Turn 103 of 228

Sleep in and go to work late, it can wait. Before you leave to go to work at 1pm, Marcus weighs in at 395. Both you and Diane finish the rest of the year's work by 3pm. The both of you take a Sabbatical for the rest of the year. Skip to the end of the Sabbatical

Lena wakes at eleven. The couch has held them — 440 and 360, the springs permanently bowed, the cushions compressed into shapes that belong to no one else. Marcus is already up, standing in the kitchen doorway, the belly hanging low, the beard matted, the yellow nails clicking against the doorframe. He steps on the scale. The numbers climb and settle. 395. He has gained thirty-five pounds over the weekend. He looks down at the belly, the stretch marks fresh and pink against the brown, and laughs the slow laugh.

"The stream was good for me," he says. Lena watches from the couch and the wish hums and the hum approves.

They eat. They smoke. They don't hurry. The apartment is warm and the morning is long and the clock moves without urgency. At one o'clock Lena kisses Marcus — the beard scratchy, the mouth tasting like stale beer and gummies — and walks barefoot to work. The sidewalk is warm. The toenails click. 440 pounds moving through the afternoon, the belly swaying, the breasts shifting, the body doing what the body does. The building is quiet. The elevator is empty. The office door opens and the smell is still there — the weekend, the stream, the piss-soaked carpet, the stained wall, the air thick with ninety-six hours of four bodies living. Diane is already at the desk. The beard is thicker. The belly is wider. The brown eyes are clear.

"I cleared the morning queue," Diane says. "What's left is the rest of the year."

They start at one-fifteen. The screens are bright. The gummies are in the drawer. The whiskey is empty but Marcus texted that he's sending a delivery — two bottles, a bag of pre-rolls, a box of fried chicken — and Lena's fingers move on the keyboard and the yellow nails click and the reports build and the analysis flows. The two of them work the way they worked before — fast, sharp, the insights clean, the numbers real. The gummies sink in. The pre-rolls smoke. The chicken arrives and they eat with one hand and type with the other and the grease runs down their wrists and the keyboards are sticky and the reports keep coming. By three o'clock the queue is empty. Not today's queue. Not the month's queue. The entire remaining year. Every report, every projection, every client brief, every Henderson follow-up — filed, completed, submitted. The system logs the timestamps. One forty-five to three. Ninety minutes. The rest of the year done.

Diane leans back in the chair. The metal groans. The beard catches the screen light. She picks up her phone and types something and shows Lena the screen — an email to corporate, already drafted, requesting a sabbatical for both of them through December 31. The justification is the completed work. The numbers are attached. The branch metrics are attached. The timestamps are attached. Diane hits send. The office is quiet. The two of them sit in the destroyed office on the destroyed carpet in the destroyed air and the screens are bright with finished work and the email is sent and the afternoon is gold.

The approval comes in twenty minutes. Corporate doesn't push back. The numbers are the numbers. The work is the work. The Garfield branch is twenty-four points ahead of second place and the two people who put it there have just completed the entire year's queue in ninety minutes and the sabbatical is granted — effective immediately, through December 31, paid, full salary, no conditions. Diane reads the email aloud. The beard moves. The voice is flat and warm.

"Sabbatical approved. See you January second." Lena laughs. The belly shakes. The chair groans. The office is done. The year is done. The work is done.

The weeks pass. The sabbatical is a long warm blur of the apartment and the couch and Marcus and the food and the weed and the streams — shorter ones now, weeknight streams, two or three hours, the subscribers climbing past 1,200, then 1,300, the tips stacking, the bodies growing. Lena's weight climbs — 450, 460, 470 — the belly wider, the apron heavier, the stretch marks deeper, the body hair thicker, the nails longer and more yellow. Marcus passes 400, then 420, the two of them on the couch like a landscape, the springs permanently bowed, the cushions shaped to their bodies alone. Diane and Carl come on Saturdays — the Charleswood Theater, row seven, the four of them enormous and naked and barefoot and unwashed, the seats holding, the aisle accepting everything. The weeks are warm. The weeks are full. The wish hums under everything and the hum is everything and the year turns and December comes and the sabbatical ends and January second is a Monday and the alarm will ring and the office will be there and the numbers will be there and the bodies will be there and Lena will be there.