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Grab a donut and join them

Lena reaches for the donut box with the hand that isn't tangled in Marcus's. The yellow nails close around a chocolate-frosted one — the last one with sprinkles, the triplets' sprinkles, the ones that were supposed to be saved for morning. She doesn't care. The donut is cold. The frosting is tacky against her fingers. She bites into it and the sugar hits the whiskey and the weed and the warmth in her belly and everything goes soft and golden at the edges.

She rolls onto her side. The 1,498 pounds shifting on the concrete, the belly spreading like warm dough, the stretch marks catching the orange streetlight through the bay window. Marcus is beside her — 760 pounds, the beard, the yellow nails, the body that grew because he loved her. Diane is on her back across from them, the 980 pounds, the beard, the belly rising and falling. Carl is between them, cross-legged, 695 pounds, the bottle of vodka balanced on his thigh.

"These are good donuts," Lena says. The chocolate is on her teeth. The yellow teeth. She doesn't care.

"They're the triplets' donuts," Carl says.

"They're our donuts now."

Carl laughs. The laugh is loose — the vodka, the weed, the late hour. He reaches into the box and takes a glazed one and bites into it and the glaze cracks and falls on his chest and he doesn't brush it off. Nobody brushes anything off anymore. The warehouse floor is covered in crumbs and ash and spilled liquor and the bodies that live in it don't notice because the bodies are comfortable and the mess is part of the comfort.

Diane sits up. The effort is visible — 980 pounds of flesh and bone rearranging itself, the belly settling into her lap, the arms bracing against the concrete. She reaches for the cake. The half-sheet cake, the icing smeared, the letters broken — JUN and IR and MA — the birthday cake that was supposed to be for tomorrow. She tears a piece off with both hands and eats it and the blue icing is on her beard and she doesn't wipe it off.

"I ate a whole cake at my nephew's birthday once," Diane says. "My sister was furious. I was twenty-two. I thought that was the most I could ever eat. I was wrong."

"How wrong?" Marcus says.

"I could eat three of these now."

"Prove it," Lena says.

"I don't have three."

"Then eat that one and I'll get Carl to bring more tomorrow."

Diane tears another piece. The cake is dense and sweet and the icing is thick and the whiskey makes everything taste better and the weed makes everything feel better and the concrete is cold against the body and the body is warm from the inside and the hum is low and steady and the triplets are sleeping on the platform above them — June's feet twitching, Iris's notebook still on her chest, Mae's hand still on her belly.

Marcus lights another joint. The flame. The inhale. He passes it to Lena. She takes it with donut-crumb fingers and inhales and the smoke mixes with the sugar in her mouth and the whiskey in her throat and she holds it — the long hold, the deep hold, the lungs that fill a twelve-foot chest — and exhales into the warehouse dark. The smoke curls toward the ceiling. The 24-foot ceiling that June climbs. The crack June is monitoring.

"She's going to be taller than me," Lena says. Nobody asks who.

"Mae. She's going to be bigger than me. She told me today. She's one year old and she told me she's not stopping."

"She's not," Marcus says. The certainty in his voice. The voice of a man who has charted the growth curves.

"Iris plotted the exponential. If the curve holds — and there's no reason to think it won't — Mae will pass you in raw mass by age six. Maybe sooner. The curve is steepening."

"Good," Lena says. She eats the last bite of the donut. The sprinkles are on her fingers. She licks them off. The yellow nails against her tongue.

"Let her be bigger. Let her be the biggest. That's what she wants. That's what the wish gave her."

"The wish gave it to you," Diane says.

"The wish gave it to all of us," Lena says. "I wished for comfort and the comfort spread. It went into Marcus and into you and into Carl and into the triplets and into Billy Jo and into the study and into the warehouse and into the blueprints on the wall. The comfort didn't stop at my skin. It never stopped. It's still going."

The hum answers. Low. Warm. The vibration in the bones that says yes and more and this is right and keep going. The warehouse holds them — the four bodies on the concrete, the three small bodies on the platform, the smoke and the crumbs and the liquor and the icing on beards and the yellow nails in the dark. The body is comfortable. The body is more. The body is not done.