This isn't the same story as the one I quickly described last night but thats because I go this from the internet and the other was written by someone else who put her own spin on an old Inuit Fairy Tale. (I've only scanned this version but it looks some what like the version I read)
Blubber Girl, Blubber Boy
Her black hair was as slick as a seal's, her face as round
as any planet. Her eyes were empty bowls
after a measly meal, her first young love dead
at the bottom of the sea. He had drowned while fishing,
the villagers told her, without the proof of a body. Other suitors
began to call, but all she could see was the ocean inside them.
Friends bought her gifts of blubber, the consoling magic of whales
that was both food and lamp oil, the energy
of life. The mourning girl carved her love's face
in the fat that once breathed between the skin and muscle
of a swimming mammal. Her creation looked so much like him,
she continued to carve his whole body, miniature details coming back to her
as though she were still lying in his viable arms. She rubbed
her soft blubber sculpture against her vulva
until it grew, first the size of a puppet, then a child.
The blubber began to rub back, sprouting at incredible speed
and when the girl came, her dead love was alive again.
The villagers thought it a miracle. There was a party
and a wedding the very next day. The young couple
kept their secret, the blubber lubricant, a special part
of their sex. When it was time for the boy to go back to work,
he set out in the very same fishing boat from which he fell
and drowned. The girl begged him to stay home,
but the boy convinced her that they were running low on salted mackerel.
Out in the sun, he felt himself beginning to melt,
his skin not quite human skin, his heart beating double time.
He paddled to shore as quickly as he could, then ran.
He was only half his man-size when he reached the igloo they shared.
The girl packed her husband in snow, massaging his body,
watching him grow. As the years went on, she never used the word
burden, though she grew tired doing all the heavy work herself.
Blubber boy lost his spunk, his fear of anything warm interfering
with even their lovemaking. He feared fire,
sweat, circulation, sparks, the very insulation from which he'd sprung.