Turn 11 of 233
Walk out of the meeting. This conversation happens again the next day. Same result. Get fired by end of the week. I feel relief and can finally pursue my true passion. My body also becomes gradually fatter and stronger throughout the week and I become even more of a slob, especially farting and burping more often
Lena pushes back from the conference room table and the chair legs scrape against the carpet. She doesn't say anything else. She doesn't need to. The folder is still open, the photographs still face up, and Priya is still sitting there with whatever that look on her face was — the one Lena can't name and doesn't try to. She walks out barefoot down the carpeted hall, her belly swaying with each step, and doesn't close the door behind her.
The formal written warning arrives by email that afternoon. Priya's tone is crisp and procedural: conduct violations documented, expectations outlined, a thirty-day improvement period established. Lena reads it once, closes it, and eats a family-size bag of potato chips at her desk with the crinkling loud enough that two coworkers glance over. She lets out a burp that echoes off the cubicle walls and doesn't look up. By Thursday she has received a second warning — same conference room, same folder, same careful language. Priya's mask is thinner this time, her eyes sharper, and when she says "This is your last opportunity, Lena," Lena leans back in her chair, feels her belly press warm and round against the waistband she stopped buttoning two days ago, and says, "I know." She walks out again. The door stays open behind her.
The week passes in a blur of escalation. Each morning she wakes heavier — the scale climbs from 167 to 171 to 174 to 178 — and each morning the getting-ready shrinks to less and less. She stops brushing her hair entirely. She stops pretending the shirts will stretch. By Wednesday she is wearing the same oversized t-shirt three days running, stained with grease and chocolate milk and whatever she ate in bed the night before, and the jeans are gone in favor of a pair of cotton shorts that ride up her thickened thighs and barely contain the full round weight of her ass. She eats bigger breakfasts. She farts openly in the bathroom, in the hallway, at her desk — long, rumbling, unapologetic — and the burps come deeper and more frequent, rolling up from her expanded stomach with a resonance that vibrates in her chest. She doesn't cover her mouth. She doesn't say excuse me. The old Lena would have died. This Lena grins.
Her work, impossibly, stays sharp. She files the best quarterly projections the department has seen in three years. Her manager sends a brief email acknowledging the quality. Priya sends nothing. Derek from accounting stops pretending he isn't watching — he lingers near her desk on Thursday, eyes on her bare feet and the strip of belly below her shirt, and says something about the weather that neither of them listens to. Lena feels his gaze on her body like sunlight and doesn't mind it. She doesn't invite it either. She just exists, larger and louder and more present than she has ever been.
Friday morning. She arrives twenty minutes late, barefoot, unwashed, wearing a tank top that has given up entirely — riding above her navel, clinging to breasts that have grown a full cup size this week, stretched so thin the fabric is nearly transparent. Her belly hangs soft and heavy over the waistband of shorts that dig into her hips. She sits at her desk, opens a container of leftover pasta she brought from home, and eats it cold with her fingers at 9 AM. The email comes at 10:15. Termination notice. Effective immediately. Please collect your personal belongings and report to HR for final processing.
She reads it twice. The warmth doesn't flare — it settles, deep and certain, like the final piece of something clicking into place. She feels her belly pressed against the desk, her thighs spread wide in the chair, her bare feet flat on the carpet, and what rises in her is not anger or grief. It's relief. Clean and vast and physical, like setting down a weight she has been carrying so long she forgot it was there. She was never meant for this office, this carpet, this fluorescent light. She has known that for years. The wish just gave her permission to stop pretending.
She collects her things in a box — a coffee mug, a photo of nothing important, a handful of pens. The walk to HR is slow and deliberate. Priya is at the front desk, not in the conference room, and her face does something complicated when she sees Lena walking toward her with the box. Lena stops. She is a head taller than Priya, broader, softer, stronger, and she smells like three days without a shower and cold pasta and something deeper that is just her skin. She sets the box on the counter.
"I'm done," Lena says. Not angry. Not triumphant. Just clear, the way a bell is clear after the ringing stops. Priya opens her mouth and closes it. Her eyes drop to Lena's belly, to the bare feet on the office carpet, and something moves behind them that Lena still can't name. Lena turns and walks out of the building, barefoot, into the late-morning sun, and the sidewalk is warm under her soles and her body is huge and alive and hers.