Little Claudia's.pdf
Little Claudia’s
10 a.m.
Claudia hit send on her ingredients order and leaned back in her industrial-strength office chair, drumming her fingers on her round belly. She glanced around the room, eyeing a stack of unassembled pizza boxes in the corner. A local artist had designed the logo using Claudia as a model. A lineart drawing of a woman in a pale green toga, gleefully biting into a slice of pizza dripping with cheese. The woman had plump thighs, full breasts, and her free hand held a belly that swelled even further.
She chuckled at the comparison between her logo and her real self. Rubenesque as Little Claudia’s mascot was, the artist had slimmed her down as much as Claudia would let her. And the art had been made at least two hundred pounds ago. The blissful expression, however, was spot-on.
A soft knock rapped at Claudia’s door, and she cleared an open space on her desk. She still had to update the staff schedules and work on a batch of tax paperwork, but that could wait.
Her real work was about to begin.
“Come in!”
Marie pushed open the door to Claudia’s office. She balanced two large pizzas in her hands. Steaming and glistening with grease, they flooded the small room with a mélange of tomato, garlic, and meat. One Italian sausage, one pepperoni. Marie slid them into the tiered wire rack perched to one side of Claudia’s desk.
Claudia’s stomach burbled with happy anticipation. She grinned up at her employee. “Thank you, Marie.”
Marie returned her smile. “Carlos said he only sold the chicken spinach and meat lover’s from the morning batch, so I’ll be back with the cheese and the veggie supreme.”
As Marie went back to the front of the house, Claudia slid the sausage pizza from the rack on its metal pan. One slice was missing. Carlos’s breakfast, no doubt. Marie’s shift had just started, and she was a vegetarian.
With the first hit of chewy crust, melted cheese, and spicy sausage, Claudia’s taste buds lit up, sending incandescent pleasure through her body. She devoured the slice in five bites and reached for another. By the time Marie returned with two more pies, only a single slice of sausage remained. As expected, the veggie supreme was also missing a slice.
Her mouth filled with seasoned crust, Claudia nodded her thanks. Marie left the office to help Carlos prepare for the lunch rush.
Claudia had opened Little Claudia’s just over a year earlier. With a bit of seed money inherited from a distant aunt, she set out to create a small pizzeria that could stand up to the ceaseless tide of chain restaurants.
The big problem with pizza, in Claudia’s mind, was the wait. With fast food and convenience stores popping up everywhere, a twenty to thirty-minute prep time simply couldn’t compete with instant gratification. While there was a chain—whose name was never spoken in Claudia’s hearing—that offered full pizzas available immediately, their flavor left much to be desired. What Claudia wanted, and therefore her customers must want, were fresh, handmade pies with quality ingredients at a moment’s notice.
The model was simple. Prepare every style of pizza on the menu before the restaurant opens, and keep a rolling supply as they sell. She started with the four most popular pies, adding meat lover’s a few months later, then “chicken, mushroom, and spinach” for her shop’s one-year anniversary. Claudia kept a list of other recipes to add to her Fresh & Now menu, but any new additions had to be carefully considered.
11 a.m.
Marie carried three pizzas into Claudia’s office while Carlos trailed behind her with two more. “Only the meat lover’s sold from the ten batch, boss,” Carlos said.
Claudia nodded, pointing at the veggie supreme in Marie’s hand. The young woman set the indicated pie on Claudia’s desk before stacking the others in the rack. There’d been only three pizzas left over when Marie visited her at ten-thirty, but no slices were missing from these five.
The flaw in Claudia’s business model was, of course, the leftovers. Having excellent pies available at all times didn’t mean there’d always be people to buy them. The longest a pizza could sit under a food lamp was two hours, but the policy at Little Claudia’s was an hour. Any more than that, she thought, and they’d be sacrificing quality, which defeated the entire purpose.
Part of Claudia’s one-hour policy was that any employee could help themselves to any pie once it came off the display counter. It worked well enough at first, but as Claudia rarely scheduled more than two employees in overlapping shifts, the leftovers stacked up faster than they could be eaten. Pizzeria employees, it turned out, lost their appetite for pizza fairly quickly.
It wasn’t an issue Claudia had.
12 p.m.
Four pies were dropped off at Claudia’s desk from the ten a.m. batch, but Marie and Carlos brought eight from the eleven. The cadence increased to two pizzas per round for the lunch rush, but only two pepperoni, one cheese, and one veggie had sold so far.
“Slow day?” Claudia asked, holding a slice of meat lover’s in one hand while she typed with the other.
“It’s starting to pick up a little,” Marie said as she passed through the door, balancing pies on both arms.
Not too much, Claudia hoped.
She loved slow days.
With no one else to eat them and unwilling to consider throwing out precious pizza, the bulk of the leftovers went to Claudia. At first, she struggled to put it all away. She had the extras boxed up and put in the walk-in so she could take them home and graze until she fell asleep.
But as she packed herself with leftover pizza day after day, Claudia’s stomach capacity expanded. The only pizzas she took home now were the ones left uneaten at closing time. She added new recipes to the Fresh & Now menu, her staff made more pizzas during the rushes, and Claudia feasted.
4:05 p.m.
Carlos clocked out after the lunch rush, leaving Marie to handle the afternoon lull. Only two pies came back at twelve-thirty and one, but she’d brought Claudia four or five pizzas every half hour since.
“Is Marcus here yet?” Claudia asked before stuffing half a slice of cheese into her mouth.
Marie nodded. “Just got here.”
Claudia frowned, her gustatory delight only slightly dampened. This was the third time Marcus had been late this month.
“He says their baby is teething,” Marie added.
Claudia waved her off. “No worries. He’s here now.”
After Marie left, Claudia reclined in her creaking chair, savoring her slice and grabbing another. Marcus was a hard worker and the fastest of her cooks. Not for nothing did she put him on the dinner shift so often.
Claudia massaged the upper swell of her belly, feeling the firmness buried under a thick layer of pudge. Goosebumps tingled in the wake of her fingertips as the first echoes of fullness tightened her insides. Even as she filled it with slice after slice, Claudia’s stomach grumbled for more.
Her lips curled into a smile to match her mascot.
The dinner rush was about to start.
Well-meaning friends and family had expressed concerns, of course. Concerns over her rising weight, she could dismiss. As more and more of her wardrobe was donated to thrift stores, Claudia replaced them with loose, flowing caftans. Generously cut dresses that fell comfortably over her widening hips, billowing bosom, and jutting belly like the toga in her logo. Most importantly, they had plenty of room for that belly to swell and grow, over weeks and months, or in the course of a single pizzeria workday.
More troubling, at first, were their financial concerns. They expressed the very reasonable worry that Little Claudia’s wouldn’t be able to stay in business if the eponymous Claudia kept eating up all their product. And while, yes, there were occasional slow days during which Claudia ate more pies than she sold, the pizzeria was popular enough that they stayed comfortably in the black. By offering pizzas every bit as good, and often better, than the big chains, available instantly, Little Claudia’s didn’t have to compete on price. The old adage of “good, fast, or cheap; pick two,” played out in Claudia’s favor.
8 p.m.
Annie had clocked in at six to take over for Marie. Despite the two-per-batch cadence of the dinner rush, only two leftover pies came to Claudia’s office at six and six-thirty. It was only because they were selling so much pizza—and entirely unrelated to her insatiable belly—that Claudia had her staff increase the cadence to three pies per batch.
Unfortunately, the early rush of sales had tapered off just after seven. Which was why it took several trips for Marcus and Annie to ferry thirteen unsold pizzas into the office. They ran out of space on the rack. Two pizzas covered the available space on Claudia’s desk while she balanced a third atop her swollen gut.
Claudia fell into a blissful haze, her senses tuned into a handful of sensations that drowned out everything else. The slice in her hand, sometimes two slices stacked together. Her current mouthful, salt and spice and sweetness, playing an unchained melody across her tongue. And the glorious squeeze of her stomach as it filled, churning and burbling and begging and taking, pressing tighter against her desk as it stretched and grew and yearned for more.
12:13 a.m.
The dinner rush picked back up a few times, so Annie and Marcus kept making three of each recipe with every batch. Customers had only come in brief waves, however. In the last four hours that Little Claudia’s was open, at least eight pizzas came back to her office every half hour.
Taut and packed to her absolute limit, Claudia waddled down the hall to the roll-top delivery door in the back. There had been a time when she could move freely throughout the restaurant—she could still manage it most mornings. She’d scheduled a contractor to install a wider door to her office next week.
Claudia felt every slice, every mouthful of cheese and crust and toppings she’d devoured since that morning. Her stomach was like a food balloon, stuffed with so much deliciousness that her poor baby couldn’t hold one more bite. Every step jostled the mountain of food inside her, tugging at her skin and sending sparks of heat between her legs. She couldn’t wait to get home.
When she finally got outside, Annie and Marcus were loading up her car. At the one-year anniversary of Little Claudia’s, she’d upgraded to a small van. It had wider doors and a driver’s seat that slid all the way back. Her employees moved stacks of pizza boxes from a hand cart into the back of the van. They’d only sold three pies between the eleven and eleven-thirty batches, and all twenty-seven leftovers were going home with the boss.
As Claudia climbed into her van, its suspension creaked, the frame dipping toward the pavement on the driver’s side. Marcus slid the back door closed, waving to Claudia as he pulled off his apron and strolled to his car. Annie closed and locked the roll-top door, then brought Claudia the keys.
“Have a good night, boss.”
“Thanks, Annie. Good night.”
Sodium lights rolled by as Claudia drove slowly home, carefully avoiding any potholes. She was looking forward to a good, long soak in her custom shower, along with some special time with the detachable shower head.
Her stomach made a tiny, muffled murmur, so quiet that Claudia must have imagined it. She’d been snacking on pizza all day. She’d spent the last four hours gorging herself nonstop. Her body was packed so full she could feel a column of pizza rising all the way to the back of her throat with no space to go down any further.
Claudia’s stomach whispered a plea.
Keeping her eyes on the road, Claudia reached behind her.
She set a box on the passenger seat, sparing a glance at the large logo covering its top. Her Romanesque lineart namesake, her mascot. Giddily munching and caressing her billowing belly. It was similar enough to the chain-which-shall-not-be-named that she’d gotten cease and desist emails in the early months. But a friend-of-a-friend lawyer argued that the color scheme and art were too different to constitute a trademark violation.
The green palette complemented Claudia’s ginger mane better, anyway.
The backdrop behind her mascot was covered with big, bold letters. They alternated between lines, repeating “pizza pizza pizza” and “eat eat eat.”
Claudia fished a slice from the box. Pepperoni. Her stomach had made a request, and her mascot had turned it into a demand.
The first bite hit her just as hard as her first that morning. Her body whimpered, but her thighs trembled.
After all, what was the point of owning a pizzeria, if she wasn’t going to eat, eat, eat!?