Turn 5 of 28

Continue eating for the rest of the day. Don't stop burping, farting or other slobby behavior. Continue even after all your buttons have popped off. At the end of the work day, take a photo with your stained shirt that has all of its buttons missing, braless and with your jeans unbuttoned and post on instagram. Go home like that. Once there, strip naked and continue eating until in food coma.

By noon the third button surrenders. It pops off with a small, decisive ping and rolls under Marcus's desk. He flinches but doesn't look down. Lena is mid-bite of her second sandwich and doesn't pause — she chews, swallows, and feels the shirt gape wider, her belly pushing forward into open air, the fabric hanging in two loose halves that used to meet across her middle. The sauce stain has been joined by a smear of mayonnaise on her collar and a dribble of milkshake down the front. She sets the empty sandwich wrapper beside the three other wrappers accumulating at the corner of her desk and reaches for the fries.

The fourth button goes at one-fifteen, during a long, rumbling belch that she leans into, eyes half-closed. The button catches the edge of her monitor and disappears. Her shirt is open from just below her chest to the hem, her belly rounded and full and completely exposed, the soft skin warm under the fluorescent lights. She drops a fry on herself, picks it up from the bare slope of her stomach, and eats it. Marcus has moved his chair three inches farther away. She doesn't care. She orders another delivery — a large pizza, breadsticks, a two-liter — and eats without stopping while spreadsheets blur on her screen.

The last button holds until almost three. She shifts to reach for the breadsticks and it gives with a soft, exhausted pop, landing in the cheese of the pizza box. Lena looks down at herself — shirt completely open, braless underneath, her breasts visible through the gauze-thin gap where the buttons used to be, her belly resting heavy and round against her unfastened jeans. The rubber band finally snaps at the same moment, pinging off somewhere under the desk, and her jeans fall open at the waist. She feels the pressure release from her lower belly and a long, low sigh escapes her. The voice in her head is practically purring. This is what freedom feels like. She leans back, and the chair groans.

The afternoon passes in a haze of food and small bodily releases she no longer thinks to suppress. A fart rumbles against the seat of her chair and she shifts her weight to let it happen fully, feeling the vibration, the warmth. She licks garlic butter from her fingers and wipes them on the ruined shirt, adding to the constellation of stains. Coworkers pass her desk and pretend not to see. One woman from accounting does a visible double-take and speeds up. Marcus leaves at four-thirty without a word, his face tight. Lena finishes the pizza.

At five-fifteen, she stands and pulls out her phone. The bathroom mirror gives her the full picture: shirt hanging open, every button gone, stained with sauce and grease and milkshake, her belly round and exposed beneath it, jeans unbuttoned and sagging on her widened hips. She lifts the phone, angles it to catch the disarray, the fullness of her body, the stains, the gaps. She posts it with the caption "Full and free" and walks out of the building like that, into the warm evening air, feeling the breeze against the skin her clothes can no longer cover.

At home she strips naked and stands in front of the full-length mirror, watching the body she barely recognizes — rounded belly, heavy breasts, soft thighs, the gentle curve of fat at her back — and feels no shame. She pulls leftovers from the fridge, then orders more, and eats on the couch with nothing on, feeling every bite land in her belly and the warmth pulse beneath her skin. She grows as she eats, the couch cushion sinking deeper beneath her. The phone buzzes with Instagram notifications she stops counting. A fart escapes into the cushion and she giggles, then belches, then takes another bite. The voice is quiet now, not because it has gone silent, but because it has nothing left to convince her of. She already knows. She eats until her eyelids grow heavy, the container balanced on the soft shelf of her belly, and she drifts into a deep, warm, dreamless sleep with crumbs on her skin and a smile on her face.