Turn 25 of 228

Go to work but stop showering permanently — let the slob state become total

Monday morning arrives grey and humid, and Lena wakes on the couch where she's been sleeping for days, the cushion permanently molded to the shape of her body. She doesn't stand up right away. She lies there and feels the stiffness in her lower back and the ache in her knees and the weight of her belly pressing her into the cushions, and she breathes it in — the apartment smell, her smell, the layered accumulation of five days without washing. Her skin is tacky with old sweat and grease. Her hair lies flat against the couch arm in a dark, matted sheet. The stubble on her legs and under her arms has thickened into coarse, curling hair that catches the grey light from the window. She scratches her belly and feels the texture of it — rough where crumbs have embedded themselves in the soft folds, smooth where skin meets skin and stays damp.

She eats breakfast on the couch: a bag of chips, four donuts, and half a two-liter of warm soda. She smokes a joint while she eats and the morning haze settles over her like a second skin. She doesn't go to the bathroom. She doesn't turn on the shower. She doesn't brush her teeth — she can feel the film on them, her tongue sliding over the texture, and she doesn't care. She picks up her phone and checks OnlyFans — eighty-two subscribers now, the coffee shop post pulling steady likes — and then she stands and walks to the door. She's naked. She's been naked for days. The thought of putting on clothes doesn't enter her mind the way it used to, as something automatic, something required. It enters and leaves, like a breeze through an open window.

The walk to the bus stop is six blocks and the morning air is warm and thick. Her bare feet know the sidewalk now — every crack, every rough patch, every hot stretch of asphalt at the crosswalks. Her body moves through it the way it moves through everything now: heavily, slowly, without apology. Her belly sways with each step. Her breasts shift and bounce. The stubble on her legs catches the light and a woman pushing a stroller crosses to the other side of the street. Lena farts as she walks — a long, low sound that a man behind her clearly hears because he speeds up — and she doesn't turn around. The bus arrives and she sits in the back and her thighs spread across the seat and her body heat and smell fill the space around her and nobody sits within three rows.

She walks into the office building naked and the security guard — the young one, the one who saw her Friday — looks up from the desk and his face goes through something she's seen before: surprise, confusion, the calculation of whether this is worth confronting, and then the decision not to. She walks past him. The elevator opens. She steps inside and watches her reflection in the polished metal — 245 pounds, unwashed, stubbled, crumb-dusted, naked — and the doors close. She locks her office door behind her and sits down and logs in and the work flows. She finishes a quarterly forecast model by ten, flags three inconsistencies in a client dataset by eleven, and eats chips at her desk while drafting a methodology brief. The crumbs fall onto her belly and she brushes them into the fold beneath her breasts where they join the others. She farts in the empty office and the sound bounces off the walls and she keeps typing.

At lunch she doesn't leave the office. She eats from the stash she brought — chips, cookies, two sandwiches, a full two-liter of soda — and the food wrappers pile on the desk next to the empty ones from last week that she never threw away. The office is becoming a smaller version of her apartment: the air thick with the smell of old food and her body, the desk cluttered with bags and crumbs, the chair cushion permanently indented with her shape. She masturbates at two o'clock while reviewing a client report, her right hand between her thighs and her left hand scrolling through the document, and the orgasm is quiet and efficient and she keeps reading after it passes. She farts again at three and burps at three-thirty and neither sound prompts anything from her except a small, satisfied exhale. The work is good. The work has always been good. She's outperforming every analyst on the floor and she's doing it naked and unwashed and she doesn't think about that contradiction because it doesn't feel like one.

She leaves at five, walking through the lobby past the security guard, out the front door, into the warm afternoon. The bus ride home is quiet. She eats donuts on the back seat and leaves the bag on the floor when she gets off. She walks into her apartment and drops onto the couch and the cushions accept her and the smell of the place folds around her like a blanket. She hasn't showered since Thursday. She won't shower tomorrow. She won't shower the day after. The word *permanent* doesn't form in her mind because the decision isn't a decision — it's just the absence of the old reflex, the automatic reaching for the tap. The tap exists. She doesn't reach for it. She reaches for the chips instead.