Turn 4 of 226
Order food; the fridge is empty and the hunger is already coming back. Then I go to work in the smallest and tightest clothes I own. My belly is completely exposed and by tits and ass barely fit in the crop top and tiny shorts i'm wearing. Donate everything in the hallway after work
Lena wakes to the smell of cold air and stale orange juice. The fridge is still open, its interior bare except for a jar of mustard and a half-empty bottle of soy sauce. Her stomach clenches before her eyes are fully open — a deep, insistent pull that has nothing polite about it. She grabs her phone from the kitchen counter, still naked, still sticky, and orders seventy dollars of delivery from the place three blocks over: two rice bowls, an order of dumplings, a large soup, and a side of braised pork. She eats most of it standing at the counter before she even considers the question of work.
The pile in the hallway stops her. Bras, panties, socks, shoes — all of it heaped against the wall like a shed skin. She steps over it and opens her closet. Everything left is either too small or too structured, and she does not want structure. She pulls out a black crop top she bought on a whim two summers ago and never wore because it showed too much skin. It covers her chest barely — her breasts strain the fabric, the hem riding up so that the full underside of each is visible where it meets the heavy curve of her belly. She finds a pair of athletic shorts that are a size too small, and when she pulls them over her hips the waistband cuts into the soft flesh of her lower stomach, her backside spilling over the fabric at the back, the leg openings tight around her thickened thighs. Her belly hangs completely exposed between the two garments, round and heavy and impossible to miss.
She has no shoes. She goes barefoot to the elevator and walks four blocks to her office building with her soles on the pavement and her belly bouncing with every step. People look. She can feel it — the glances at her exposed midsection, the way the crop top is fighting a losing war against her chest, the way the shorts have ridden up until barely anything is covered. A man on the crosswalk stares openly and she catches herself standing straighter, pushing her shoulders back, letting the weight of her body announce itself. The warmth pulses. She feels powerful.
The office is a mid-rise with bad fluorescent lighting and a carpet that smells like old coffee. Her desk is by the window on the third floor. She sits down and the shorts dig into her hips and the crop top rides up another inch and she can feel her belly pressing against the underside of the desk. Her coworker Diane, who sits two desks over, looks up from her computer, and her eyes travel from Lena's bare feet to the strip of skin between the crop top and the shorts and stay there for a beat too long. Diane is mid-forties, sensible cardigan, reading glasses on a chain. She does not say anything. She turns back to her screen.
Lena makes it through the day by eating the remaining dumplings at her desk and feeling the fabric of her clothes get tighter as the hours pass. By four o'clock the crop top has given up any pretense of covering her and the shorts have worked themselves so far into the crease of her hips that they might as well not be there. She logs off, takes the elevator down, and walks home barefoot again. On the way she stops at the donation bin on the corner of her block and shoves the entire pile from the hallway into it — every bra, every pair of underwear, every sock, every shoe. The metal flap clangs shut. She stands there for a moment in her tiny clothes, lighter by a whole drawer's worth of old life, and the warmth in her belly settles deeper, like something clicking into place.