Turn 19 of 21

Check the scale and see where the year has taken them. I weigh 520, Lexi weights 470. Then ask the wish directly if it has a limit. It replies no.

The scale has been wedged between the bathroom wall and a tower of empty beer cases for so long that Lena has to shift three boxes and a stack of pizza boxes to reach it. She hasn't stepped on it in months — the numbers stopped mattering somewhere around the third promotion and the fourth hundred pounds — but tonight, in the blue television dark, something pulls her toward it. She waddles into the bathroom and the floor groans beneath her, each step a seismic event, her thighs rolling against each other, her belly swaying low and heavy like a sack of wet sand. She is enormous. She has known this for months in the abstract way you know the weather, but stepping onto the cold plastic platform makes it concrete.

The display flickers. 520. Lena stares at the number and feels the warmth pulse through her, steady as a heartbeat. Three hundred and seventy-five pounds since the night she whispered into a mirror. Her body is barely recognizable as human — the belly hangs to her knees, a vast apron of flesh that sways with every movement, stretch marks mapping the expansion in silver and purple rivers across its surface. Her breasts rest against the upper curve of her belly, each one wider than her torso used to be. Her ass overflows every surface, dimpled and creased, the thighs thick and pressing together from hip to knee. She is coated in grease and dried sweat and the faint yellow residue of a year of pissing and shitting where she sits, body hair matted and thick, teeth yellow and furred, fingernails long and curved and dark beneath. She is 5'7" and 520 pounds and she is standing in her bathroom and she is not ashamed.

"Lexi," she calls. Her voice is low and thick, softened by the beer and the edible and the fat that has padded her throat. She hears the couch groan and the slow, heavy sounds of her mother's body shifting — 470 pounds of flesh rising from the cushions, the shit-stained leather peeling away from her ass with a wet sound. Lexi appears in the doorway, filling it, her belly leading, her breasts heavy and wide, her thighs pressing together as she walks. She steps on the scale and the number blinks: 470. She looks at Lena and belches and they both laugh.

They stand in the bathroom together, two vast, unwashed, yellow-toothed women, and Lena feels the warmth in her belly pulse stronger than it has in months. She closes her eyes. She has never spoken to it directly — has never tried to name it or address it or ask it anything — but tonight, in the blue dark, with the number 520 still glowing on the scale, she feels it there, humming beneath her skin, and she speaks to it the way you speak to something that has been living inside you for so long that it has become you.

"Do you have a limit?" she asks. The words come out plain and unadorned, spoken into the warm, sour air of the bathroom.

"Is there a point where you stop?"

The warmth flares. It rises from her belly and spreads through her chest and her throat and her skull and for a moment the world is gold and soft and utterly still. And then the voice speaks — not in words, not in language, but in the same frequency it has always used, the one that says more and always more and this is home — and the answer is simple and total and arrives like a key turning in a lock.

No.

Lena opens her eyes. The scale still reads 520. Lexi is watching her with a lazy, stoned expression, one hand resting on her belly, chips crumbs in the creases of her neck.

"What did it say?" Lexi asks.

"No," Lena says. "No limit."

Lexi nods. She shifts her weight and the floor groans.

"Good," she says, and reaches for Lena's hand, and they stand together in the bathroom doorway, filling it completely, and the wish hums through both of them like a shared pulse, steady and warm and endless, and Lena feels the last question she has been carrying — the one about whether this will end, whether she will wake up one day and find herself returned to the body that never fit — dissolve into the warmth like sugar into hot water. It will not end. She will not go back. This is her body now, this vast and soft and stained and perfect body, and it will keep growing and she will keep loving it, and the wish will keep humming, and the apartment will keep filling with the evidence of two women who stopped performing for the world and found something better on the other side. This is what she asked for. This is what comfort looks like. This is home.