Turn 150 of 228

Focus on the triplets' medical data. A month later, Diane is standing at 9'6" and just as fat and disgusting as ever. The triplets are extremely developed for their age, height, weight and milestones wise. I begin my own growth spurt

The triplets are a month old. The appointment is at the clinic — the same clinic, the same staff, the same wide-eyed silence when Lena walks in naked and barefoot and 1,050 pounds with three babies strapped against her chest in cloth slings. Billy Jo is there with the laptop. The yellow nails on the keys. The nurse takes the measurements. The room is quiet except for the hum of the scale and the beeping monitors and the scratch of Billy Jo's typing.

The numbers don't make sense. The first triplet — seven pounds six ounces at birth — is now fourteen pounds two ounces. The second — six pounds fourteen ounces at birth — is thirteen pounds nine ounces. The third — eight pounds one ounce at birth — is fifteen pounds eleven ounces. A normal month-old infant gains roughly a pound and a half. These babies have nearly doubled. The lengths are wrong too. Twenty-three inches. Twenty-two and a half. Twenty-four. A normal month-old is twenty inches. The head circumferences are ahead. The reflexes are ahead. The grasping is strong — the tiny fingers wrap around Lena's yellow thumbnail and grip with a force that makes the nurse step back.

"They're holding their heads up," the pediatrician says. She's holding the third triplet — the biggest — and the baby is staring at her face. Not the unfocused newborn stare. The locked-on, tracking, deliberate stare of an infant months older.

"This is — this is a two-month milestone. Possibly three."

Billy Jo types. The drawl is quiet. "The growth charts don't apply here."

"No," the pediatrician says. "They don't."

Lena looks down at the three faces against her chest. The babies are warm. The babies are growing. The hum is three heartbeats and the heartbeats are strong and the body is comfortable and the body feeds them and the body doesn't distinguish between its own growth and theirs because comfort is comfort and the wish doesn't stop for anything.

Billy Jo adds the data to the study that night. The new subsection: *Offspring Development Trajectory: Accelerated Somatic and Neurological Maturation in Index Case Progeny.* The numbers are clean. The pattern is clear. The triplets are not normal. The triplets are the word spreading.

Diane arrives Tuesday. She doesn't fit through the apartment door.

Not sideways. Not angled. The 905-pound body is the same — the belly, the beard, the stretch marks, the body hair, the yellow nails, the unwashed skin, the bare feet. But the body is taller. The head is above the doorframe. The shoulders are wider than the door. The belly enters first and the rest follows and the ceiling is closer than it was and the apartment is smaller than it was and Diane stands in the living room with her head bent against the ceiling and the look on her face is the one that used to be managed like quarterly reports and isn't anymore.

"Nine foot six," she says. The voice is different — lower, slower, the vocal cords stretched. The beard is longer. The body hair is thicker. The stretch marks run down the thighs and the calves and the forearms. The bare feet are enormous — long and wide and flat, the yellow toenails clicking the floor like small hooves. The 905 pounds are distributed across the new height and the fat is the same fat and the disgusting is the same disgusting and the body is just more of it. More tall. More wide. More heavy. More bare. More unwashed. More Diane.

"My feet started growing in the hospital," she says. She lowers herself to the floor. The apartment shakes. The ceiling is eight feet and she is nine-six and she sits with her legs folded and her head still touches the ceiling.

"Then my legs. Then my spine. It took three weeks. I couldn't stand in my apartment. I couldn't stand in the office. I slept on the floor in the hallway because it was the only space long enough. Carl brought food. He had to duck through the door."

Lena sits on the couch. The triplets are in the slings. The yellow nails. The 1,050-pound body. The hum. She looks at Diane — 905 pounds, nine feet six inches, the beard, the yellow nails, the stretch marks, the body that stopped pretending and the body that is still changing.

"You're still you," Lena says.

"I'm more me," Diane says.

Billy Jo is on the floor. The laptop. The yellow nails. The drawl. She's typing. She's typing fast.

"The growth trajectory isn't weight," Billy Jo says. "It's skeletal. The proximity transformation was somatic — weight, fat, muscle, hair, nails. This is structural. Bone length. Bone density. The frame itself is changing. This is new data. This is — this is the word traveling further than we thought it would."

Lena feels it then. Not in the triplets. Not in Diane. In herself. The hum shifts. The hum has been warm and patient and steady for over a year and the hum is still warm and patient and steady but the hum is moving. The hum is in the bones now. The hum is in the spine. The hum is in the femurs and the tibias and the feet and the hands and the skull and the hum is not just weight anymore. The hum is the body growing in a new direction.

The yellow nails look longer. Not because they grew — because the fingers grew. The hands are bigger. The feet are wider. The 1,050 pounds shift on the couch and the couch groans and the ceiling feels closer than it did this morning. The body is comfortable. The body is more. The body is the word and the word is spreading and the spreading is not just fat anymore. The spreading is the frame itself. The spreading is *more.*