Turn 7 of 21
ignore the mess and keep eating and getting drunk and high all weekend. Extend it into the week as well. Remarkably, her productivity improves when she his stuffed, high and drunk. She continuously releases wet burps and farts, even during meetings. The brazenness turns her on.
The weekend passes in a blur of grease and smoke and the slow, relentless expansion of Lena's body. She doesn't clean. She doesn't shower. She barely leaves the couch except to answer the door for delivery drivers and use the bathroom, and even those trips become labored as her thighs grow thicker and her belly heavier with each passing day. By Sunday night the apartment looks like evidence — towers of takeout containers on every surface, beer cans rolling under the couch, sticky sauce trails on the coffee table and the floor and her own skin. She sleeps in it. She eats in it. The smell has become part of the furniture.
Monday morning she wakes up and reaches for her laptop instead of her clothes. The thought of putting on pants doesn't even surface — it has been replaced by the simpler, warmer thought of food. She orders breakfast from the diner down the street: a breakfast burrito the size of her forearm, a side of hash browns, a chocolate milkshake she tells herself is coffee. She eats through her first meeting of the day with the camera off and the microphone muted, and when a wet belch rises midway through a status update she catches the mute button just in time, then lets it go, long and resonant, into the empty room. Her belly sits heavy and round on her lap, warm beneath her palm, and the thrill of it — the brazenness, the sheer disregard — sends a shiver through her that she doesn't try to stop.
By Tuesday she has stopped muting. The belches come during meetings and she covers them with a cough or a well-timed question, but she doesn't silence them entirely, and the risk of it — the possibility that someone might hear the low rumble of her stomach or the faint pop of gas escaping — makes her pulse quicken in a way that has nothing to do with fear. She is more productive than she has been in months. The warm haze of weed and the pleasant weight of a full stomach and the low hum of a beer buzz turn the spreadsheets and the emails into something almost rhythmic, and she finishes her work early and rewards herself with another delivery. The cycle feeds itself: eat, work, belch, eat, smoke, sleep, grow.
Wednesday she forgets to mute entirely during a team call. A long, low fart escapes into the cushion just as her director is asking about the quarterly report, and she feels the sound travel through the mic and into the digital ether, and for a moment her heart stops — and then the warmth floods her. She sits in the silence afterward, waiting for a reaction, and none comes. Maybe the mic didn't pick it up. Maybe someone heard and said nothing. The not knowing is electric. She shifts her weight and feels her body spread across the couch, feels the new softness of her thighs, the heavier hang of her breasts, and a deep wet burp rises and she lets it go without reaching for the mute button at all. The voice in her mind hums approval, and her body hums back.
By Thursday the apartment is unrecognizable. Every flat surface is buried. The kitchen sink is full of dishes crusted with old food. The bathroom mirror is fogged with a film of grime. Lena sits in the center of it all, naked and greasy and growing, her red hair matted and limp, her body hair thick and untrimmed, her belly round and warm and pressing against the laptop balanced on her thighs. She weighs more than 170 now — she can feel it in the way the couch creaks when she shifts, in the way her arms rest heavier against her sides, in the way her ass spreads across two cushions instead of one. She doesn't check the scale. She doesn't need to. The wish is working, and she is finally, finally, comfortable.