Turn 15 of 23

Do everything her body wishes, get high and drunk permanently, fart, burp piss, shit and masturbate whenever and wherever she is. Do nothing productive. Start smoking cigs because she was always curious about that. Get addicted to that too.

The first cigarette arrives in a delivery bag by accident — a carton someone else ordered, left at the wrong door, pushed through the gap and sitting in the pile with the food. Lena spots the box while tearing into a container of mac and cheese, and she studies it with the slow curiosity of someone who has nothing but time. She tried one once at a party in college and coughed for ten minutes and never tried again. She has been curious for years. She has never had the freedom to be curious. She picks up the box with thick fingers and tears the cellophane and lights one with the stove lighter she uses for the vape.

The first drag makes her cough — a deep, wet rattle that shakes her belly and ends in a belch that tastes like smoke and cheese. The second drag is smoother. The third settles into her lungs like an old friend she never invited inside but who fits the room perfectly. The smoke curls out of her mouth and mingles with the haze already hanging in the apartment, and something clicks — not in her mind but in her body, a receptor opening, a door swinging wide. She takes another drag and holds it and the warmth is different from the weed, sharper, dirtier, more urgent. She loves it. She smokes three before the mac and cheese is gone.

Within a day the carton is empty. Within two days she has added cigarettes to every delivery order — two cartons at a time, then three, the app remembering her preferences the way it remembers the food. She smokes while she eats, cigarette in one hand and fork in the other, ash falling onto the slopes of her breasts and belly. She smokes while she drinks, the wine bottle between her thighs and the cigarette between her lips, and the combination of weed and wine and tobacco creates a haze so thick and golden that the apartment feels like the inside of a cloud. She smokes when she wakes, which is whenever she wakes, and she smokes before she sleeps, which is whenever she sleeps. The ceiling above the couch has turned yellow.

Her body does what it wants, when it wants, and she doesn't direct it anymore. She pisses where she lies — the warm stream soaking into the couch, into the carpet, into the layers of waste beneath her — and she doesn't pause whatever she's doing. She shits without shifting her weight, the soft mass spreading beneath her, and the smell joins the atmosphere and she breathes it. She farts constantly, a low rumbling soundtrack that punctuates every breath, every bite, every drag. She belches with her mouth open, mid-chew, mid-drink, mid-smoke, and the sound rolls through the apartment like far-off thunder. Nothing is held. Nothing is delayed. Nothing is managed. Her body is a river and she is lying in it.

She masturbates the way she breathes — without ceremony, without schedule, without preamble. Her fingers find the wet, warm folds between her thighs whenever the urge arrives, and the urge arrives every hour or every few minutes, and she comes with a groan that shakes the food containers and ends in a fart and a belch and a long exhale of cigarette smoke. She doesn't clean up. She doesn't move. She lies in the warm, wet aftermath and reaches for the wine. The laptop is closed on the floor where it slid days ago and she hasn't looked at it. The phone is beside her for deliveries and nothing else. She does nothing productive. She produces nothing. She is a body in a room, doing what bodies do, and the wish hums beneath all of it — steady, warm, endless — and her flesh presses outward in every direction, and she doesn't measure it, and she doesn't care.