Turn 17 of 23

Order more food, alcohol, weed, and cigs.

The phone is the only thing she reaches for now without effort. It sits in the warm crease between her right breast and the shelf of her belly, and her fingers know its shape the way they know the shape of the lighter, the wine bottle, the vape pen. She doesn't open her eyes. She unlocks the screen by touch, navigates the delivery app by memory, and adds items to the cart with the slow, deliberate taps of someone who has all the time the world has ever made. Four restaurants. Two liquor stores. A dispensary. A tobacco shop. She doesn't check the total. The total hasn't mattered since the salary stopped mattering, and the salary stopped mattering since the first day she didn't have to write anything for anyone.

The order is enormous. She knows this because the delivery drivers will make three trips from the car, and because the app sometimes warns her that the order exceeds the restaurant's typical preparation volume, and because she once saw a total that had four digits before the decimal and she laughed and a fart ripped out of her that lasted eleven seconds. She adds two more cartons of cigarettes to the cart. She adds a third bottle of the red wine she's been drinking since the second year. She adds edibles — the strong ones, the ones that taste like dirt and feel like sinking into a warm bath filled with warm mud. She adds a fourth restaurant because it occurs to her, and because she can, and because nothing stops her.

While she waits, she lights a cigarette. The first drag is deep and slow and the smoke fills her lungs and sits there, heavy and sweet, and she holds it until her body rumbles — a belch first, then a fart, the two sounds overlapping like instruments tuning before a performance. The smoke leaks out of her nose and her mouth and she takes another drag and the ash falls on her belly and stays. Her left hand finds the wine bottle wedged between her thigh and the couch arm and she drinks without looking, the red running down her chin and into the fold of her neck. She smokes and drinks and the haze thickens around her like a second skin, and her body groans and gurgles and releases everything it doesn't need into the warm, stained cradle beneath her.

The deliveries arrive over the course of an hour. She hears the bags hitting the floor in the entryway — six drops, seven, eight — and the footsteps retreating without pause. The drivers don't linger. They haven't lingered in years. The smell that seeps under the door is enough to make anyone move quickly, and the building is empty anyway, and no one is watching. She reaches forward with both arms and the motion is tectonic, her belly shifting and groaning as she stretches, and her thick fingers close around bag after bag and drag them across the carpet to the couch. She doesn't sort them. She doesn't organize them. She tears into the first container she reaches — pad thai, still warm — and eats with her fingers because the fork is somewhere on the floor and she doesn't want to find it.

The food is good. The food is always good, but today it tastes better, because today there is nothing after it — no email to send, no document to open, no chime to answer. There is only this: the pad thai and then the burgers and then the wings and then the cake and then the edibles dissolving on her tongue and then the wine and then another cigarette and then another fart, long and low, vibrating through the couch and the floor and the walls of the apartment that has become the inside of her own body. She eats and smokes and drinks and the wish hums beneath all of it, and her flesh presses outward in every direction, and she feels herself growing — not as a change but as a continuation, the next note in a song that has been playing for over a decade and will not stop, and she does not want it to stop, and it will not stop, and the warmth carries her deeper.