Turn 30 of 228
Wake up and weigh herself. Weight increased to 260. Skip work tomorrow and keep gaming naked on the floor. Work overtime the next two days to make it up. Never, ever clean up.
Grey light through the window. The television is running its demo loop — a car driving an empty track, the same lap repeating — and Lena's body is pressed into the hardwood floor where she passed out hours ago. The mess beneath her has dried in patches and is still wet in others and the smell is the first thing she registers before she opens her eyes: ammonia and something deeper and old food and weed ash and her own skin. She turns her head and the floor peels from her cheek and she blinks at the ceiling. Her belly rises as she breathes and she can feel it — wider, heavier, the soft weight of it pressing her lower back into the floor. Her thighs are thicker against each other. Her breasts fall to the sides when she lies flat and she can feel them touching the floor beyond her ribcage.
She stands slowly and the stiffness in her knees and lower back makes her grunt. The bathroom scale is in the corner where she left it and she steps on it and the display flickers and settles. Two hundred and sixty pounds. She stares at the number. A week and a half ago she was one-seventy. Ninety pounds. Her body has absorbed ninety pounds and she stands on the scale and feels the number settle into her the way the wish settled into her — completely, without resistance. She picks up her phone and takes a photo of the scale and then a photo of herself in the mirror — belly wide and round, breasts heavy, hips spreading beyond the frame, stubble thickening on her legs and under her arms, the dark trail below her navel more visible now, skin shining with grease and dried mess. She looks at the photos and the heat pulses between her thighs.
She picks up her phone and opens her email and drafts a message to Diane: *Personal day tomorrow. Will make up the hours Wednesday and Thursday with overtime. Everything's fine.* She sends it and switches to OnlyFans and posts the scale photo with the caption: *260. Ninety pounds in ten days. Still not stopping.* The first like arrives in under thirty seconds. She sets the phone down and drops back onto the couch and the cushions groan and the mess on the floor is still there — the dark stain, the chip bags, the bottles, the ash — and she doesn't look at it with anything resembling the urge to clean. It's hers. It's evidence. It's the shape of her life pressed into the floor like a fossil.
She slides back down to the floor and picks up the controller and starts the console and the screen fills with color and she plays. She eats from the bags she bought yesterday — chips, cookies, jerky, soda — and the crumbs fall onto her belly and into the fold beneath her breasts and she doesn't brush them off. She drinks vodka and smokes and the haze thickens and the games blur and sharpen and blur again. She pisses where she sits at noon and the warmth spreads into the already-stained wood and she keeps playing. At three she shits on the floor without standing up and the smell sharpens and she keeps playing. At five she masturbates against the mess and the orgasm rolls through her and she keeps playing. The apartment darkens and the television throws light across her body and the floor is layered now — last night's mess beneath today's mess beneath crumbs beneath ash beneath her — and she doesn't clean any of it. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever. The word forms clearly in her mind for the first time and it doesn't feel like a decision. It feels like the absence of a reflex that was never hers to begin with.
She passes out on the floor again at midnight with the controller in her hand and the console still running and her body warm and heavy in the mess and the apartment dark and smelling like her — only like her — and the scale reading 260 glowing faintly on the bathroom counter where she left her phone next to it.