Turn 10 of 21
Spend the weekend pushing past 210 and see what the wish does next. It just makes her current slobbiness worse, more burping farting and pissing wherever she wants. She stops wiping after dumps too. She spends every hour not asleep drunk, high and full. Her work continues to improve, so much so she gets a promotion.
The weekend opens like a door she has no intention of closing. Lena orders from four restaurants simultaneously on Friday night — Thai, barbecue, two pizzas, a tray of brownies — and arranges them on the coffee table like a altar. She eats with her hands. She eats with her face. She eats until the flavors blur into a single warm taste and her belly is so taut and round it presses against the table's edge when she leans forward, and then she smokes and drinks and eats more. The scale on Saturday morning reads 211 and she stands on it with her eyes closed, feeling the new weight in her ankles, in the sway of her gut, in the way her thighs press together all the way to her knees. She steps off and catches herself in the bathroom mirror and the body there is barely the same species as the one that stood here two and a half weeks ago — broader, softer, hairier, the red hair hanging in greasy ropes, body hair thick and dark across every surface, her belly a wide heavy dome that hangs over the patch of coarse red hair between her thighs.
She doesn't just let the slobbiness deepen — she leans into it like a warm bath. After her morning dump she stands up and looks at the toilet paper and thinks: why bother? The act of not wiping feels like a small revolution, a line crossed that she can never uncross, and the warmth in her belly flares with something that isn't just comfort. It's pride. She pulls up her sweatpants — the only pair that still stretches over her ass, barely — and feels the fabric sit against skin that isn't clean and doesn't care. By noon she has pissed herself twice on the couch without standing up, the warm flood pooling beneath her ass and soaking into the leather, and each time the relief floods through her body like a drug and she sinks deeper into the cushions and reaches for another beer.
The burps and farts have become a language. Deep, wet belches that taste like whatever she ate last — garlic and grease and hops — rolling out of her without warning or apology. Long, rumbling farts that vibrate against the couch cushion and fill the room with a heavy, sour warmth. She farts during a movie she's half-watching and the sound is so long and low she laughs until her belly shakes, the whole surface of it rippling like water. She belches into the open air of her apartment and the echo comes back off the kitchen tile and she feels a pulse of heat between her legs that she doesn't bother to ignore. The voice in her mind doesn't even need to speak anymore. The approval is in her body — in the warmth, in the weight, in the way everything feels easy and loose and right.
The work week arrives and she doesn't change anything. She wakes up on the couch, pisses where she lies, eats breakfast naked during her first meeting, and closes two more client accounts by Wednesday. Her emails are crisp and decisive in a way that surprises even her — the weed and the alcohol and the constant fullness have burned away some anxiety she didn't know she was carrying, leaving behind a calm, focused clarity that her director notices. On Thursday he calls her directly.
"Lena, I want to talk about your trajectory here," he says, and his voice carries the particular warmth of a manager about to deliver good news. She listens with one hand resting on her belly and a beer between her thighs and the warm voice whispering: they're rewarding you. They're rewarding what you're becoming.
Friday morning the email arrives. Senior Analyst, effective immediately, with a twelve percent salary increase and a team of three reporting to her. She reads it on the couch, naked, surrounded by the wreckage of another week — containers and cans and the sour-sweet smell of her own body and the dried urine on the leather cushions. She weighs herself: 213. Two hundred and thirteen pounds on a 5'7" frame, up from 145 less than three weeks ago. She stares at the number and the reflection in the mirror and the email on her phone and feels all of it converge — the weight, the promotion, the mess, the warmth — into a single, overwhelming certainty: the wish is not just making her comfortable. It is making her successful. It is making her into exactly what she was always supposed to be, and the world is bending to accommodate it. She orders a celebration feast — three entrees, two desserts, a case of beer — and sinks into the couch and lets a long, low fart vibrate through the cushions and thinks: more. Always more.