Turn 27 of 28

record a new video showing the full scope of her immobility. After a week, an unexpected visitor appears, her former friend Priya. She is horrified. But also deep, deep down, somewhere where even Priya doesn't know, she is turned on and wishes she could become just like Lena.

Lena reaches for the laptop and props it open against a crushed soda can wedged in the waste beside her hip. She angles the camera wide and hits record. The frame captures the full scope of her — the belly spreading across the buried floor like a pale landscape, reaching the couch, pooling outward in every direction. Her thighs, splayed and immense, press against towers of delivery boxes. Her arms move, slowly, heavily, but the rest of her is stone. She tries to lift her hips and nothing happens. She tries to roll and her body simply refuses, the mass too great, too settled, too distributed across the floor. She turns her face to the camera.

"I can't move," she says. Her voice is quiet and clear.

"I can't stand. I can't roll over. I can't reach anything that isn't right here." She holds the shot for a long moment — her body, the apartment, the layered waste, the towers of boxes — and then reaches forward and stops the recording. She uploads it with the title "completely immobile — this is me now" and drops the laptop back against her hip.

A week passes. Lena eats, drinks, releases, sleeps, and grows. The subscriber count on her site ticks past five thousand two hundred. Tips arrive in steady pulses. She barely notices them anymore — they are background noise, as constant and unremarkable as the warmth in her belly. The apartment darkens around her, the windows sealed, the air thick enough to taste.

Then someone knocks on the front door. Lena's eyes open. She hasn't heard a knock in months. The knock comes again, louder, and then a voice — familiar, sharp, threading through the thickness of the air.

"Lena? Lena, it's me. Open the door."

Priya. Lena stares at the ceiling. She cannot reach the door. She cannot stand. She says nothing, and after a long silence she hears the handle turn — the lock is broken, has been for months — and the door swings open.

Priya stands in the doorway and the smell hits her first. Her whole body flinches. Then the sight registers — the waste, the towers, the darkness, and at the center of it all, Lena, enormous and naked and covered in red hair, lying on the floor like a landscape, her belly spreading across the room. Priya's hand comes up to her mouth. Her eyes fill. She takes one step inside and stops.

"Lena," she says. "What happened to you."

Lena turns her head. She looks at Priya with calm, half-lidded eyes.

"I'm comfortable," she says. "For the first time in my life."

Priya stares. Her face moves through horror, through grief, through something she can't name. She takes another step and her shoe presses into something soft and wet and she almost retches but doesn't. Her eyes travel across Lena's body — the vast belly, the red hair matted and unwashed, the skin glistening — and something flickers behind the horror in her face. Something she doesn't recognize. Something warm and dark and pulling, buried so deep she doesn't even feel it consciously. She looks away quickly, her chest tight.

"You need help," Priya says, but her voice has changed. Something in it has softened.

"You need — Lena, you can't just —" She stops. She is staring again. She catches herself and looks at the wall. Her breathing is unsteady.