The dining room chandelier glistened handsomely above the immaculately prepared table spread, steaming and filling the house with its smoky aroma. Roberta had really pulled out all the stops on this meal. She’d cooked for half the afternoon, readying the roast, potatoes, vegetables, and even splurging on a middle-shelf bottle of red wine. Ordinarily, the woman didn’t see a need to introduce alcohol to her diet when she already was in need of shedding a few pounds, but today she was in the mood to make merry.

            After all, Kyle’s rebellious spirit had noticeably quelled in the three days since she bathed him. He’d carried out his chores obediently and to the letter. No remarks were made, even when Roberta invented a reason to insert him back between her breasts, just as a litmus test of his loyalty. He’d fought a lip-quivering grimace but ultimately surrendered to the jostling bumper-cars trip of his mother’s tits. At last satisfied that her son had made some personal advancement, as well as personally satisfied in a couple of other ways, Roberta decided some relief was needed for both of them. So, allowing bygones to be bygones, she informed her son that they’d be having a faux-dinner date at home.

            “Why?” he demanded with a minimum of insulting snark.

            “Because your entire generation collectively forgot how to treat a girl right on a date. Now it’s all about hook-up culture and “swiping” this way or that. Well, not you, young man. You’re going to learn a little something about courtship.”

            “Yeah, but… with you?”
            “Who else but the woman who knows you best, inside and out?” Roberta fired back with her prettiest smile. “No argument here. This is going to be a little privilege for you, hon. I’m even paying for the food. You won’t find a better deal than that anywhere in town. Now what do you say?”

            Kyle waylaid his counter-points. Though cripplingly awkward, a bizarre mock-up date with his own mother would still beat the alternate prospect of spending the same meal sandwiched between the chair cushion and her puffy rear end. Probably all the while treated to a steady flow of escaped, musky flatulence. After all, there were multiple dairy and bean-based products incorporated into the supper cornucopia. Roberta wouldn’t even notice the silent chemical warfare below, but Kyle most certainly would, and he didn’t suppose his stomach nor his soul could withstand another extended time in solitary confinement beneath Roberta’s world-breaking posterior.

            “Sure, Mom, sure,” he wheezed. “Show me how to date.”

            The mismatched couple took their places at the mahogany dining table beneath the sworled light fixture, courtesy of Roberta. She, draped in a luxurious crimson-velvet dress which would’ve been outside her comfort zone even a year ago, cradled her son to her bosom on the approach, then eased him into the doll chair atop the tablecloth. Allowing herself a lingering glance at her svelte little boy with his muscle-fit suit coat and forcibly combed hair, Roberta clasped her hands in gleeful anticipation of the forthcoming improvised private social function.

            Curiously, Kyle found his assigned seat wasn’t anywhere near the opposite end of the table from his mother, as might be in the case with an actual date, but in fact situated amongst the serving trays. She encircled his table with waist-high trays and pans, fencing Kyle in the very heart of the buffet. Like an item on the menu. Which, incidentally, was exactly how she looked upon him now.

            “Bon apetit, dear,” Roberta said; a wink and a sultry blown kiss followed. She speared a gravy-dripping hunk of meat from the nearest dish and hoisted it into her own plate. Sawing through the corner, then, the woman placed a small triangle of meat-flavored gristle in front of her diminutive child.

            Kyle grimaced at the fatty, sour little chunk his mother evidently expected him to eat. Globs of creamed corn and potatoes were soon plopped down on his coin-sized plate as well, but the boy had already lost his appetite to the ether. Instead of force-feeding, he moved food around his plate to create the illusion of compliance. In the meanwhile he witnessed his six-foot-two behemoth parent sink back into her chair and dig greedily into the steaming spoils of her work.

            Roberta had a habit of never chewing with her mouth closed. Her teeth gnashed ravenously, mulching the damp feast into a beige pulp over her tongue. Saliva visibly unspooled amongst the masticated mess, slurped back up before it could exit her lips. Clumps of food were alternated liberally with sips of maroon wine to wash it all down.

            Ordinarily it merely annoyed Kyle to see and hear this character flaw of Roberta’s, but in times past he had the capacity to lean further away in his chair and simply ignore the popping of her lips. Tonight, however, the giant woman had made the spectacle of her feeding into an inescapable show for her son. Even looking down couldn’t save him. She’d placed Kyle such that he had nowhere else to look but upon that towering, rounded torso with her sagging breasts and the inflated bulge of her growling stomach pressed up against the edge of the table. It seemed just about every part of the woman and her plump form was in motion at any given instant, either digesting or savoring the rapid intake of treats.

            “I’m so glad you agreed to give this a try,” Roberta explained with food still hanging from her teeth. She twirled the fork tines gently against the lower pillow of her lip. “You make a fine dinner date, Kyle. I’m impressed so far.”

            “Uh-huh.”

            “What do we say?”

            “Thanks, Mom.”

            “That’s my boy.”

            The remainder of the dinner followed in interminable yet mercifully stunted silence. Occasionally Roberta brought up a new subject and Kyle parried with just enough conversation to keep her from glowering. Luckily, after the woman had drained most of the wine bottle on her own, chit-chat became easier to deflect. What little discussion made it through the loose filter seemed to sate her, judging by her increasingly loopy smile.

            In total, the boy only partook of two corn kernels over the course of the meal; the continuous monument of his mother loudly and wetly mashing two and a half servings of every item into her gullet was simply too much for his already grossly limited hunger to withstand.

            Normally Kyle was content to view his mother on the periphery of his consciousness: just an irritating yet bearable obstacle in the way of living the way he wanted to. She wasn’t exactly attractive or interesting, but she knew how to stay out of his way when he still stood tall enough to declare he was headed out for the night. Now, though, when by design he had nothing but Roberta’s ample corpus and her grubby fingertips to look forward to, the woman actively disgusted Kyle. In fact, she made him want to peel his skin away wherever she touched him. Tonight, he’d been brought to the brink of nausea merely by existing in her aura.

            “That was simply lovely, Kyle. I really mean it. Thank you,” Roberta said, her words a little slower and more musical than when the meal commenced. Grasping the neck of the wine bottle in her fingers, for an instant she appeared to consider taking a swig directly from the source, before she set it hard back down on the table. The woman shakily brushed her frizzy locks over one shoulder.

            “You’re welcome,” Kyle muttered at the minimum level of acceptable politeness. He wandered between the remaining food trays, his hands in his tiny suit pockets. All the while he felt his mother’s wide, eyes boring down on him. “Can… I just go to bed now, Mom?”

            Roberta blinked. Her thumb rolled over the pink cusps of her lips and drummed on her chin. Her cheeks, rosy from the wine, puffed into a warm smile.

            “I suppose it is getting late, isn’t it? Maybe it’s for the best to just call it a day.”

            “Y-Yeah.”

            “C’mon, dear. Let’s at least get you into some pajamas before we tuck you in.”
            Dismayed to hear he wouldn’t be changing in privacy, Kyle shrugged off his mother’s words. At this point, he was willing to weather a little embarrassment if it meant this night could just end.

            He held his arms out wide in anticipation of Roberta’s fingers closing around his frame. When they did so, he noted the sticky residue on the tips from where his mother had so callously licked her fingers mid-dinner, plus a skin-deep lubricant of alcohol-influenced clamminess painted along her palm. By the combination of his double-layered dress clothes and her flushed skin, he was in for an uncomfortably warm ride. Shivering, Kyle was glad he’d only be trapped in her fist for the minute it took to reach the dresser in her bedroom. He’d need at least two showers to wash away the mealy aroma, and maybe a third to swish out his brain of the image of Roberta’s open chomping jaws.

            Roberta made the trip with surprising speed and precision considering the amount of wine she’d imbibed; she even took the stairs gently enough that Kyle was spared the whiplash. However, disappointment evidently came in pairs, at least. Upon entering the bedroom, mother and son did not make their way for the drawer where the shrunken boy’s reduced wardrobe waited, but instead halted near the foot of the bed. The woman’s knees wobbled, and by counter-balance, Roberta let herself melt directly into the mattress. Kyle did his best to lean his head away from his mother’s damp fingers, but there was nothing he could do about his limbs entrapped and numbed by the coiled digits below.

            For a minute, Kyle considered the possibility of wriggling free from her closed hand and leaving his wine-buzzed mother in the sheets while he clambered down the wooden posts to freedom. However, after a preliminary attempt at struggling, the boy realized he was clenched too powerfully into his parent’s fist. She had him. Every part.