Turn 18 of 23

Smoke and eat until her body takes over completely

She loses track of the cigarette in her hand. It burns down to the filter and the heat touches her fingers and she doesn't flinch — she simply opens her fingers and the butt falls onto the slope of her belly and rolls down into the crease between her gut and her thigh, joining a small graveyard of dead cigarettes that have been accumulating there for days. She reaches for the carton beside her head without looking, shakes one out, and lights it with the practiced motion of a body that has memorized the gesture the way it memorized breathing. The first drag is automatic. The second is deeper. By the third she has forgotten she lit it at all, and the smoke curls out of her mouth and nose in slow, thick streams that join the amber cloud hanging beneath the yellowed ceiling.

The food containers surround her in a landscape of grease-stained cardboard and plastic. She reaches for the nearest one — she doesn't know what's in it, hasn't known for weeks, her fingers simply close around containers and bring food to her mouth and her jaw works and she swallows and reaches again. The taste registers somewhere far back in her mind, a distant signal through the fog of weed and wine and nicotine, and her body makes the decision before her mind can participate: more. Her fingers are slick with oil and sauce and her belly groans as it accepts another mouthful, and a belch rises out of her chest like a geological event, low and resonant, vibrating through the mass of her body and shaking the containers stacked on the floor beside the couch.

A fart follows — long, wet, unbroken for fifteen seconds — and she doesn't shift her weight or adjust or acknowledge it in any way. It happens the way her heartbeat happens. Urine follows, warm and steady, soaking into the couch and the carpet beneath her, adding to the layers that have been building for months. Her bowels shift and empty without a pause in her chewing, the soft warmth spreading beneath her, and the smell rises and mingles with the cigarette smoke and the old food and the stale wine and the thick, sour-sweet scent of her unwashed body and becomes the air. She breathes it. She has been breathing it for so long that it is not a smell but a climate, and the climate is hers, and she lives inside it the way a fish lives inside water.

Her body has taken over. She knows this the way she knows the cigarette is lit — distantly, without urgency, as a fact rather than a thought. Her hands move and her jaw moves and her lungs fill with smoke and her stomach fills with food and her bladder empties and her bowels empty and her fingers find the wet warmth between her thighs when the urge arrives and she comes with a groan that ends in a belch and a fart and a long, slow exhale of smoke, and none of it is directed by her. She is not doing these things. They are being done. Her body is a machine that has found its rhythm and the rhythm is endless and self-sustaining and it does not require her attention or her permission. She is the passenger. She is the landscape. She is the warm, vast, smoking, eating, releasing terrain on which all of this happens, and the terrain does not move.

The wish hums beneath it all. She feels it in her bones — not as a force but as a direction, the same direction it has been pulling her for over a decade: more. More flesh, more softness, more warmth, more surrender. Her body expands in slow, imperceptible waves, pressing outward against the couch that no longer exists beneath her, against the carpet, against the walls she can no longer see. The containers on the floor are being pushed outward by the slow tide of her growth. The coffee table has shifted an inch. She doesn't notice. She doesn't notice anything except the cigarette and the food and the haze and the warmth and the deep, unshakeable certainty that this is what she asked for — comfort so total that the self dissolves inside it, and there is only the body, and the body is home, and the body is happy, and the body does not stop.