Turn 7 of 23

Check the scale and see if the wish is accelerating. It is. She is turned on and looks forward to it. After dealing with the arousal. Her Life blurs for another Month. Her Weight increases to 270 pounds, she is permanently high and drunk, she stops going to the bathroom to piss, more farts and burps, more acne, always naked, always horny. Her work is never better and she gets another promotion

Lena rolls off the couch and walks to the bathroom, her body shifting and bouncing with each step in a way that still sends a thrill through her. The scale sits where it always sits, tucked beside the sink. She steps on it and watches the numbers flicker — 190, 193, 196 — before settling on 198. She steps off, waits, steps on again. 199. Two pounds in two days. She stares at the number and feels the warmth bloom in her belly before the thought even forms. It's accelerating. The wish isn't slowing down. It's speeding up, and the realization moves through her body like a current — hot, sharp, pooling between her legs where her thighs press together. She braces one hand against the sink and lets the other slide down her belly, through the coarse blonde hair below her navel, and she doesn't bother moving to the bedroom. She's already breathing hard.

She comes with her forehead pressed against the cool tile of the bathroom wall, a deep belch rolling out of her as her body shakes, and the orgasm is tangled up with the number on the scale and the thought that keeps surfacing: *faster, more, keep going.* She stands there afterward, flushed and trembling, and looks at herself in the mirror — greasy hair matted to her forehead, acne scattered across her round face, belly hanging soft and heavy — and she smiles with teeth she hasn't brushed in five weeks.

The month that follows dissolves into a haze of smoke, wine, food, and flesh. Lena stops tracking the days. The vape pen becomes a permanent fixture between her fingers, the wine a permanent warmth behind her sternum, and her mind settles into a slow, golden fog that makes everything soft and simple. She works in the fog and the work is brilliant — her reports are sharper than ever, her analysis clean and incisive despite the fact that she's usually three glasses in by the time she opens the laptop. Her body becomes a factory of noise and gas. She belches mid-sentence on calls and mutes just slowly enough that someone almost catches it. She farts every few minutes, long and deep, the couch cushions permanently warm beneath her. The sound of her own body is constant — gurgling, groaning, releasing — and she has stopped distinguishing between the noise and the comfort.

She stops going to the bathroom to piss sometime in the second week. The first time is an accident — she's deep in a spreadsheet, the pressure builds, and instead of standing she just lets go, warm liquid spreading beneath her on the couch, pooling in the dip of the cushion. The heat of it against her bare skin makes her close her eyes and exhale slowly. After that she doesn't bother. The couch becomes everything — desk, bed, toilet, dining table. The apartment smell thickens into something dense and sweet-sour that hits the back of the throat, a layered combination of unwashed skin, old food, urine, and gas that has soaked into every surface. Her acne spreads — across her shoulders, down her back, over her chest and breasts, thick clusters along her jawline and the sides of her neck. She scratches them absently while she types, leaving pink crescents under her nails.

The scale hits 270 on a Thursday. She has gained eighty pounds since the wish, and her body has transformed into something unrecognizable — belly spreading wide and heavy across her lap when she sits, folding over itself in soft layers, breasts enormous and pendulous, ass so wide it overflows the couch cushion on both sides. Her thighs are thick and pressed together permanently, the skin between them raw and damp. Her face is round and full, the double chin heavy, her cheeks soft and flushed from the wine. She is always naked, always warm, always slightly buzzing, and the arousal is constant — a low hum that spikes every time she catches her reflection or feels her belly shift or lets out a particularly long fart. She touches herself at her desk between emails, after meals, during bathroom breaks she no longer takes. The wish is still working, and she is still proud, and she still doesn't want it to stop.

The second promotion arrives by email on a Friday afternoon. Regional Senior Analyst — a role that didn't exist before, created for her output. Fully remote, no change in visibility, a salary bump that would have made her cry a year ago. She reads the email with one hand on her belly and the other holding the vape, and she lets out a belch so deep it rattles the phone on the coffee table. She forwards the email to her personal account, closes the laptop, and opens the delivery app. She orders from two restaurants at once. She is 270 pounds, she is permanently high, she is naked on a couch she has pissed on, and she has never been more successful. The thought should feel wrong. It feels like the only thing that has ever made sense.