Sitting on a bench outside a farm exhibit at the Puyallup Fair watching waves of people move past, I feel like I'm the sole visitor in a giant open zoo, watching a strange species of human move all around me. The configurations of our bodies are the same, but theirs are slightly out of proportion, like the tumorous pumpkins on display in the agricultural hall. Their faces look all gaunt and stretched out by smoke, obesity or some secret hidden beneath their visages that only the wearer knows.

Among this subspecies there are interesting variations that become apparent the more I watch them. There are an inordinate number of people in wheelchairs, though few of them are missing legs, and none are wearing casts. Rather, they seem to be victims of lifestyle related ailments – all are overweight, and though I’m sure they blame their girth on their being in a wheelchair, I doubt they looked much different when they could still walk. In addition to the wheelchair, many of them have other extracorporeal aids helping their bodies function. I see one man in army fatigues missing a leg; he is the only person I see all day who is in a wheelchair solely because he’s lost a leg and walking is too difficult. I see another morbidly obese man in a wheelchair missing an arm, whittled down to only one usable limb probably by diabetes.

I don’t see any kids in wheelchairs, but the children take after their parents in body shape, their little features dotted on bloated canvases that stretch from their foreheads down to the crease that separates their heads from their chests. One of them walks past, a girl wearing stretched out pink shorts, a white tank top, and white running shoes with long pink socks that have fallen down and scrunched up around her ankles. I can’t tell how old she is – something about obesity skews peoples age, and she looks like she could be anywhere from ten to thirteen. It’s hard to tell whether or not she’s hit puberty yet – her flabby breasts are indistinguishable from those on the chests of equally overweight preteen boys. As she walks hurriedly toward the rides her legs, which are dimpled with fat, awkwardly clunk together.

The girl fades off into the crowd, and I spot an anomaly, although it doesn’t look entirely out of place. A young couple in their early twenties strolls through the crowd hand in hand. The man is wearing all black, and has a red hair that’s been molded into a strange mix of abstract and bowl cut (I saw a booth earlier in one of the exhibition halls offering haircuts for seven dollars from a group of bored hairdressers who looked like they had spent more time sculpting their own hair than other peoples’ - I wonder if he was the victim of an outpouring of their repressed creativity). His clothes look vaguely fashionable, but dated. Trailing slightly behind him is his girlfriend, a diminutive rail-thin Asian girl who peeks out at the crowd over his shoulder as he pulls her ahead.

Out of the corner of my eye I see the pink shorts come back into view, this time with an entourage. Three generations with no more than thirty five years between youngest and oldest, they are a living timeline of the life of a South Puget Sounder. There are the two parents, not surprisingly as overweight as their daughter, and wearing loose fitting, serviceable clothing. Although they heave and puff walking around the fair, sitting they look enviably comfortable. Settled in on a bench, the dad pulls out a pack of Marlboros and offers one to the mom, who quickly lights and inhales, then draws his own, which hangs off his lip as he lights it.There is another girl with them, an older sister, no more than eighteen years old. She’s wearing tight jeans and a loud black and pink Volcom sweatshirt, and unlike the rest of the family she’s surprisingly skinny. Her wrists are stacked from hand to sweatshirt sleeve with brightly colored plastic bracelets which match the contrasting green and pink hair ties that pull her hair into a ponytail and in front of her she absent mindedly pushes a stroller back and forth, containing what I assume is her baby, as if it were just another flashy accessory.

The parents talk and puff as the girl in pink shorts moves around restlessly. She squats in front of the stroller and makes faces at the baby, who is about six months old, wearing her hair up in two little pigtails that stick straight up from her head. The baby giggles and smiles as the girl sticks out her tongue and puffs up her cheeks at her. She tries to manipulate her little hands into playing a clapping game with her, taking the baby’s pudgy wrists in her hands and moving them around.

“Stop messing with the baby Kaitlyn,” says the dad. The words escape his mouth curtly in a plume of cigarette smoke.

“She likes it though. I’m teaching her how to play patty cakes .”

“Kaitlyn. Kaitlyn! Stop touching the damn baby,” says her dad again, this time grabbing the girl by the wrist and pulling her back.”

“Well when I was at Cindy’s house she was teaching it to her little sister and her mom didn’t care.”

“Well I ain’t Cindy’s mom and I don’t want the baby to start crying again. Just come over and sit on the bench and be quiet,” says the dad.

The girl goes over and sits on the bench next to her parents glumly, holding her chin between her palms and staring at the ground. She looks up at the rides and asks if she can go on the tilt-a-whirl again. The dad hands her a strip of orange paper tickets and she waddles off.

“Come back as soon as you’re done cause we gotta leave in half an hour,” yells the mom.

The other sister pulls out a cigarette and lights it. I’ve been pretending to mess around with my phone for the last five minutes, but I’m fairly sure now that none of them have any idea I’m even there, and I put it away and pretend to watch for someone coming from the crowd behind them.

“Kaitlyn needs to realize the baby ain’t a damn toy. She thinks it’s funny she should try taking care of her for a day.”

“You were even worse than she is when Kaitlyn was a baby. No wonder, that’s probably where she gets it from. Remember the time you made her ride around on the dog and she fell off and hit her head on the kitchen floor? And look at you now, all grown up with your own kid,” says her mom, laughing.

“You hear Stacy got fired over at Safeway?” says the older sister.

“I swear that girl can’t keep a job to save her life,” says the dad.

“This time she says it wasn’t her fault; the manager sounded like a real jerk. She got in trouble twice for coming into work late, even though it was only five minutes and it was only because the bus was late.”

“She don’t have her car anymore?”

“Yeah, but it’s broken and Dave said he was gonna fix it, but you know his lazy ass so now it’s just sitting in the driveway.”

The older sister puts out her cigarette and grinds it into the cement with her foot. She pulls a bag out from the pocket under the stroller and gets a bottle, then takes out the baby and starts feeding her.

“So anyway she came in late again yesterday and her boss fired her right there on the spot. And you know she don’t have nothing in the bank and now she comes asking me for money.”

“You better not give her any, doesn’t she already owe you a hundred dollars?”

The baby lets out a cry and she shoves the bottle back in its mouth.

“That’s what I told her. She ain’t getting anything else from me cause I ain’t about to be more broke than she is.”

The girl in pink shorts comes trudging back over from the rides and crashes into her mom’s lap.

“Can I have another ticket? I want to go on the roller coaster again.”

“Nah, we gotta get going. The baby needs a nap and you’re going over to auntie Barbara’s house tonight,” says her dad.

The girl in pink shorts whines and tries to bargain with her dad as her sister packs up the baby’s things and puts them back beneath the stroller. The whole family lurches up out of their seats and slowly they make their way off into the crowd.