Turn 8 of 28
Keep eating and drinking until she passes out on the couch again. Waking up on Monday morning, she finds out she won the lottery. Specifically she won 10 billion dollars. As a result, she quits her job and celebrates the best way she knows how. More eating, drinking, burping and farting. Her lack of hygiene turns her on even more as well. She doesn't even to the washroom to pee anymore, only poop.
Lena reaches for the wine bottle and finds it empty. She shakes it, tips it upside down over her open mouth, and the last red drop falls onto her tongue. The Thai containers are stacked three high on the floor beside the couch, the pizza box is open and empty, and her belly is taut and round beneath her, pressing into the cushion when she leans forward. She feels the warmth pulse through her midsection and a deep, rumbling fart vibrates out of her, long and sustained, and she presses down harder to extend it, feeling the resonance travel through her body and settle low in her hips. The shudder that follows is warm and liquid. She closes her eyes, the empty bottle still in her hand, and sleep takes her in mid-breath.
She wakes to grey Monday light and the insistent buzzing of her phone. The couch has molded itself around her body overnight, the cushion dipped low beneath her hips. She is heavier than she was yesterday — she can feel it in the way her thighs press against the armrest, in the way her belly rests on the couch surface beside her. She reaches for the phone, expecting another Instagram notification, and sees a series of emails from the state lottery commission. Her brow furrows. She opens the first one, then the second, then the third, and sits up very slowly. Ten billion dollars. The number doesn't process. She reads it again. The ticket she bought on a whim three weeks ago, the one she forgot about, the one she stuffed in her wallet and never checked — ten billion dollars.
She sits on the couch naked, unwashed, crumbs dried to her skin, her hair matted, her body odour thick in the warm apartment air, and the number swims in front of her eyes. She doesn't call anyone. She doesn't scream. She picks up her phone and opens her email, and with greasy fingers she types a two-line message to her manager: "I quit. Effective immediately. Thank you for the opportunity." She hits send before the reality fully lands, and then it does, and a laugh breaks out of her — sharp, loud, surprised — that turns into a belch halfway through, rolling up from her stomach and echoing off the walls.
She orders everything. The delivery app glows with her selections — a full breakfast platter, lobster rolls, a whole cheesecake, two bottles of champagne, a mountain of dumplings, a pasta order large enough for six people. She adds wine, then more wine, then a bottle of whiskey she's never tried. She spends two hundred dollars without blinking because the number in her bank account is so large it has stopped feeling like money. When the delivery arrives she takes the bags at the door naked, signs the receipt, and carries everything to the couch in three heavy trips, her belly swaying with each step, her thighs rubbing together with a soft, warm sound.
She eats and drinks without pause, champagne fizzing into belch after belch that she forces out deliberately, leaning forward, pressing her stomach down, feeling each one build and release in a wave that travels through her whole body. The warmth between her hips sharpens with every one. A pressure builds low and she lets it go without moving — a long, hot stream that pools beneath her on the blanket, soaking into the fabric, warm against her thighs. The smell rises and she breathes it in, and something about the wrongness of it — the sheer, deliberate disregard — sends a pulse through her that makes her gasp. She reaches for the cheesecake, and a fart rumbles out of her, long and deep and resonant, vibrating through the wet blanket beneath her, and she presses into it with her eyes half-closed and a sound escaping her lips that she doesn't try to suppress.