and knees pressing faint shapes against the bloat before the acids claimed him. She moaned, massaging the mess within, neck rolls flushed red with effort.
 “Almost… almost…”
 By the third day, her gut hung low, hot and veined, a liquid-filled boulder. She collapsed into an armchair, sweat dripping down her chins, and watched her stomach undulate. Jake’s struggles had ceased, replaced by the wet glorp of melting flesh. She giggled, high and girlish, as her gut gurgled a requiem.
 “So… full,” she gasped, though her hunger wasn’t sated.
 It was Sated.
 On the fourth day, Mrs. Hesper waddled to her front yard, belly swaying, now a permanent fixture of her body, sloshing with the remains of a dozen victims. Her neck had thickened into a trunk of fat, her chins layered like a melting candle. With a grunt, she stabbed a fresh skull onto a spike in her garden—Jake’s, picked clean and grinning—beside a collection of others.
 Inside, her belly growled.
 A baseball rolled into her yard, followed by laughter.
 She turned, jowls quivering with anticipation.
 Hunger, after all, was forever.