Turn 25 of 28

simply lie here, eat, drink, and let another day pass

Lena reaches for the pizza box beside her without opening her eyes fully. Her fingers find the crust, close around it, and she pulls the slice to her mouth. The cheese has gone cold and the sauce has congealed into something rubbery, but she chews slowly, steadily, and swallows. Her belly rests on the floor between her spread thighs, a warm and immense weight that shifts with each breath. She doesn't move from the spot where she passed out last night. There is no reason to move. The floor holds everything she needs — food within arm's reach, the whiskey bottle she finished replaced by a wine bottle she hasn't opened yet, the laptop glowing with its steady pulse of notifications.

The wine bottle cap twists off with a sharp crack and she drinks without sitting up, tilting the bottle against her lips, red wine running from the corner of her mouth down her chin and neck. She swallows, belches, drinks again. The morning light that leaks through the curtains is gray and faint, and she watches it crawl across the ceiling while her hand reaches for the next box — fried chicken, cold, the breading soft and damp. She eats a thigh, then a breast, then a wing, dropping the bones onto the floor beside her where they join a small cemetery of bones from days and weeks before.

Her body releases without warning or ceremony. A long, slow fart vibrates against the floor beneath her hips. Urine follows, warm and steady, spreading beneath her thighs and pooling in the shallow depression her body has worn into the tile over the weeks. She doesn't pause her eating. The smell rises and mingles with the permanent atmosphere of the apartment — the layered sweetness of rotting food, the sour undertone of old wine, the deep organic musk of her unwashed body and everything it has released onto every surface. She has stopped distinguishing between the smells. They are all just the smell of home.

The laptop pings. She reaches for it with a greasy hand and pulls it closer, the screen casting light across her face. A new comment on the aftermath video: "you're still going aren't you?" from a user called feedmore. Lena types back with one finger, slowly: "every day. every day." A tip notification appears — fifty dollars from growwatcher, with the message: "don't ever stop." She reads it twice and feels the warmth pulse through her, low and approving, settling into the spaces between her bones like something that has always belonged there.

The afternoon passes in a haze of eating and drinking and releasing. The lasagna from yesterday, a box of garlic knots she finds crushed beneath a wine bottle, a half-eaten cake with a fork still stuck in it. She eats everything she can reach without standing, dragging boxes toward her with her feet when her arms tire. The wine bottle empties and she rolls it away and it clinks against the others lining the baseboard. She opens the second bottle and drinks it warm. Her belly grows fuller, pressing outward, the skin warm and taut, and she rests both hands on it and feels the food settling inside her, converting slowly into more of her. The light outside shifts from gray to gold to dark. She has not moved from the floor. She has not needed to. She eats another slice of pizza, drinks another mouthful of wine, and feels the wish humming through her body like a second heartbeat — steady, patient, endless.