A Round Peg, Chapter 1 (Patreon)

CHAPTER 1: THE DONUT HOLE

Peg fiddled with the key in the lock, the lock was weathered, rusted. This was going to be a short first day of work if she couldn’t even open the gate. 

At last she made it through the grime and crud and popped off the old padlock. The wheels of the gate squealed in protest as she struggled to lift the gate. She huffed, blushed immediately when she started sweating, “it’s too soon to start sweating” she thought as she pushed her red hair out of her face, “you haven’t even gotten to work yet.”

The gate bounced up finally and she was able to take a step back to catch her breath. 

“There’s always money in The Donut Hole” her grandma always said. But staring at the ancient derelict kiosk in front of her brought to mind a money pit more than a money tree. 

Peg’s grandma Maureen had started The Donut Hole 60 years ago. Peg had asked her years ago what had drawn her to starting a donut business that would go on to last her whole life, but her grandma’s answer was typically pragmatic for her generation, “cake donuts are just flour, egg, sugar and milk, very little overhead, very high profit margins and people still feel like they’re getting a good value, either for 1, a half dozen or a dozen.” 

While her grandmother’s donuts held a nostalgic place in her heart, she’d secretly preferred yeast donuts and would pester her grandmother to expand her business model. “Yeast donuts require a whole infrastructure, temperature control, rising times, they’re fussy, you can’t fit the whole factory into a phone booth” Maureen had a way of shutting down debate. 

“The phone booth.” Peg said to herself as she unlocked the kiosk door. 

The Donut Hole kiosk looked less like its phone booth family nickname and more like an old cinema box office. In fact, she’s pretty sure that’s what it was originally, her grandma had a way of reusing and recycling, she had fond memories of playing with decommissioned merry-go-round horses in her grandma’s back yard. 

By some fluke of the property sales of the 1950’s, Grandma Maureen was able to purchase just a few square feet of city centre property for the kiosk, all wired and plumbed as if it were a real building. Various business and even the city itself had attempted to buy the The Donut Hole property from her but she stood her ground, even after she couldn’t work the kiosk anymore and The Donut Hole closed down. 

Now it belonged to Peg. Well, kinda. Grandma Maureen died over a year ago and the family still didn’t know what to do with The Donut Hole. Selling a few square feet of city centre property was now very complicated, legally, so for the foreseeable future, the family was stuck with it. And Peg, being 33, unemployed and recently moved back home, had been not-so-subtly encouraged to reopen The Donut Hole. While they framed overseeing The Donut Hole like she was taking one for the team, Peg suspected they were trying to busy her after more than a year of unemployed inertia. 

The only food service job she’d ever had was working for her grandma at The Donut Hole in high school and college so it’s not that Peg had any special aptitude or fondness for the food service industry. Though it was quite apparent that she had a special fondness for food. 

In the years since she’d last set foot in The Donut Hole, Peg had blossomed from a shy college girl teetering on the precipice of chubbiness to a bold fat woman, doing her best to remain body positive while still apprehensive of the fact that the dial on her scale was forever swinging upwards. 

Her years of studying body positivity and Health at Every Size were being tested by moving home. Everyone’s childhood home feels smaller when you return as an adult, but then again everything actually was smaller because Peg was fatter. She was still the same height she was when she was twelve but now more than double the weight. It was encountering the past, familiar, but smaller, that always made her suddenly very aware in her weight gain. 

Entering The Donut Hole for the first time in twelve years was such an experience. 

Stacks of boxes, old mail and junk piled behind the door and Peg had to throw her shoulder against it to shove it open. Once she cleared the path she was still shocked to find that even with the door wide open it seemed impossibly tiny. She shuffled through the door sideways, the only possible way, very aware of her breasts, belly, thighs, back-fat and butt as they pushed through the narrow frame. 

Once she was in, she was in. She couldn’t find much room to maneuver. her hips and soft upper arms brushed against every surface at her sides and her belly and butt brushed every surface in front and behind. Peg realized she couldn’t even close the kiosk door, because she was in the way! She pressed herself against the opposite wall, scooting her butt onto the counter and sucking in her belly as much as she could to shove the door past and close it. 

It felt unreal, that she’d happily spent entire summers cooped up in such a tiny space. How did she ever fit? That her grandmother AND her grandfather used to stand here together she couldn’t even imagine. They were petite people, born in meager times. Peg was born into an era of plenty. She tried to remind herself that she was also taller than both of them too but feeling tall didn’t diminishing the anxiety she felt at filling up The Donut Hole. 

Every surface was dusty and dirty, and she couldn’t keep her body away from anything. How was she going to get any work done like this? She tried to imagine bending over to get batter, or cleaning the cooker or making change. A thought to give up crossed her mind. “You’re too fat, maybe your cousin Maria will take on The Donut Hole, she likes to cook. She’s thin.” 

She shook away the negative thought and tried to put it through a fat acceptance filter. “This space is very small. You’re a fat woman in a small space, it’s not your fault the phone booth was not made with you in mind, Grandma Maureen would have built it bigger if she’d known, but you’ve been in tight spaces before, you can make this work.”

Peg wondered if this was really her fat acceptance studies talking, or her own stubbornness mixed with the desperation of long term unemployment. Did she really want to squeeze into the phone booth every day? She looked out the filthy windows and up at the cast iron ceiling. Despite the tightness, there was a warm nostalgic feeling being inside The Donut Hole again. The smell of donuts still lingering impossibly after all these years. Her stomach rumbled. She wanted to see it clean and polished again, she wanted to smell (and eat!) fresh donuts, she wanted to make it work.