A New World Record (picture+story!)

5 gallons.

She'd crunched the numbers so many times she could practically recite them. Converting from diameter to volume to surface area to pressure per square inch.

128 gallons.

From work shifts, to wages, to sticks of gum. 10.8 hours per stick. She savored the taste of 140 US dollars between her teeth. She sunk to her knees, cradling a sloshing gut that weighed more than her.

467 gallons.

She shimmied slightly while she still could, making sure that she was directly above the blue X she'd made on the ground in painter's tape. Her arms sunk heavily to her sides; then rose, outstretched, as the juice pumped them taut.

700 gallons.

The first stick ran out of flavor, and she spat it out. It landed on her -- specifically, on the curved blue plane of her that stretched out several feet in front of her head. If her math had been accurate, she was now a sphere roughly 5.6 feet in diameter, as wide as she had been tall. She no longer had the mobility to fetch a new one, but she'd planned ahead; stick #2 was taped to what used to be her chest, and was now within biting distance. Its siblings were lined up like a scotch-tape bandolier. She shimmied it out of its foil wrapper with her tongue, and felt its bittersweet taste flush through her mouth as she began chewing.

3800 gallons.

If the second stick had only worked as hard as the first, its effect on her waistline would have been imperceptible. A linear increase in size requires an exponential increase in volume, after all. Thankfully, that was exactly the effect each stick had on the next. Turns out a blueberry-- or whatever blueberry-shaped affront to nature she had become-- was much better at producing juice than a human girl. She cooed as the feeling of growth renewed, her body's horizon line growing more distant. 10 feet wide and counting.

8600 gallons.

The growth was slowing again, so it was time for stick # 5. The dangers were well-known -- to the point of superstition, in her opinion. Sure, first-generation gum cranked out juice with little regard for elasticity; a second stick meant you'd barely grow a foot before the inevitable. After years of class-action lawsuits and millions in R&D, one stick rendered its chewer elastic enough to hold eight times its payload. According to her math, at least. Stick #6 was already digging into her chin, the flesh around her head starting to rise upwards.

13900 gallons.

Even the veritable flash-flood of juice flowing into her meant an almost imperceptibly slow increase in size. Not that she would have been able to see it, between her fogged glasses and increasing intoxication. Like being wine-drunk without the vomiting, or jerking off for three hours without the painful numbness. Like both of those at the same time, she mused, taking stick #9 between her teeth.

16700 gallons.

Given enough time, even a state of overwhelming bodily euphoria gets boring. She'd been staring at the same featureless blue landscape for what felt like hours. Juice sputtered out of her flattened nipples like distant geysers. Clearly, her math had been wrong, but she was in no condition to check her work. With a resolute "fuck it", she broke her sober self's golden rule, and bit into sticks #11 and #12 at the same time.

...

Bee-bee-beep!

She opened her eyes groggily. The minutes that had passed since she bit into that forbidden fruit had been a blur of fear, anticipation, and pleasure so intense that her body tried and failed to recoil from it.

Bee-bee-beep!

This was interrupted by the incessant squeal of a digital alarm. Her eyes shot open with recognition. That meant the button she had rigged up was being pressed... which meant that her body was pressing against the far wall... which meant that she had done it.

31334 gallons.

Those five digits had been etched in her brain. They meant that she was now more than 20 feet and one inch wide. A new world record.

This also meant that, according to her initial projections, her growth should be slowing. It was not. Despite her size, she was still growing fast enough to blink and miss; like watching the sun sink below the horizon. An alarming sight, even for someone who had fantasized about it for years.

Being in her body felt like being held at the bottom of a swimming pool. She could probably fill one, she mused, as translucent blue flesh filled the rest of her field of vision. Something dug into her cheek; when she recognized it, the only logical next step clicked into place.

Peeling away the foil wrapper with tooth and tongue, she felt a strange sort of pride. Nobody was going to break her record for a long, long time.