Turn 28 of 226

Go to work. My shorts and sports bra are barely holding on. The punching bag arrives at home while I am there

Lena wakes on the floor at six-fifteen and the rest has done something to her body that she can feel before she opens her eyes. The soreness is still there — a deep, structural ache in her shoulders and thighs and the connective tissue of her hips — but beneath it the muscles feel different. Denser. As if the night of stillness gave them permission to build what she spent two weeks tearing down. She stands and the stretch is an event, her body unfolding to its full height, every joint releasing a sound like a door opening. She pulls on the sports bra and it catches on her breasts and she pulls harder and the elastic groans and holds. The shorts are worse. The waistband has given up any pretense of fitting and rolls itself down beneath her belly, and the legs have ridden so high they are more like briefs than athletic shorts, the fabric stretched thin across her ass, the seams showing threads. She is dressed. She is as dressed as these garments will allow.

The office is the same office. She walks in barefoot and the carpet is familiar beneath her toes and the chair groans when she sits and the sports bra compresses her breasts into something that is visible from every angle and the belly hangs bare and round beneath it. Nobody speaks to her. The hallway traffic has learned to flow around her door without pausing. She opens the vendor analysis and works. The numbers are there and she enters them and the work is good and the morning passes in the way that mornings pass when the brain is operating at a frequency the body can sustain — frictionless, total, the kind of focus that excludes everything except the thing being focused on.

At eleven her phone buzzes with a delivery notification. The punching bag has arrived at her apartment. The building's package room accepted it. She reads the notification and the warmth surges and she feels the pull in her hands, in her knuckles, in the muscles of her shoulders that have been hitting nothing for two weeks and are about to hit something. She puts the phone down and returns to the spreadsheet and the pull does not leave. It sits in her body the way the warmth sits in her belly — patient, certain, a thing that is coming that she cannot rush.

She eats at her desk. A burrito, a side of rice, a large iced coffee. The burrito drips sauce onto her belly and she wipes it with her hand and licks her fingers and keeps typing. A burp comes up from somewhere deep and resonant and she lets it out and it fills the office and she does not look up. Ten minutes later a fart follows — long, low, her body processing the volume of food with mechanical indifference — and the chair vibrates and the warmth pulses once, amused, and Lena finishes the vendor analysis and starts on the pricing model Marcus mentioned in last week's email. Her bare feet are propped on the wastebasket. The door is open.

By five o'clock the pricing model is done and the sports bra has shifted in ways that are no longer recoverable. The left strap has twisted and the right cup is folding inward and the elastic band beneath her breasts has rolled itself into a rope that digs into the soft tissue. She stands and the bra rides up and her breasts settle beneath it, heavy and full, and she pulls it back down and it holds for three seconds and begins to ride again. The shorts are a memory of clothing. She walks out of the office barefoot and bare-bellied and the hallway is empty and the elevator is empty and the street is warm and she walks home thinking about the bag.

The apartment door opens and the bag is there. It is leaning against the wall in the living room — the empty living room, the room with no bed and no couch, just floor and a water bottle and a legal pad and the rectangle of bare space where the bag will stand. It is taller than she expected, six feet of vinyl and steel, the base a wide plastic dome meant to be filled with water or sand. She strips at the door — the sports bra over her head, the shorts down her thighs — and crosses the room naked and puts her hand on the bag and the vinyl is cool and smooth and the weight of it is solid and present and real. Her knuckles are already forming fists.