Ftrain, by Paul Ford

The bus leaves the city. It is dark. We turn down long roads. It is impossible to know where we are. Someone asks the guards when the ride will be over.

"Sit down and shut up, fat-ass," says a guard, her nose sharp, her hair tied back. The interlocutor does sit down. He is at least five times her size, but—well, you'd have to be called fat-ass your whole life to understand.

A little later the small cluster of children, seated up front, are nervous and laughing. I overhear one of them, an eight-year-old porker, asking the guard if we can stop at Arby's because they once took a bus trip and stopped at an Arby's.

"There'll be Arby's at the camp," says the guard, smiling as she fingering her truncheon.

"There's one there?" asks the child, deeply hopeful. His cherub-face looking up. "Really?"

The guards all laugh; I overhear one of them say "butterball."

I notice then that the children have become quiet. I notice that all of us have. The appearance of naked cruelty quiets us. It tells us what we're in for. Fifty fat people stuffed suddenly desperate to flee, shrinking--oh, irony--into our oversized sweatshirts and loose blouses.

Arrival. Another logjam in the narrow bus aisle.

The barbed wire is a bad sign, as are the dogs. "Hunger is Freedom" says the large metal sign above the gate. It is a surprisingly, mockingly narrow gate. Some of us have to turn sideways to walk through it.

A slend, a very slend, with a tiny computer asks my name, and checks me off another list.

"What are you waist-size?"

"Um," I say. It's privileged information. I don't like to say it out loud.

"Just tell her," hisses the woman behind me.

So I do, ashamed, and for a moment I think the number is just that, insignificant, but then I see the woman with the computer shake her head in disgust.

"Camp five," she said. "150 pounds. 800 calories." That can't be good, I thought.

"Jesus Christ, when do we eat?" asks a tall man to my right.

"That's a good question," someone else says. I turn to see the speaker and as I turn I see her face--she is a short Mexican woman with long gray hair--split open by one of the guards' truncheons. A flash of pain and confusion, a murmur of fear from the crowd.

"Everyone listen to me," said the guard--herself not exactly thin. "You're on a diet starting now."

As I suspected, no Arby's.

It was guards like those that we learned to fear the most--the guards who packed it on, the ones with the love handles, who couldn't avoid treats. They were the harshest with the punishments, the most likely to snap you to the ground or simply to punch you in the stomach and lecture you on willpower. It is those that, if I am ever freed from this place, that I will spend my life hunting; and I will force-feed them deviled ham before placing a bullet into their smooth, smooth temples.

But for now I am very hungry.

(Cont'd later)

Weight: 313 lbs