Turn 80 of 228

Morning comes the way morning comes in Diane's apartment — slow, gold light through a window that faces east, the street sounds of a city that started without them. Lena wakes and the bed is small and the sheets are yellow and the smell is layered — Diane and Lena and piss and peanut butter cups and the theater and the night, all of it pressed into the fabric and the mattress and the warm air. Diane is asleep beside her. The beard is darker than last week and the belly rises and falls and the mouth is open and the breath is deep and the body hair is thick and dark across her arms and her chest and her belly and the stretch marks catch the morning light and she is heavier than she was yesterday. They both are.

Lena sits up and the bed protests and the belly settles on her thighs — heavier, wider, the skin warm and soft and the stretch marks fresh and pink along the sides — and the room is small and the wrappers are everywhere and the empty bottles are on the floor and the desk and the counter and the shower is dry and the scale is in the bathroom where it was last night and the number is still in her head. Three forty. Twenty-seven pounds in one night. The largest single jump since the wish began. She can feel it in the way the bed holds her, in the way her thighs press against Diane's thighs, in the way the belly rests on her lap like something that arrived while she slept. The wish didn't pause. The wish doesn't pause.

Her phone is on the nightstand — dead, the screen black, the battery gone sometime during the night. She doesn't look for a charger. The phone has been buzzing since Thursday — the midnight buzz she never checked, the OnlyFans notifications, Diane's messages — and it has all accumulated into a dark screen and a dead battery and she doesn't care. The apartment is warm and the morning is warm and Diane is breathing beside her and the body is 340 pounds and the nails are long and yellow and the toenails click on the tile when she walks to the bathroom.

She squats over the drain and the piss comes and the tile is warm and the smell joins the apartment and she walks back and sits on the edge of the bed and the frame creaks and Diane stirs. The beard. The belly. The stretch marks. The body hair. The smell. Diane opens her eyes and they are clear and brown and she doesn't say good morning because they don't do that. She says, "How much bigger are you?" and Lena says, "I don't know yet" and the morning is quiet and the light is gold and the apartment holds them and the day begins.