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Bask in your success in the only way you know how

Lena reads the email three times. The numbers sit on the screen — clean, bright, impossible, real. Quintupled. The word doesn't feel like a word. It feels like a sound, a hum, the same hum that has been under everything since the morning the jeans were tight and the belly sat heavy and the hand found the curve and the voice said *this is better, let it keep going.* The hum is the word. The word is the hum.

She closes the laptop. The office is warm. The carpet is black and soft under her bare feet and the walls hold the stains of ninety-six hours and twelve days and two months and the fluorescent lights hum and the building hums and the hum is everything. She stands. The chair screams. 470 pounds shifts and the belly swings and the thighs roll and the yellow toenails sink into the ruined carpet and the body is the body and the body is good.

Diane is watching. The beard is still. The brown eyes are steady. Lena doesn't speak. She walks to the center of the office — the open space between the desks, the stained carpet, the corner where the mold has thickened into something alive — and she stands there and she feels it. All of it. The 470 pounds and the matted hair and the yellow nails and the unwashed skin and the belly hanging low and the breasts heavy and the thighs touching and the stretch marks white and deep and the body is hers and the body is comfortable and the body has never been wrong. The wish hums and the hum is warm and the hum says *more* and the *more* is not a demand. The *more* is a promise.

She squats. The knees crack. The belly pools on the thighs. The carpet is warm under her — warm from the building, warm from the mold, warm from the two of them and the months of work and food and smoke and piss and everything that has soaked into the fibers. She lets go. The piss comes hot and long and steady, soaking into the black carpet, spreading in a dark circle that meets the older stains and merges with them. The smell rises — sharp, warm, layered, the new piss on the old piss on the stream piss on the months of piss — and the smell is the office and the office is hers and the piss is hers and the body is hers and the hum is everything.

Then the food. The drawer — the bottom drawer of the desk, the one that has been the snack drawer since November — pulls open and the yellow nails find the bags. Chips. Donuts. The cold chicken from the morning, still greasy, the container warm from the office air. She eats on the floor. On the carpet. The belly spreading, the crumbs falling into the stains, the grease on the yellow nails and the yellow nails tearing the bags and the bags emptying and the body filling. The hum is warm. The body is warm. The work is done and the numbers are real and the salary is real and the body is real and the carpet is warm and the food is good.

Diane joins her. No words. The beard doesn't speak. 411 pounds lowers itself onto the carpet beside Lena — the floor groaning, the mold compressed, the two of them enormous and bare and unwashed and the yellow nails and the beard and the belly and the breasts and the thighs. Diane reaches into the drawer. Finds a bag. The cellophane crinkles. The two of them eat on the floor of the destroyed office that saved the company two hundred and eighty million dollars and the fluorescent lights hum and the building hums and the carpet is warm and the hum is quiet and the hum is certain and the hum has never been wrong.