Turn 18 of 21

Invite Lexi to talk about what happens when the wish stops, or if it ever will. Conclude it doesn't matter, we love living like this. As a result, we order more food and the next year passes by in a hedonistic blur. I still get promoted like clockwork.

The apartment is dark except for the blue flicker of the television, some nature documentary playing low — something about tectonic plates and the slow, patient work of continental drift. Lena watches it through half-closed eyes, her belly resting on her thighs like a sleeping animal, 360 pounds of warm, unwashed flesh sinking into the ruined couch. Lexi is beside her, 330 pounds, her own belly spread across her lap, her hand resting in a bag of chips. They are high and drunk and full, the same state they have occupied every waking hour for months, and the apartment smells like a living thing — sour and warm and layered with the evidence of two bodies that stopped performing for the world a long time ago.

"Mom," Lena says. The word comes out slow, softened by the IPA she's been nursing and the edible still humming through her bloodstream. She doesn't look away from the screen.

"Do you ever think about when it stops?"

Lexi crunches a chip. She doesn't ask what Lena means. She knows.

"The wish," Lena says. "Or whatever it is. The thing that's been — doing this to us. Making us bigger. Making us not care. Making everything feel like —" She gestures vaguely at the room, at the stains, at the towers of containers, at her own vast body. "Like this."

Lexi is quiet for a long time. The documentary murmurs about fault lines and pressure building beneath the surface. When she speaks, her voice is loose and unguarded, the way it always is now — the voice of a woman who stopped editing herself months ago.

"I think about it," she says. "Every few days. Usually when I notice I've gotten bigger again, or when I catch myself doing something that would have horrified me a year ago. Like shitting myself on a Tuesday because the couch felt too good to leave." She belches softly.

"And then I stop thinking about it, because I don't want to stop."

Lena nods. The warmth pulses in her belly — steady, constant, the heartbeat that has been with her since the night she whispered into a bathroom mirror.

"What if it does stop?" Lena asks. "What if we wake up one day and we're not hungry anymore, and the warmth is gone, and we're just — two fat women in a filthy apartment?"

"Then we'd still be two fat women in a filthy apartment," Lexi says. She turns to look at Lena and her yellow teeth catch the television light.

"And we'd still be happier than I've ever been in my entire life."

The silence that follows is full and warm and complete. Lena feels the wish hum through her — through her belly, her breasts, her thighs, the deep folds and creases and soft expanses of a body she has stopped questioning — and she feels Lexi's warmth beside her, the same frequency, the same pulse, and she understands something she hadn't put into words before. The wish didn't make her love this. It gave her permission to stop pretending she didn't.

"It doesn't matter," Lena says. Not to Lexi. To the room. To the wish. To herself.

"None of it matters. If it stops, we keep going. If it doesn't stop, we keep going. This is what I wanted. This is what you wanted. This is home."

Lexi reaches for her hand and squeezes it and their fingers are greasy and warm and neither of them lets go.

Lena orders food with her free hand. Four pizzas, two orders of wings, a tray of lasagna, a case of beer, a case of champagne, edibles, brownies. The delivery driver leaves it at the door without knocking. They eat. They drink. They smoke. The night dissolves into warmth.

The year that follows is a single, long, golden afternoon. Lena's career becomes a paradox that no one in the corporate office can explain — she is perpetually high, visibly drunk during morning meetings, naked from the shoulders down on every video call, and her numbers are the best the company has ever seen. The promotions arrive like weather. Senior Vice President of Strategy, spring. Executive Vice President, summer. Chief Strategy Officer, fall. Each one comes with a raise she barely notices and a team that grows and performs and she manages all of it from the couch with her belly resting on her laptop and cheese on her chin. The corporate world bends around her like reality itself is reshaping to accommodate what she is becoming.

The apartment stops being an apartment. It becomes a landscape — geological layers of containers and cans and stains, the couch a living organism of compressed filth and body heat, the air thick and sour and warm. They grow. The scale climbs and they stop checking it because the numbers stopped meaning anything. Lena's body fills the couch. Lexi's body fills the space beside her. They eat and drink and smoke and piss and shit and burp and fart and the wish hums through both of them and the voice says what it always says — more, always more, this is home — and they agree, and the year passes, and they are happy, and the wish does not stop.