Turn 46 of 233

Show up Monday morning for the second house and set the pace. Run 6 miles after work and see what breaks. I also stop wearing the shorts entirely. Build up the sweat and grime again as well because I love the feeling of it and hate being clean

Lena wakes on the balcony floor with the steel in her skin throbbing dull and warm and the concrete cool beneath her bare back. The piercings are crusted — lymph and dried fluid around the balls — and she picks at them absently while the sky turns gray to pink. She doesn't wash them. She doesn't wash anything. She eats cold rice from the pot with her fingers standing at the kitchen counter, her belly pressing the edge, her bare ass against the cabinet behind her. The shorts are on the floor where she stepped out of them last night and she looks at them and doesn't pick them up. She doesn't pick them up on her way out the door. She drives to the site naked.

The crew is already there. Marco sees her first — sees the whole of her, the belly and the breasts and the barbells and the tan and the bare hips and the dark hair between her legs — and his face does nothing. He's past it. They're all past it. Daryl glances up from the saw and looks back down. Ray nods. Tuki hands her the coffee he brought her without a word and Lena takes it and drinks it black and standing and the morning is the same as every other morning except the air is on all of her skin and it feels right. The site sign reads CREW LEAD: L. PARK and she stands in front of it naked and golden and six-three and two-fifteen plus and she says, "Sill plates are staged. Ray, you're on layout with me. Marco, Daryl — framing packages are in the truck. Tuki, saw station. Frank, you're on joists. Let's beat last week's time."

The second house goes faster. Lena has the rhythm now — she knows where the crew is slow, where the material flow bottlenecks, where she can push and where she has to wait. She runs layout herself, snapping chalk lines barefoot on the slab, her belly swinging with each bend and straighten. The piercings catch the sun when she's on the roof and the crew below sees the steel flashing on her chest and nobody says anything. By Wednesday the walls are up. By Thursday afternoon the roof is sheeted. Friday morning the shingles go on and Lena is on the ridge naked, her bare feet on the plywood, the wind on every inch of her skin, her belly hanging full and round above the rake, and she calls measurements down to Marco and the rhythm is seamless and the house goes together like something she's done a hundred times. Walt walks it at two o'clock and checks every wall and every corner and he says, "Three days and change," and Lena says, "Monday we start the third," and Walt nods and walks away.

The sweat builds through the week. By Wednesday she can smell herself — a deep ripe musk that starts at her hairline and runs down her chest and belly and into the creases of her hips and thighs. The construction dirt layers on top of it: sawdust in the fine body hair on her forearms and calves, concrete dust in the calluses on her feet, the particular gray-brown film that comes from working a site all day. She doesn't shower. She doesn't brush her teeth. She doesn't brush her hair. By Friday her hair is matted and dark with grease and her skin is layered with the week's work and her piercings are crusted again and she runs her hand across her belly and feels the grit and the warmth and the thick softness beneath it and a deep contentment settles in her chest. This is what she wants to feel like. This is the texture of the life she chose.

After work Friday she drives to the river path and starts running. Six miles. The first four are the same as always — her feet finding the pavement, her thighs driving, her belly tight with the day's food, her breath settling into rhythm. The fifth mile is the wall and she hits it and pushes through it the way she has been — ugly, grinding, her form collapsing, her arms heavy, her bare feet slapping the concrete. The sixth mile is new territory. Her lungs are burning and her thighs are shaking and the sweat is pouring off her in sheets — running through the construction grime in dark streaks down her belly and thighs, pooling in the creases of her hips, dripping from her chin onto her chest where it runs around the steel barbells. Her feet are bleeding — the calluses cracking on the rough pavement, leaving faint pink smears on the concrete behind her. At six miles she stops. She stands bent over with her hands on her knees and her belly hanging between her arms and her chest heaving and the blood and sweat running down her legs and she straightens up and looks at the river and she is smiling. Nothing broke. The wall came and went and she is still standing and the body held and she thinks: seven on Monday.

She walks home naked and filthy and bleeding and sweating in the Friday evening light and the city moves around her and she doesn't care. She eats everything in the kitchen — the rest of the rice, a pound of ground beef, six eggs, a half gallon of milk — and she lies on the balcony floor with her belly full and her body wrecked and the steel in her skin and the stars coming out and she thinks about Monday. Third house. Seven miles. More food. More weight. More. The word sits in her chest like a stone and it is not the wish's voice and it never was again. It is hers.