Turn 8 of 226

Stay exactly as I am, belly out and all and burp openly while greeting Diane . She asks if I'm all right. Never better I say.

Lena does not move. Her belly sits heavy and exposed in her lap, the crop top bunched uselessly under her chest, the shorts buried somewhere beneath the overhang of her gut. Her skin is slick with four days of unwashed sweat and her hair hangs in matted ropes. She smells — she knows she smells — and the knowledge sits in her mind like a fact about the weather, acknowledged and unimportant. A burp is climbing her throat and she lets it come, a full, rolling belch that fills the office and hangs in the air. She grins.

"Hey, Diane. Come in."

Diane opens the door and stops. Her hand stays on the handle, her reading glasses catching the fluorescent light, and her eyes move the way eyes move over a car accident — quick, involuntary, unable to settle. Down to Lena's bare feet on the carpet, up to the belly sitting round and heavy in her lap, across the food containers and grease stains on the desk, and then to Lena's face, which is smiling and open and entirely unbothered. The silence lasts three full seconds.

"Are you all right?" Diane's voice is careful. Not casual. The kind of careful that has been rehearsed on the walk over, words chosen in advance and then rearranged at the last second because the reality is worse than the preparation. She steps inside and closes the door behind her, which Lena notices and does not comment on.

"Never better," Lena says, and she means it in a way that she cannot explain. She leans back in her chair and her belly shifts forward, spreading heavy across her thighs, and another burp rolls up and out before she can stop it — except she does not try to stop it. The sound is enormous in the small room. Diane's left eyelid twitches. Lena rests both hands on the curve of her stomach and feels the warmth pulse beneath her palms, steady and approving, and she looks at Diane with an expression that is genuine and calm and slightly puzzled, as though she cannot quite understand why the question was asked.

Diane stands very still. She is wearing a grey cardigan buttoned to the collar and sensible flats and she looks, by contrast, like she has been assembled from a manual titled "How to Be a Person at Work." Her mouth opens and closes once. She glances at the desk — at the quarterly summary glowing on Lena's screen, at the report that landed in the supervisor's inbox an hour early — and something in her expression shifts. Not relief. Confusion. The math is not working. The woman in front of her smells like she has not bathed in days, is dressed in something that would be insufficient for a gym, and is producing better work than the rest of the floor combined. Diane's hand tightens on the back of the guest chair and she does not sit down.

"You called in sick yesterday," Diane says. It is not a question.