Turn 39 of 226

Clean the mirror to get a better look. Notice I am tanned too. Then stretch out and relax by masturbating

Lena pulls her shirt — the crop top, the only shirt she has left, the one she has been wearing to work for weeks — off the bathroom counter and wets it under the faucet and scrubs the mirror with it. The grime comes off in streaks. The glass beneath is still clouded, still marked with the ghost of weeks of condensation and dried toothpaste and whatever else has been accumulating on a surface no one has cleaned in over a month, but the body behind it sharpens with each pass. She scrubs until the crop top is gray with dirt and the mirror is as clear as it is going to get and she stands back and looks.

The woman in the mirror is not the woman who made the wish. The woman who made the wish was 130 pounds and pale and small inside her own frame, a body that seemed to rattle around in six feet six inches of skeleton like a marble in a jar. The woman in the mirror is 202 pounds and her skin is brown. Not the brown of a tanning bed or a bottle — the brown of a body that has been walking naked through a city for weeks, shoulders and arms and belly and thighs exposed to the sun every morning and every evening on the commute, and the skin has responded the way skin responds. Her shoulders are the darkest, a deep golden brown that fades toward her chest and returns on the tops of her thighs and the bridge of her nose. There are tan lines — faint ones, ghost lines — where the crop top sat across her ribs and the waistband of her shorts crossed her hips, but even those are fading because she has been naked at work and naked at home and the sun has been reaching everywhere it can reach. She turns. Her back is darker than her front. The ass is round and wide and the skin is brown and the hair between her legs is dark and thick and the crack of her ass is the palest part of her body, a narrow strip of white that has never seen the sun, and she looks at it and does not care.

She leans against the bathroom doorframe and her body settles into the frame the way water settles into a vessel — filling every angle, finding every edge. Her belly hangs soft and heavy and her breasts rest on her forearms when she crosses them and the fat on her hips spreads against the wood of the doorframe and the muscle beneath it is dense and warm. She looks at herself and the warmth is there and it is not saying ready. It is saying look. Look at what you are. She looks. The brown skin stretches over the fat and the muscle and the calluses on her knuckles are dark against the tan and the hair on her forearms is sun-bleached to a lighter brown and the yellow of her teeth is more visible now against the brown of her face and none of it is wrong. None of it is wrong. The body in the mirror is a body that has been used and the using has marked it and the marks are the record of what she has done and she does not want to erase them.

She walks to the living room and the carpet is rough under her bare feet and she lowers herself to the floor with the controlled descent of someone whose thighs can handle twice their bodyweight. She stretches out on her back. The floor is warm — it has absorbed weeks of her body heat, weeks of her sweat, and the carpet holds the warmth the way a stone holds the warmth of the sun. Her arms go above her head and the stretch runs through her torso and her belly lifts and her ribs expand and her breasts shift and settle and the stretch is not exercise. It is surrender. She lets her arms fall to her sides and her legs fall open and her body is on the floor and the floor is holding her and the warmth is pulsing and it is saying nothing. It is just there. A low hum. A current.

Her hand moves to her belly first. Not down — across. She rests her palm on the curve of it and the fat is soft and warm under her hand and the muscle beneath is firm and the combination is something she has never felt before because she has never been this body before. Her hand moves lower. The belly gives way to the hair and the hair gives way to the warmth and her fingers find the place and the touch is slow and deliberate and she is not rushing. The orgasm is not the goal. The touching is the goal. The being on the floor in a body that is 202 pounds and brown and strong and dirty and hers is the goal and her fingers move in the way her body tells them to move and her hips shift and her thighs press together and then open and her back arches and the breath comes deep and slow and the warmth builds and builds and the ceiling is above her and the bag is in the corner and the legal pad is beside her and the orgasm arrives like a wave — not sharp, not urgent, but wide and heavy and slow — and her body contracts and releases and contracts and the sound she makes is low and long and it comes from the same place the stretch came from. Somewhere in her chest. Somewhere deep. She lies on the floor afterward and her hand is still between her legs and her belly is rising and falling and the apartment is quiet and the warmth is steady and she is comfortable. She is comfortable in her body and the wish is being fulfilled and the fulfillment is not a destination. It is a process. It is ongoing. It is now.