Turn 36 of 228

Check Diane's response. Post photo of piss stain with a caption about smell. Leave work early walk to bodega naked for more food. Spend entire weekend gaming on floor while eating, drinking, getting high, pissing, shitting and masturbating. Remarkably, never lose a game.

Lena picks up the phone at three-fifteen and opens the text thread. Diane's reply is there — short, careful, the way Diane writes everything: *You don't have to thank me. But you're welcome. I'll see you Thursday.* Below it, a second message sent four minutes later: *The compounding error you caught is going to save the Henderson account. I forwarded your explanation to the client directly. They were impressed.* Lena reads it twice. The warmth spreads through her chest — not arousal, not pride exactly, something quieter that sits in the same place the tears sat last night. She sets the phone down and stands and the chair peels from her skin with a soft wet sound.

She picks up the phone and opens the camera and points it at the carpet — the dark stain beneath her chair, the new piss stain beside it still wet and glistening, the old food stain layered beneath both — and takes the photo. The caption: *My office smells like piss and food and me. I've been naked in here all week. The carpet remembers everything. 101 of you are watching this happen.* She posts it and pulls on nothing and unlocks the office and walks through the hallway and takes the elevator and the lobby is quiet and the security guard looks up from his phone and his eyes move across her body — 267 pounds, barefoot, stubble thickening on her legs, the dark trail below her navel, unwashed skin shining under the fluorescent lights — and he looks back down and she walks through the front door into the Friday afternoon.

The bodega is six blocks. Her feet know the sidewalk and her body moves through the warm air — belly swaying, thighs pressed together, breasts heavy and shifting with each step — and people look and she doesn't look back. She walks into the bodega naked and the clerk behind the counter looks up and his face does something complicated and he says nothing and she fills a basket with chips and cookies and soda and jerky and vodka and candy and walks to the counter and sets it down and pays and the clerk bags everything and his hands don't shake and his eyes don't leave her face and he says "have a good weekend" and she says "you too" and walks home.

The apartment door opens and the smell hits her — the layered accumulation of every night this week — and she drops the bags on the kitchen counter and slides onto the floor in front of the television and starts the console. The weekend opens in front of her like a long dark room. She plays. She eats. She drinks vodka from the bottle and smokes and the weed haze thickens and the games blur and sharpen and her body fills the floor — 267 pounds of naked woman in the mess she's made and never cleaned — and she wins. Race after race, match after match, her reflexes sharp and strange in the haze, the controller vibrating in her hands while crumbs fall on her belly and the vodka warms her blood. She pisses where she sits at seven and the warmth spreads into the hardwood and she keeps playing. She shits at nine and the smell sharpens and she keeps playing. She masturbates against the mess at midnight and the orgasm rolls through her and she keeps playing and wins another race.

Saturday is the same — wake on the floor, eat, play, drink, smoke, piss, shit, masturbate, win. Sunday repeats it. The apartment darkens and lightens and darkens and the floor accumulates — new stains layered on old stains, bags and bottles and ash and the smell deepening into something dense and biological and entirely hers. She doesn't shower. She doesn't clean. She doesn't stand except to get more food from the counter and when she does her knees crack and her belly hangs and the mess on the floor is visible from above and she doesn't look at it with any feeling except recognition. Her body grows — she can feel it, the wish working in the quiet spaces between games, her thighs thicker against each other on Sunday than they were on Friday, her belly wider on the floor, her breasts heavier when she lies flat. She wins every game. The controller never leaves her hands for longer than it takes to eat or drink or come. The console stays on. The apartment stays dark. The weekend stays hers.