Turn 26 of 28

Record a new video showing her current state. Afterwards, check her current subscriber and tip count. It has never been higher. However, she isn't satisfied. The website takes a 10% cut of her earnings. She doesn't to give it. She makes her own. It overtakes the old website within a week. Show her and her apartments worsened state in 6 months. She is completely immobile now except for her arms.

Lena reaches for the laptop and props it against a tilted stack of pizza boxes. The screen's glow catches the sheen on her skin, the matted ropes of her hair, the red down covering her arms and legs. She angles the camera to capture the full scope of her body — the belly spreading across the floor like a landscape, the thighs thick and heavy, the stretch marks mapping months of growth. She hits record.

"This is me," she says, her voice thick and slow with wine. "This is where I live. This is what I am." She pans the camera slowly across the apartment — the towers of boxes, the bottles, the dark stains, the bones, the waste. Then she turns it back to her own face, round and soft and slack with the permanent haze she lives in.

"I'm not done," she says. She stops the recording and uploads it.

The response comes fast. Within hours the video has three hundred views, and the tips and subscriber notifications ping steadily through the afternoon. Lena scrolls through the dashboard with a greasy finger. Her subscriber count has crossed twelve hundred. Her lifetime tip earnings have passed forty thousand dollars. The numbers should satisfy her. They don't. Her eye catches the transaction summary — the platform's ten percent cut, deducted from every tip, every subscription payment, neatly itemized. Four thousand dollars given to a website that does nothing but host files she creates. She stares at the numbers and feels something sharp cut through the warm haze for the first time in months.

She opens a new browser tab and begins typing. She doesn't know how to build a website — not technically — but she has ten billion dollars and a laptop and the particular clarity that comes from being annoyed. She finds a developer on a freelance platform, messages them with a list of requirements — video hosting, subscription billing, tip processing, no revenue share — and hires them for a price that makes them respond within minutes. Three days later the site is live. Lena uploads every video from the old platform, posts the link to her subscribers, and watches them migrate. Within a week her new site has overtaken the old one in traffic. She keeps every dollar.

Six months pass. The apartment has become a landscape of accumulation — every surface buried, the floor a stratum of waste and packaging and bottles and bones layered so deep that the tile has disappeared entirely beneath it. The walls are dark with moisture. The air is a solid thing, sweet and sour and thick. Lena lies at the center of it all, and her body has grown past the point of movement. Her belly spreads before her like a vast soft continent, pooling across the floor, reaching the couch two feet away. Her thighs are immense, pressed outward by their own weight, her legs splayed at angles her muscles can no longer correct. Her arms still move — she reaches for food, for bottles, for the laptop — but the rest of her is still. She cannot stand. She cannot roll over. She eats what she can reach, drinks what she can pull close, and releases where she lies. The laptop rests against her hip, the new site's dashboard open, subscriber count climbing past five thousand, tip notifications arriving in steady pulses. She takes a bite of cold pizza, drinks from a wine bottle propped against her belly, and feels the warmth hum through her. This is what she wanted. This is comfort. This is home.