Turn 9 of 23
No one notices the smell because she is the only one in the apartment building. Building codes do not exist in this universe, so no one cares about health hazards. Lena is immune anyway. Lena becomes an immobile, 800 pound slob in two months with all aspects worsening. Still best performer in company.
The month after the third promotion passes in a golden haze of smoke, wine, and relentless expansion. Lena barely registers the days anymore — they blur together in a warm, sticky stream of food orders, work sessions, and the constant, buzzing pleasure of her own growing body. Her weight climbs with a speed that would have been impossible a month ago: 360, 380, 410, 440. The scale in the bathroom becomes harder to reach, then harder to read, then impossible to stand on. She checks it one final time at 460, swaying naked in the bathroom doorway, her belly hanging past her thighs, her breasts resting on the shelf of her gut, and then she doesn't go back. She doesn't need a number to tell her what she can feel.
By the end of the first month she has stopped leaving the couch for anything. The bathroom is a room she remembers the way you remember a restaurant you used to frequent. Everything happens where she sits — eating, working, sleeping, pissing, shitting, masturbating, burping, farting. The couch has become a landscape, its cushions compressed and molded to the shape of her enormous ass, the fabric dark and stiff with layers of waste. The apartment smells like a sealed tomb of human excess — sour and sweet and thick, the air itself heavy with it. She doesn't notice. She breathes it in like oxygen.
Her body becomes something she no longer recognizes as a body in the traditional sense. Her belly spreads across her lap and then past it, a wide, heavy apron of flesh that rests on the couch cushion and spills over the edges. Her breasts are enormous, each one wider than her head, hanging thick and soft against the upper curve of her gut. Her ass has flattened and spread beneath her like dough, overflowing the couch on all sides, pressing against the armrest and the back. Her thighs are massive, pressed together in a wall of soft flesh that never separates. Her arms have thickened until she can barely reach past her own belly. Her face is round and swollen, her double chin heavy and deep, her cheeks soft and flushed with wine and weed. Acne covers every surface — shoulders, back, chest, breasts, belly, thighs, the folds beneath her chin. Her body hair is a pale forest across her legs, underarms, navel, lower back, inner thighs.
She can't stand anymore. She tries once, somewhere around 550 pounds, and the effort is so enormous and so pointless that she sinks back into the couch and laughs — a deep, wheezing laugh that turns into a belch that turns into a fart. After that she doesn't try. She works from the couch, eats from the couch, sleeps on the couch, pisses and shits where she sits. Her laptop rests on the shelf of her belly, propped against the soft rise of her breasts, and she types with her thick fingers on keys she can barely see over the swell of her gut. Her work is flawless. Her reports are models of clarity. Her analysis is the best the company has ever seen. She receives a fourth promotion — VP of Regional Strategy — in an email she reads with one hand on the vape and the other buried in a container of mac and cheese.
By the end of the second month she weighs 800 pounds. She knows this not because she has weighed herself but because she can feel it — the sheer, crushing, glorious weight of her own body pressing into the couch, the way her flesh spreads and pools and settles around her like warm dough. She is a landscape. Her belly covers her thighs completely and rests on the couch cushion in a wide, soft cascade. Her breasts lie heavy on either side of her gut, pendulous and enormous. Her arms rest on the armrests because she can't bring them together in front of her. Her face is buried in the soft pillow of her own neck and chest. She farts almost constantly — wet, rumbling, endless — and her belches are deep and resonant and frequent. She is always high, always drunk, always aroused, and she touches herself with thick, clumsy fingers whenever the mood takes her, which is every hour. The wish is still working. She doesn't know if it will ever stop. She doesn't care. She is comfortable. She is the most comfortable person who has ever lived.