Thinner

"Thinner," the old Gypsy man with the rotting nose whispered, and caressed his cheek, like a lover...

Billy Halleck, good husband, loving father, lives in Connecticut and practices law in New York City. He is both beneficiary and victim of the American Good Life: he has an expensive home, a nice family, and a rewarding job…but he is also fifty pounds overweight, and, as his doctor keeps reminding him, he is thirty-six years old-edging into heart attack country.

Then Billy Halleck sideswipes an old Gypsy woman as she is crossing the street in their quiet little southern Connecticut town of Fairview, and everything in his pleasant, upwardly mobile life changes. He is exonerated in the local court by a friendly judge and sheriff…but a blacker, far worse judgment has been passed on him, nevertheless. Billy Halleck begins losing weight. He is pleased at first, then worried, and finally terrified. He can't stop it. He eats and eats but the weight flies off...