This story contains male weight gain.)
"Excuse me!" Caleb blurted out as he was pushed away from the mall's sliding door by a group of 20-something women walking out in a pack. They took up nearly the entire width of the door, walking out with their Starbucks drinks and various paper bags hanging outward like floofy dresses. In spite of Caleb’s protestations, they walked right past him, paying him no mind as they continued into the parking lot. Shaking his head side to side, Caleb took the opportunity to slip inside.
This kind of thing was common for the short, slender fellow. With his generic features and insubstantial frame, he was used to being ignored and pushed to the side. It was worst when it happened literally, which was more often than he would have liked to admit.
After he'd moved through the mall's sliding doors, Caleb found himself face-to-face with a man who had at least a foot of height on him, and probably 300 pounds of weight, mostly stored in his imposing belly. The sleeves were ripped off of his denim vest, exposing some impressively bulky arms that made him look like he’d seen just as much time at the gym as the bar. What his face lacked in muscular definition, it made up for with his grumpy expression. "Move it, short stuff." he demanded, pushing Caleb aside like so many strings of beads hanging from a doorway, before he exited the mall.
Caleb stumbled to the side and had to catch himself on the wall. Even based on his experiences, that was egregious. Sure, he'd been called "short stuff" and pushed aside intentionally before, but that was something he expected to happen in high school. Not now, when he was a 28-year-old man with as much right to use the mall as that biker-looking jerk.
As Caleb collected himself and stood up, he noticed a strange contraption at the end of the hallway. In all his time visiting that mall, he'd never noticed it before. Truth be told, he'd never looked down that hallway, as he figured it would just lead to offices and other employee-only areas. But there were no such signs tell him him to keep out, so he wandered down to take a closer look.
The device seemed to be an old-fashioned scale, bronze in color with "Your Weight and a Wish" painted on top. Caleb could faintly make out a second, faded "and a Wish" below the first. Below that was a hand like an analog clock, in front of a circle that displayed numbers going up to 250. Next to that was a coin slot labeled "5¢". To the side, Caleb saw a pile of tiny slips of paper sitting next to the scale, indicating that no one at the mall had paid any attention to the scale for a very long time.
"Five cents, huh? Alright, why not?" Taking out his wallet, Caleb picked out a nickel and dropped it in the machine before stepping on the platform.
As soon as Caleb stepped on the scale, the hand moved away from zero, stopping just short of "125".
"No wonder people push me aside. I wish I had a bigger frame and weren't this scrawny and short. I bet people would move for me then."
As soon as Caleb had finished his sentence, the hand on the scale loudly snapped back to zero, surprising him enough that he stepped off. With a sigh, he muttered to himself, "Being less easily spooked might be a good start."
Caleb turned dejectedly to walk back into the mall, but the sound of gears moving in the scale stopped him. After he heard a bell ring, he looked back and saw a piece of paper shoot out of the scale, before gently falling to land among the others. Curious, he went over and picked it up, expecting his weight to be written on it. He certainly wasn't expecting to read the words, "BIGGER FRAME."
As Caleb looked confusedly at the piece of paper, he was even more surprised to see his sweatshirt stretching out into his view, as if he were leaning back and pushing his stomach out. But he was still standing upright. Dropping the piece of paper in surprise, he looked around and discovered that the impossible was happening: he was growing bigger and wider. Much wider.
