Turn 45 of 233

Step out on the balcony and stretch under the stars. Sleep there. Spend the weekend the best way I know how, eating, pushing my body and masturbating. I also get a belly button and nipple piercings on Sunday

Lena steps onto the balcony and the night air is cool against her skin — her belly, her chest, the full warm curve of her hips. The city hums below. She plants her bare feet wide on the concrete and raises her arms above her head and stretches, her whole body lengthening, her torso pulling long and golden in the dark. She twists at the waist and her belly swings with the rotation and she drops into a deep lunge and holds it, her thighs burning, her breath steady. She works through every position the way the linemen taught her — hip openers, hamstring pulls, shoulder rolls, the slow deliberate catalog of a body that needs to be maintained. When she finishes she lowers herself onto the concrete and lies on her back with her arms at her sides and her belly rising like a dome against the sky and the stars above her are faint and scattered and she closes her eyes and sleeps there with the night air on her skin and the city below and the particular peace of a body that has worked hard and eaten well and been honest about what it wants.

Saturday is a long hot blur. She wakes on the balcony at dawn with the sun warming her belly and she goes inside and eats — six eggs scrambled with cheese, a pound of bacon, a full pot of rice, a gallon of milk — and then she runs. Five miles this time. The fifth mile is ugly, her form breaking down into the same graceless grinding forward motion, her feet black, her thighs burning, her belly tight and cramping, but she finishes it and stands bent over at the end of the street with bile in her throat and her legs shaking and she grins. She goes home and masturbates on the balcony floor with the sun on her belly, thinking about the run, about the weight, about the number on the scale she hasn't checked but can feel in the way her thighs touch and her belly rests on her thighs when she sits. She eats again — a whole roast chicken, a bag of sweet potatoes, more rice, more milk — and she lifts the cinder block she keeps on the balcony and does presses and curls and rows until her arms shake and her chest is pumped and the muscle beneath the fat is burning. She eats again. She sleeps on the balcony.

Sunday morning she wakes up and eats and runs five miles again and the fifth mile is less ugly this time — her body is adapting, the form holding longer, the wall coming later — and she goes home and showers for the first time in weeks. Not because she cares about being clean but because she's going to the piercing shop on Tenth Street and even Lena has the residual social awareness to wash the construction grime off before she lets someone put needles in her skin. She walks in barefoot and shirtless in the tiny shorts and the kid behind the counter — tattooed, gauged, maybe twenty-two — looks at her body and doesn't blink. She's not his strangest customer today.

"Belly button and both nipples," Lena says.

The kid nods. "Straight barbell for the navel? Hoops or barbells for the nipples?"

"Barbells. All of it. Steel."

He marks her belly with a pen — the spot just above her navel, on the upper curve where the soft round flesh swells out — and she looks down and watches him position the clamp and the needle and she doesn't flinch when it goes through. A sharp clean heat, a moment of pressure, and then the barbell is in and the ball is threaded on and there's a small bright piece of steel sitting in the golden curve of her belly. The nipples are worse — sharper, deeper, a pain that makes her jaw tighten and her breath catch — but she breathes through it and watches and when both barbells are in she looks down at her chest and her belly and the three small bright points of steel against the tan skin and she feels a surge of something fierce and possessive. They're ornaments. They're declarations. They're the final punctuation on a body that has stopped asking permission.

She tips the kid forty percent and walks out into the Sunday afternoon sun with the fresh piercings throbbing warm and the steel catching the light and her belly leading and her bare feet on the sidewalk and she goes home and eats two pounds of ground beef with rice and beans and falls asleep on the balcony again with the stars above and the city below and the steel in her skin and the particular satisfaction of a weekend spent doing exactly what she wanted with exactly the body she wanted to do it with.