Turn 16 of 28
Pass out on the couch and wake up to check her verification status. Its through. Skip forward in time a month. Her monetization is wildly successful. Between it and the 10 billion dollar lottery money, she never has to worry about money again. Her weight has further increased that her belly hangs to her thighs. She never wears clothes, cleans, or shaves herself. She has starting peeing wherever.
Lena passes out on the couch with the second pizza half-eaten on her chest and the whiskey bottle rolling against her hip. Her body releases a long, rumbling fart into the soaked blanket as she sleeps, then a belch that echoes off the apartment walls, then nothing but the slow tide of her breathing.
She wakes to grey light through the window and the laptop still warm beside her. She opens it with greasy fingers and navigates to the site. A green banner across the top of her profile reads "VERIFIED CREATOR" and beneath it a notification: "Your subscription tier is now active. 14 subscribers." She stares at the number. Fourteen people have paid fifteen dollars each to watch her body grow. The warmth pulses through her and she feels herself smile, a slow, private thing.
A month passes. It moves the way water moves — steadily, without pause, reshaping everything it touches. The subscriber count climbs from fourteen to two hundred to six hundred to over a thousand. She posts daily — photos, short videos, written updates. The comments are a constant stream of encouragement and hunger and admiration. Tips come in faster than she can track them. Between the subscription income and the ten billion sitting in her bank account, money has become an abstraction, a number that grows without any effort on her part. She orders food through the delivery app the way other people breathe — automatically, without thought, three or four times a day. Her apartment becomes a landscape of containers and bottles and soaked blankets and the thick, layered smell of her.
Her body has continued its steady expansion. The wish works without interruption, without mercy, without ceiling. Her belly now hangs low enough to rest against her thighs when she sits, a heavy apron of soft flesh that spills over her lap and onto the cushion. Her breasts have grown enormous, spreading wide across her chest, heavy enough that they rest against the upper curve of her belly when she leans back. Her thighs are thick and dimpled, pressing together from hip to knee, and her arms are soft and heavy, the upper portions swaying when she reaches for food. Her face has rounded completely, her jaw soft, her neck thick. The hair on her body has grown unchecked — legs, arms, underarms, the dark trail below her navel, all of it thick and visible and untrimmed. She hasn't worn clothes since the coffee shop with Priya. She hasn't showered. She hasn't brushed her teeth. The smell of her apartment has become a living thing — dense, layered, sweet and sharp and animal — and she breathes it in like air.
She has stopped using the bathroom entirely. She urinates where she sits, the warmth spreading beneath her on the couch, soaking through blanket after blanket, and each time the act sends a pulse through her that is part satisfaction and part something deeper. She has stopped thinking of it as a choice. It is simply what her body does now — eats, grows, releases, sleeps, repeats. The site loves it. Her subscriber count is a number she no longer checks out of financial concern but out of curiosity, the way someone might check the weather. The comments have become a community, a chorus of voices telling her to keep going, that she is exactly what they want, that she is perfect. She posts a photo of herself from above — the full landscape of her body on the couch, belly hanging between her spread thighs, the mess surrounding her — and the first comment reads: "you are art." She reads it with a glass of wine balanced on the shelf of her belly and feels the warmth pulse, steady and approving, and thinks: yes.