The stewardess was blonde, skinny and bored, and so was Huysmans. (Well, the last one anyway.) "Please put up your tray tables in preparation for landing in Snerdsk, capitol of great nation of Schmertzylvania," she droned. Then she turned her face toward Huysmans with the crack of a secret policeman's baton during an interrogation. "Use of mustache wax not allowed during final 15 minutes of flight," she said firmly.

Huysmans put away his small jar and slumped in his chair. Schmertzylvanian hospitality, once the envy from the Volga to the Bosphorus, had declined into sullenness during the long, tedious reign of First Citizen Klodna. But there was one local tradition that even Klodna's pleasure-killing regime could not extinguish, and that had roared back since his accidental heart attack/falling off a balcony/being run over by a tank in '91. The legendary bathhouses of Snerdsk, or, as they were known to the secret underworld of devotees of plumper women, the Fathouses.

Huysmans, world-famous author of what the West called BBW erotica, thought back on the many and formative experiences he had had as a young man in the Fathouses— a reverie of vast shaking bosoms, thunderous thighs, and grunting, sweating masseuses in thin white blouses. But just as he was recalling a particularly steamy moment in the sauna a few weeks before he defected as a teenager, he was jerked back to fluorescent-lit reality by a voice at his side. It was the absurdly fit, black-glasses-wearing American businessman seated next to him, who had pretended not to recognize Huysmans (despite his having made the rounds of all the talk shows upon the release of the recent sequel to the movie made from one of his stories, The Sapphic Pirate Miranda 2: Between the Mounds of Hell).

"Pardon me," he said nervously. "Aren't you ... that Huysmans guy who writes about..."

"Beeg byootiful vimmin," Huysmans interjected.

The American ducked his head down as if he had said something shameful. As if anyone could not guess why he would be traveling to Schmertzylvania! "So ... is it true what they say about the ... er, bathhouses?"

And suddenly, Huysmans had his inspiration for a story.

The American walked down the cobblestone street as a dusk sky rapidly soaked up the spilled India ink of night. The cheap plexiglass sign announcing "HYTL NPRYMKCHK"— Hotel Nepomuk—was a blemish on the much older stone building behind it, all orientalist curves and filigree. The place he was going was not a hotel, and it certainly had nothing to do with St. John of Nepomuk, whose eponymous cathedral had sat at the end of the street until Klodna, with the Bolshevist's sure sense of what would appeal to the tourist trade, had demolished it for the largest hay storage facility in Europe. Nevertheless, it was famous for what happened inside, however much that would have made the good Czech saint blush.

He opened the door and bare bulbs blazed inside, reflecting off the greenish tile; whatever discretion one had shown creeping down this street in the dark was lost in the flashbulb glare of the entryway, illuminating your desires to the world. A sullen woman whose skin reflected the green of the tiles looked up at him, barely. He started to speak in simplified English, but she rolled her eyes toward the sign on the wall in equally brusque Schmertzylvanian, German, Spanish, English, Russian and Japanese. The American surveyed the choices, could make little sense out of them, but reasoned that the highest-priced one must contain everything one could want, and still only came to about $19 American. He pointed to it, and pulled out a sheaf of bills the color of pickled cabbage. Once he had paid he stood there, waiting, while the woman ignored him as if he had ceased corporeal existence at that instant.

Suddenly a wooden door swung open with the sound of a cat being stepped on, and there was another woman, more buxom and with brisk efficiency set in her square jaw and narrow eyes. She held a towel and a cheap cotton cloth, and behind her billowed a briny cloud of steam and chlorine, making her look like a demon trailing brimstone. She nodded toward the hallway behind her and then turned as precisely as if there were a spindle running up her backside, clomping down a stone passage lined with tiles plainly older and grander than the rather grim entryway had boasted.

The American followed as she turned and then arrived at a hallway of rooms. She pointed, once, to a tiny changing room with a locker in it, and then once more, to a massage room with a wooden table, which smelled vaguely of medicine. Then she handed him his towel and cloth, and waited until he shut the door, and changed.

If he thought his gym-trained American physique would at last excite some flicker of femininity in his guide as he emerged, he was mistaken. She stood before the massage table as expressionless as if she were waiting for a customer to fall from the sky. But at least one thing had changed: she had taken off her outer labcoat, revealing a thin white blouse and the husky, flushed arms that sprouted from it. In the center, though the neckline was demure, he could see the beginnings of a capacious bosom, likewise flushed and freckled in the middle.

He lay, face down, on the table; the cloth managed the remarkable feat of being both paper-thin and scratchy. A second later brusque hands took hold of him and began to knead his back like pretzel dough, making shapes of it he fully expected to prove permanent. It was painful and yet rejuvenating, as toxins and endorphins seemed to be extruded with every press of her hands.

Gradually, she worked to a finer grind, and as she did she leaned in closer to him, her beefy breasts rubbing against his back, the warmth of her exertions enveloping him. His cock, pressed against the table, began to stiffen. She moved around and leaned over his head, her belly resting against him, her mound riding the table as she scooped the muscles of his lower spine and then began twisting and manipulating his muscular buttocks. He had only a view of one thigh and the beginnings of the triangle next to it, but watching it flex and jiggle with her exercises made him eager for the moment when, no doubt, she would flip him over and zero in on the erection ill-concealed by the thin cloth and bring him to a happy ending.

He thought back on the things he had read about Schmertzylvania and how it had come to this unique position as the capitol of buxom female sexuality. It went back to the 1870s, when the famous and decidedly rotund madam Slubenka led an uprising with pirates against the priestly tyrant Father Goruvnik, who ruled in the name of the weakling Dimitor II. Slaughtering Goruvnik and forcing Dimitor into exile, Slubenka threw her support behind his dissipated cousin Wolodmir, inaugurating not only a Schmertzylvanian golden age (usually referred to as The Era of Adequate Heating) but a unique notion of plus-sized female sexuality as the font of society's prosperity.

Thin women lived lives of ordinary morality. But those who reached a certain bulk and abundance were indulged in every sort of license, including as habitues of the bathhouses, where it was common for them to pop in on their way home from work, even in the Klodna era, and enjoy an hour or two of unbridled lust and debauchery before returning to their drunken husbands in their drafty flats-- assuming that their husbands had not, themselves, visited the bathhouses that night.

She stood back and tapped him smartly on the shoulder. He looked up, taking an extra moment to savor what was before him-- the thin white blouse clinging to the massive breasts with the sweat and steam of the room, the pale flesh flushed on the cheeks, the arms, under the neck; the thick round thighs coming together in the triangle he imagined himself teasing open with a persistent tongue. He lingered just a moment with these thoughts and then rolled over, his cock unfolding to push the cloth up in a gesture of unmistakable meaning. He lay back, and waited for her touch.

"Hhhkhh-hhmm," she coughed, and he looked up. She gestured, equally unmistakably, toward the door.

He looked at her, puzzled, imploring; he got back all the sympathy of a codfish. There was no question that she was finished, that she planned to touch his cock about as much as she planned to burst out in a chorus of the Schmertzylvanian national anthem, "'Twixt Mighty Peaks and Fishy Caverns." Hurt, confused, feeling ripped off (even if $19 was a fraction of what a massage like that would cost in the West), he slid off the table and started to slink to the changing room opposite.