Turn 3 of 23
Order dinner, something bigger this time. Fall asleep from food coma. Repeat entire process for 2 weeks. At the end of 2 weeks, I go from 150 to 170 at 6'0". Still never wear clothes. Stopped brushing teeth, showering and shaving completely. Blonde hair becomes greasy and there is blonde stubble everywhere. Farts and burps even more common. Receive promotion for impeccable work.
Lena orders dinner from the Thai place two neighborhoods over — the one with the enormous portions — and adds a second entree this time. Pad see ew, drunken noodles, spring rolls, two orders of sticky rice, mango sticky rice for dessert. When the delivery arrives, she eats cross-legged on the couch with the container in her lap and grease on her fingers, and by the time she scrapes the last of the noodles from the foil tray, her eyelids are heavy and her belly is taut and warm against her thighs. She doesn't make it to the bed. She slumps sideways on the couch, one arm tucked under the pillow, the other resting on the rise and fall of her stomach, and she's asleep before the TV shuts itself off.
The days blur into a pattern. Wake up on the couch, naked, still warm from sleep and the wish's quiet work. Hit the vape. Open the laptop. Eat. Work. Eat again. Drink. Let the belches roll out of her without closing her mouth. Let the farts come whenever they press forward — long, low, frequent, a dozen times an hour some days, her body running on its own schedule now. She orders bigger each time: two entrees become three, sides multiply, desserts are no longer optional. The delivery drivers know her building code by heart. She never puts on clothes. Not once. The apartment stays warm and she doesn't need them, and the thought of fabric against her skin — the constriction, the elastic, the zippers — makes her stomach turn.
She stops brushing her teeth somewhere in the first week. It isn't a decision; the routine just falls away, like a file she no longer needs. She stops showering a few days later. The soap sits untouched in the dish. Her blonde hair goes greasy and flat against her scalp, darker at the roots, and she runs her fingers through it without thinking. Her legs and underarms grow in — soft blonde stubble that thickens over the days until she can feel it with her palm when she rubs her shin. She scratches her belly absently and feels the faintest prickle of hair below her navel. None of it registers as a problem. It registers as *less effort*, and less effort feels like comfort, and comfort is what she asked for.
The scale reads 170 by the end of the second week. Twenty pounds in fourteen days, and when she steps off, she catches herself in the bathroom mirror — belly soft and round, breasts heavy and pendulous, ass wide and deep — and the warmth that moves through her isn't surprise. It's satisfaction. She looks like she's *supposed* to look. The thought arrives without friction.
The promotion email arrives on a Friday afternoon. Her manager schedules a call — camera off, as always — and tells her the budget proposal landed with leadership, the shared drive reorganization saved the team six hours a week, and her output has been the highest on the floor for two consecutive weeks. She's being moved to senior analyst. A raise. A corner of her mind notes that nobody has seen her in fifteen days — not a coworker, not a friend, not a delivery driver face-to-face. She's a voice on calls and a name on emails, and she's never performed better. She hangs up, hits the vape, and lets out a long, rumbling belch that echoes off the kitchen walls. Then she opens the delivery app and orders the biggest dinner yet, because she's celebrating, and because the wish is still warm in her belly, and because she doesn't want it to stop.