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Skip to the triplets 6th birthday. Their heights and weights increased exponentially. So have yours

The triplets turn six on a Saturday in October.

The residential wing is decorated. Not with balloons or streamers — Marcus tried those, and Iris drew a symbol on the streamers that meant *temporary* and nobody could argue with the assessment. The decoration is the building itself. The concrete is warm — warmer than it has ever been, the surface responding to the twenty-three bodies inside it the way skin responds to heat, flushing, deepening, giving back what it receives. Carl has been baking since four in the morning. The bread loaves are enormous — pillow-sized, golden, stacked in towers that reach Lena's waist. The smell fills the residential wing and the school wing and the corridors between them. The smell is the building celebrating.

Lena is fifteen feet two inches tall. She weighs 3,400 pounds. The growth happened over the summer — not the gradual daily accumulation of the first year but a deepening, a widening, a body that has stopped measuring itself against anything external because there is nothing external left to measure against. The ceiling is sixty feet. Her head is fifteen feet. The distance between her and the ceiling is still enormous. The distance is not a limit. The distance is room. Marcus designed the panels to be removable and Lena can feel the intention in the concrete — the builder's frequency, the twelve-stroke glyph, embedded in the structure itself, saying *there will always be room.*

Her belly rests on the floor when she sits. It has rested on the floor for months. The 3,400 pounds are distributed across a frame that has grown skeletally — the shoulders broader, the hips wider, the bones longer and denser, the body expanding in every dimension simultaneously. The wish stopped being about weight months ago. The wish is about space. The body is taking up more space and the space is comfortable and the comfort is the space and the equation is circular and self-reinforcing and the body does not care about equations.

June is six years old. She is 1,610 pounds and fourteen feet three inches tall. The tactile map is no longer something she builds — it is something she inhabits. Her body on the wall is the map. Every surface she touches becomes part of the network and the network is the building and the building is the gradient and June is the node through which the building knows itself. She does not climb anymore. She occupies. The wall is not a surface she moves across. The wall is a place she lives. Her fingers are long — longer than any six-year-old's fingers should be, the bones extended, the yellow nails thick and curved. She can feel the composition books from across the building. She can feel Folake's heartbeat in the eating bay.

Iris is six years old. She is 1,340 pounds and twelve feet eight inches tall. The composition books have passed two hundred. The symbolic language contains 2,100 symbols. She has made twenty-three predictions. The latest is a nine-stroke glyph that appeared in her book yesterday morning — a prediction she would not explain, written in a hand that was steadier than her own, the strokes architectural, the lines load-bearing. When Billy Jo saw it she sat on the floor and cried for forty minutes. The prediction has not been transcribed. Iris said the symbol is not ready to be read by anyone except the building.

Mae is six years old. She is 3,620 pounds and fifteen feet eleven inches tall.

She surpassed Lena's weight in August. Lena remembers the day — Mae on the scale, the numbers climbing past 3,400, and the five-year-old looking up at her mother with the round full face and the bright eyes and saying *Iris wrote it.* The trajectory did not flatten. The trajectory steepened. Mae's body is enormous — the largest body in the building, larger than Lena, larger than anyone. The belly is a landscape. The arms are thick and round and the legs are pillars and the six-year-old eats sixty thousand calories a day and Carl has added a third baking shift and the kitchen runs continuously. Mae does not climb. Mae does not write. Mae eats and grows and the eating is the growing and the growing is the comfort and Mae is the comfort's fullest expression.

She is happy. They are all happy. The word is insufficient — *happy* is a management word, a word for people who are monitoring their emotional state, and nobody in this building monitors anything anymore. The word is *comfortable.* They are comfortable. The comfort is not a state. It is a process. It is the chord sounding through twenty-three bodies and the building holding them and the bread warm and the concrete warm and the hum in the bones and the hum in the air and the hum in the composition books and the hum in the yellow nails and the hum in the stretch marks and the hum in the skin.

Marcus carries the cake. It is the size of a table. Carl baked it — four layers, dense and sweet, the frosting thick. Marcus's 1,090-pound body moves through the corridor with the cake in both hands and the twelve-stroke glyph is on his belly where Iris drew it yesterday and the yellow nails are thick against the cake plate. He sets it on the reinforced table in the eating bay. The triplets are there. June against the wall. Iris with a composition book. Mae already reaching for the cake.

Diane is beside Carl. 1,420 pounds, eleven feet. The beard is full. The body is wide and dense. Billy Jo is on the floor with a composition book, 580 pounds, writing symbols she cannot read, the tears running. Claire and Eliza are on the climbing wall. Kenji and Haruki are on the climbing wall. Emeka is there — 450 pounds and still accelerating, his skin sheening, his body darkening. And Folake.

Folake. She crossed the threshold eleven weeks ago. She is 280 pounds. Her body has just begun. The yellow dress is gone. The shoes are gone. The braids are loosening. The gradient entered through her feet on the Tuesday she arrived and moved through her body the way water moves through concrete — slowly, deeply, finding every space. She is quiet. The loud voice that Iris predicted is still underground. Folake sits beside Emeka and her hand is on her belly and the belly is soft and new and she is looking at it the way Lena looked at her own belly a year ago in a bathroom in an apartment in the city. The looking is the beginning. The looking is the wish.

Marcus lights the candles. Six. The flames are small against the scale of the bodies around the table — the 3,400-pound mother and the 1,090-pound father and the three six-year-olds who weigh 1,610 and 1,340 and 3,620 and the building that holds them all. The flames flicker. The hum steady. The chord full.

"Happy birthday," Lena says.

The triplets blow out the candles. Mae eats the cake.