Turn 32 of 226

Get back to work and ignore everything else until lunch. Then eat and work at the same time. Go back home and use the bag for the first time. The rest of the routine is the same

The morning passes in a block of focus that excludes everything. Lena enters the pricing model line by line, cross-referencing vendor contracts against the operational audit she filed last week, and the numbers align the way they are supposed to align when someone is doing the work correctly. Her bare fingers move over the keyboard and her body exists beneath her as a fact — the weight of her breasts, the pressure of her thighs on the seat, the warmth pulsing like a second heartbeat — and she does not think about it. She thinks about margin ratios. She thinks about the vendor in Section 4 whose pricing structure is hiding a fifteen percent markup that Marcus will want flagged. She flags it. The morning is a sequence of small, precise actions and the world outside her office door does not interrupt.

Nobody comes. The hallway traffic moves past her open door in the patterns she has come to know — footsteps at quarter-to, the elevator chime at the top of each hour, the distant sound of someone's printer. A voice passes close at ten-fifteen and does not slow. Another at eleven, a woman laughing about something unrelated. Lena's nakedness is a fact that the hallway has absorbed the way hallways absorb all facts that are not addressed — by looking away, by flowing around, by the particular institutional silence that fills a space when no one knows whose responsibility it is to speak. She types through it. Her feet are bare on the carpet and her belly is bare and her breasts are bare and the markup in Section 4 is flagged and the morning ends.

The food arrives at noon. The delivery driver calls and Lena meets him at the lobby freight entrance because she cannot walk through the building lobby naked without the security guard seeing her again and she does not want to manage that interaction. She carries two bags up the freight stairwell and the containers are warm against her chest and the smell of green curry fills the stairwell and her stomach responds before her mouth does — a low growl, a shift in the warmth, the body announcing its readiness. She sits at her desk and opens the first container and the curry is thick and hot and she eats it with the plastic spoon that came in the bag, working between bites of the spreadsheet, her left hand on the mouse and her right hand bringing food to her mouth. The rice goes fast. The Greek bowl follows and the double chicken is dry and she does not care. She burps midway through and it echoes off the office walls and she does not acknowledge it.

By three o'clock the pricing model is done and the vendor analysis has been updated with the markup flag and she sends both to Marcus with a one-line email: "Attached — Section 4 markup needs review before renewal." She leans back in the chair. Her belly spreads across her lap and her breasts settle heavy and full and the warmth pulses and the work is done and the bag is at home and the bag is waiting. She leaves at four. The freight stairwell again, the side door, the sidewalk. The afternoon is warm and her bare feet are on concrete and her body is naked and the city moves around her and she walks home at the pace her legs set, which is long and unhurried, and the punching bag is visible through the window of her apartment before she reaches the door.

She strips at the door — she is already naked, there is nothing to strip, and the gesture is a habit that has outlived its purpose — and crosses to the bag. The vinyl is cool and smooth and the base is heavy with water and the bag stands at six feet and she stands at six-six and she is taller than it and this is correct. She sets her feet. Her bare toes grip the carpet. She brings her hands up and the fists form and the form is the form she has been drilling for two weeks against air and the air has taught her everything it can. She throws a jab. The bag takes it. The impact travels through her knuckle and her wrist and her forearm and her shoulder and the bag swings and the chain at the top creaks and the sound is new. The sound is the sound of her body hitting something that is not nothing. She throws a cross. The bag swings wider. The impact is harder and she feels it in her core, the rotation transferring through her trunk, and the fat on her torso shifts with the torque and the muscle beneath it holds and the bag rocks and comes back and she hits it again.