The TV had been Dad's sleeping pill ever since we could remember. One night, it lost its prisoner to a swamp of a growl. Normally he would tell the blabberer to put a dirty old sock in it, or throw a beer mug. But since this noise was coming from within, the only thing he could do was drown it out with more whiskey.

He sighed, took a Lay-Z Bear recliner arm in each hand, and rocked himself forward.

We're talking about a man whose individual buttcheeks span the diameter of one Volvo tire each. Not to mention he tended to leave footprints in the sidewalk. So all he did was sink further in. Puzzled by the wrong direction, he checked behind him. It seemed as though the recliner, his comrade in sloth, his betrothed sleeping quarters of thirty years, was attempting to swallow him. The chair puffed with its mouthful of hairy white Dad derriere. It looked like rebellion. It may have been a plea from a break; no one could ever blame Atlas for wanting to bowl with the Earth once in a while; merely holding couldn't have been paradise for the arms.

Dad gave the chair an understanding pat, reminding it that breaks of any length led to "forcible retirement." Again, he heaved himself forward.

Lay-Z sucked him further back in, laying claim not only to his backside but now the upper part of his legs so his feet dangled over the edge. That confirmed it. This was a mutiny.

"So you're playing games now, huh?"

Well, two could play at that. Dad took a long, deep, belly-tightening breath. The steaming inhalation was so profound and intimated that the hairs along his arms prickled and stiffened.

Then, with his fingers tight enough on the Lay-Z Bears arms to unsheathe his nails clawing-range further, he pushed. He aimed to widen its capacity enough to leave it with ease. Failing that, his feral, savage deformation of the furniture might intimidate it into yielding him his freedom. Indeed, the sharp, high cracks of splintering wood from within told him he was making progress.

It was then that Lay-Z folded forward as a counterattack, back to cushion, like a pair of apex jaws.

Meanwhile, sweat cascade down Dad's neck. He stiffened hisback, arms, and legs. Veins throbbed and brows collided on his head. Hair squeezed out, penetrating the bald spots like arrows desperate for freedom. His teenage employees at the construction yard didn't rebel this much.With each new inch of pressure, he tightened his muscles a little more, determined to bring his authority to the top of this struggle. So much rage and effort coarsed through his veins that he began to swell. Muscles in his agonized arms popped, pumping excess bulk into new hairs sprouting there. His legs, tense with resisting the cushion, broadened as the muscles beneath depleted the room beneath the skin; Again, a flood of this mass infiltrated the hairs there and pumped them into stiff brown towers. Most alarming of all, his buttcheeks burst through the limits of human description, and some stubby anomoly was wedging itself between them, just at the base of his back. Agan, a blanket of hair layered itself through the pores there, brown as soil.

No, not hair; fur.

Dad's underside was the sturdiest warrior in the match. And yet, the Lay-Z clamped down harder, ushering the furry brown expanse towards the belly. The threads of his pajamas stretched and tore, little by little. Flesh and fur made ragged work of the cloth; there'd soon be nothing but patches around the shoulders and pelvis. He mustered up determination he'd never even met from the very marrow of his bones, practically turning his whole vision white as his muscles bulged bigger and bigger, like corked volcanos decades past due eruption.

Speaking of bones, all that straining enlargened them as well, reinforcing them into strapping rods of steel. His molten sneer urged his maw out into a razor fanged beast of a muzzle, and dragged his rounding ears up his temples.All the while, Lay-Z held its own determination, squeezing ever more mass into Dad's fuzzying muscles.The power filling them up, from his jaw to his belly, was so vast and tight that Dad could only have been a few tinkybits away from bursting. If he didn't outright explode from it, you could have easily bounced a nickel off that magnificent orb. Even behind the fur, black trenches and veins foretold sinister omens of his looming fate.

But he'd never backed down from a power struggle, and sweaty and stiff as he was, he wasn't going to do that now. If he exploded, then he'd be taking the treacherous chair with him. It was a thought conceived before the redistribution of fat had finally reached its limit.The Lay-Z's back slapped its cushion, and Dad popped from the chair a brown hard blubbery ball of stiff fur. He smashed the television in and unrolled, a completely transformed bear.