Turn 22 of 23

Close her eyes and sink back into the haze

The voices are still talking but they're getting thinner. Mara is saying something to one of the firemen — her voice cracking, the words tangled with the kind of urgency that belongs to people who still believe urgency matters, who still think the world operates on the assumption that a situation can be fixed if enough people arrive with enough equipment. Lena hears the shape of the words without catching their meaning. They slide past her the way water slides off the surface of something that has been underwater so long it no longer notices wetness.

A radio crackles. Someone says "we're going to need a structural assessment" and the sentence hangs in the amber air like a insect caught in resin. Lena's eyelids are heavy. Not tired — heavy the way everything about her is heavy, the way her breasts rest against her gut, the way her belly rests against the floor, the way her arms rest in the deep creases of flesh where they've been lying for months. Heavy with the accumulated weight of years of growing, of softening, of becoming.

Her eyes close. The last thing she sees is Mara's face — tear-streaked, pressed close to the broken window, mouth still moving — and then the image folds into the haze like a photograph dissolving in warm water. The voices don't stop but they recede, pulling back to the far shore of a lake she is sinking into, and the lake is warm, and the lake is deep, and the lake is her. The paramedic's gloved hand is still on her arm. She can feel it — a small, cool pressure against the vast warmth of her skin, the way a pebble feels against the sole of a foot that has been walking for miles.

She doesn't acknowledge it. Her body acknowledges nothing now except the rhythms it has built for itself — the slow pulse of blood through tissue, the gurgle and shift of digestion working through reserves that haven't been replenished in weeks, the low, constant hum of gas moving through a gut so large it has its own weather. A fart escapes her, muffled by the mass of her own flesh, and it rumbles through the floor and one of the firemen takes a step back. She doesn't hear it.

She is already gone — not unconscious, not asleep, but somewhere deeper than either of those things, a place beneath language and light where the body exists for itself and by itself and the wish is the only voice that speaks and what it says is always the same: more. Her chest rises. Falls. Rises. The cigarette smoke in the air mingles with the cold draft from the broken window and the warm breath of her body and creates something that is neither inside nor outside, neither clean nor foul, just the atmosphere of a woman who has become a world.

Mara is crying. The paramedic is saying something about vitals. The firemen are standing at the edge of the room trying not to look at the place where Lena's body meets the floor and realizing there is no edge, there is no seam, there is only the slow, continuous surface of her. And Lena is beneath all of it — beneath the voices and the hands and the cold air and the horror — lying in the warm dark behind her own eyelids, where the wish hums and her flesh presses outward and the nothing is full and the fullness is everything she ever asked for.