Turn 5 of 21

order a massive delivery lunch and eat it all naked on the couch. Get stains all over her body and release loud and stinky burps and farts. After work is done, order beer and weed and get high and drunk and stuff yourself further, getting more stains and more farts and burps. Pass out on the couch, not having showered or shaved.

The delivery arrives at noon — four bags of it, enough food for a family, and the delivery driver gives Lena a look when she opens the door wearing nothing but a t-shirt that barely covers her hips. She doesn't care. She carries the bags to the couch with both arms full and sets them down on the coffee table and surveys the spread like a queen surveying her court. Two orders of pad see ew, a large green curry, an order of spring rolls, a container of dumplings, a side of coconut rice, and a mango sticky rice she added at the last minute because she deserved it. She eats with her hands half the time, chopsticks the other half, and she eats the way she has learned to eat this week — without pacing, without pausing, without the small careful bites that used to be her signature.

The food is warm and rich and her belly swells as she works through it, the t-shirt riding up until it is bunched uselessly above her navel and she pulls it off entirely because it is in the way. Curry drips down her chin and she wipes it with the back of her hand and smears a streak of yellow across her collarbone. A spring roll breaks apart and the oil runs down between her breasts and she laughs and keeps eating. The couch cushions are dark with soy sauce and grease by the time she finishes the second order of noodles, and her belly is taut and round against her thighs, and she leans back and releases a belch so long and low it reverberates off the walls. The apartment fills with the smell of curry and digestion and she doesn't open a window.

She works between bites, laptop balanced on a cushion beside her, and her productivity is fine — better than fine, actually, because the fullness makes her slow and focused and the warm haze in her mind turns the spreadsheets into something almost meditative. A fart rolls out of her midway through a conference call and she mutes herself just in time, then unmutes and answers a question about Q3 projections as though nothing happened. The call ends and she unmutes and belches so hard her laptop vibrates on the cushion.

After work she orders from the app. Six pack of IPAs and a pre-roll from the dispensary two blocks over, and the same delivery driver brings both and this time he doesn't look at her at all, which suits her fine. She cracks the first beer on the couch and lights the joint and the first hit makes her cough and then melts into a warm floaty hum that makes the whole apartment feel like a cocoon. She orders more food — pizza this time, a large with extra cheese, and garlic knots, and a two-liter of soda she drinks straight from the bottle. The pizza arrives and she eats it cross-legged on the couch with the beer between her thighs and the joint smoldering in the ashtray and her belly resting heavy and warm on her lap.

She doesn't notice the stains until she tries to stand and can't. Tomato sauce on her left breast, a smear of garlic butter across her belly, soda drips drying sticky on her inner thigh. Her body is a map of everything she has eaten today and the smell of her — food and sweat and beer and the faint sour note of digestion working overtime — fills the apartment like a fog. She belches and it tastes like cheese and hops, and she laughs, and a fart follows it, long and low and resonant against the leather couch, and the warm voice in her mind says yes and yes and yes. She reaches for another slice and the pizza box is empty and she doesn't remember finishing it. She reaches for another beer and there is one left and she drinks it warm. Her eyes are closing before she finishes it. The last thing she feels is her own body — heavy, warm, full, spreading into the cushions — and the last thing she hears is a long, slow rumble from somewhere deep in her belly as the wish works through the night.