Turn 17 of 21
See where the wish takes you both next weekend. Have a drinking contest Sunday night before work. I win 30 IPAs drunk to 29. Work continues to improve. We both stop brushing teeth. After 2 months, I had 2 more promotions, our teeth are yellow and food, piss and shit stains have multiplied in the apartment and ourselves. I weigh 360, Lexi weighs 330 at the end of the 2 months.
Sunday night the coffee table becomes a battlefield. Sixty IPAs arranged in rows between the takeout containers and the stained laptop, the bottles catching the kitchen light. Lexi cracks her first one and lifts it toward Lena with a competitive glint that would have been impossible eight weeks ago — back when she was a thin woman in a blazer who held her farts in and measured her portions. Now she is 240 pounds of naked, unwashed flesh sitting cross-legged on a ruined couch cushion, her belly resting on her thighs, her body hair thick and matted, and she is grinning.
"Thirty each," Lena says. "First one to finish wins."
They drink. The apartment fills with the sound of cracking caps and swallowing and the deep, wet belches that follow each beer. Lena's belly swells as the liquid accumulates, the foam bloating her wider, and by beer fifteen she has to shift her weight to let her gut hang off the cushion's edge. By beer twenty-three Lexi is slurring and laughing and her hiccups have become long, resonant belches that spray across the room. Lena reaches thirty at the same moment Lexi reaches twenty-nine and lifts the empty bottle above her head like a trophy and lets out a fart so long and low it vibrates the remote control off the armrest. Lexi groans and finishes her last beer and falls sideways onto the couch and pisses herself laughing.
The weeks that follow are a warm, heavy avalanche. Lena stops brushing her teeth on a Tuesday — not a decision, just a forgetting, and then a not-caring, and then a warmth that pulses with approval when she runs her tongue across the fuzzy enamel and feels nothing but satisfaction. Lexi follows within days. Their teeth yellow fast, the surfaces coating with a soft film of plaque and food and beer residue that thickens until their smiles are the color of old ivory. The bathroom sink gathers dust. The toothbrushes sit in their holder untouched, obsolete relics of a life where maintenance mattered.
The promotions arrive like clockwork. The first comes three weeks in — Director of Strategic Operations, a twenty-five percent increase, a team of fourteen. Lena accepts the offer on a video call while eating a bowl of macaroni naked on the couch, cheese sauce on her chin, and the VP on the other end doesn't blink. The second lands five weeks later — VP of Regional Strategy, another thirty percent, a corner office she will never visit because she works from the couch and her numbers are the best the department has ever recorded. She reads the email while farting into the cushion and feels the wish purr beneath her skin like an engine.
The apartment has become geological. The couch cushions are layered — food stains and urine stains and shit stains compressed into a dense, dark stratum that tells the story of two months of uninterrupted living. The coffee table is buried. The kitchen counter is buried. The floor is a mosaic of crushed cans and containers and dried spills. Their bodies are landscapes of accumulation — skin that hasn't been washed in weeks, coated in a sheen of grease and dried sweat and the faint yellow residue of urine, body hair matted and thick, teeth yellow and coated, fingernails long and dirty. Lena stands on the scale on a Saturday morning and the number reads 360 and her body fills the bathroom doorway — her belly a vast, heavy apron that hangs to her thighs, her breasts enormous and resting against its upper curve, her ass wide enough to brush both sides of the doorframe. Lexi steps on behind her: 330. Her mother's body has become a mirror of her own — round and vast and soft, the belly wide and low, the thighs thick and pressing together, the arms heavy with fat that sways when she reaches for food. They look at each other and the recognition between them is total and warm and the voice says what it always says. More. Always more. This is home. This is what you asked for. And the wish keeps humming, and it shows no sign of stopping, and neither of them wants it to.