Margot stops mid-aisle at CostCo, one hand still resting on the cart handle, because she's spotted the pallet of whipped cream cans stacked near the bulk baking supplies. Three-packs of the big ones, the sixteen-ounce canisters with the wide nozzles, and there's a yellow sale tag dangling off the cardboard display that makes her do the math in her head. She's already got the hose at home, the one she'd cut to fit over a standard can tip, and the house to herself this whole weekend while the kids are at their grandmother's. She touches her lower belly without thinking about it, fingers pressing into the soft give through her sundress, and the corner of her mouth lifts.
Two three-packs go into the cart, then a third, and she's already running through the checklist in her head. Twelve hours fasting. The enema bag hanging from the shower rod, warm water flushing her clean until it runs clear. The towel laid out on the bathroom floor, knees pressing into terry cloth, and the first can cold in her hand. She pushes the cart toward checkout and her pulse is doing something low and slow in her throat, the kind of anticipation that used to hit her during the last month with the twins when she'd catch her reflection and see how impossibly round she'd become.
The weekend arrives humid and still, the apartment quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator and the distant sound of a neighbor's television through the wall. Margot hasn't eaten since nine o'clock last night, and her stomach feels clean and hollow, a tight little knot under her ribs. She's done two enemas already, squatting in the tub while warm water flooded up into her and then released, carrying everything out, leaving her empty. The third one ran almost clear, and now she's standing naked in the bathroom, rolling the first can of whipped cream between her palms to warm it up.
She's already fit the hose onto the nozzle, a clear plastic tube about eight inches long, and she's tested the connection with water to make sure it won't slip off under pressure. The bathroom light is too bright, the way it always is, but she doesn't dim it because she wants to see everything. She wants to watch her belly in the mirror. She lowers herself onto the towel she's folded on the tile floor, gets onto her hands and knees, and reaches back to press the tip of the hose against her anus.
The plastic is cool and firm, and she's slicked it with a little coconut oil so it slides in without resistance. She pushes it past the tight ring of muscle, an inch, then two, and the familiar fullness of something inside her makes her exhale slow and shaky. She reaches for the can, shakes it hard the way the instructions say, and then turns it upside down. Her thumb finds the nozzle. She presses.
The cream rushes in cold. That's the first thing she notices—not the pressure, not the fullness, but the cold, a chill blooming deep inside her rectum like she's swallowed winter. The nitrous oxide hisses inside the can, propelling the cream through the hose in a thick, steady stream, and she can feel it spreading, coating her walls, pushing deeper. Her belly, still soft and empty a moment ago, is already beginning to round out just above her pubic bone.
She watches herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the door, and the sight makes her mouth fall open. Her lower belly is swelling, a smooth curve rising where there was only a little pouch of softness before. The cream keeps coming, and she keeps the nozzle pressed down, emptying the can in one long, continuous flood. Her intestines are waking up, stretching, accommodating, and the sensation is so much like being pregnant again that her eyes sting with it.
The can sputters and dies, and she sets it aside, breathing hard. Her belly is round now, taut, pushing out above her hips the way it did when she was four months with the twins and just starting to show. She runs a hand over the curve, and the skin is warm from the inside, the cream settling, shifting as she moves. She's not done. She's nowhere near done.
The second can connects with a click, and she shakes it, turns it, presses the nozzle before she can second-guess herself. This time the cream rushes in faster, or maybe it just feels faster because she's already so full, and the pressure builds immediately. Her colon is filling now, not just her rectum, and the sensation radiates outward into her hips, into her lower back, a deep, spreading ache that is not pain or pleasure but something in between. Something she's craved for months since the twins came out and left her empty.
The second can empties and her belly is enormous. She can see the shape of it in the mirror, round as a beach ball, the skin stretched glossy and tight over the dome. She presses both hands against it and feels the give, the way it pushes back, solid and heavy. Her large intestine is packed with cream now, every loop and coil of it distended, and she can feel it pressing up into her diaphragm, making it harder to take a full breath. She's as big as she was at seven months, and she's not stopping.
She takes a break because her hands are shaking—not from fear, from the intensity of it, the overwhelm of being this full again. She sits back on her heels and breathes and rubs her belly in slow circles, feeling the cream slosh inside her with the movement. Her body is adjusting, the stretch becoming something she can bear, something she can want. She reaches for the third can.
The third can is the one that breaches the small intestine. She feels it happen—a sudden release of pressure followed by a new, deeper cramp as the cream finds its way past the ileocecal valve and into the long, coiled tube of her small bowel. Her belly swells higher now, rounding out above her navel, pushing her ribs apart. She has to stop and burp, a long, hollow sound that tastes like nitrous oxide and sweet cream, and the release of gas makes room for more.
She's as big as she got with the twins. She can see it in the mirror—her belly is a perfect, tight sphere, the skin stretched so thin she can see the faint blue trace of veins beneath the surface. Her navel has popped out, a little knot of flesh at the apex of the curve. She looks nine months pregnant with triplets. She looks impossible. She looks exactly the way she's been dreaming of looking since the day she came home from the hospital with two babies and a belly that was soft and empty and wrong.
The fourth can is the one she's been waiting for. She connects it with trembling fingers, shakes it, turns it, and presses the nozzle. The cream pushes through her small intestine now, forcing its way upward, and she can feel it traveling, a slow, incremental pressure that climbs from the center of her belly all the way up to the place where her ribcage meets. And then something gives—a valve, a sphincter, some internal door she's never felt open before—and the cream floods backward into her stomach.
The sensation is so intense she has to put a hand on the floor to steady herself. Her stomach is filling from the bottom up, cream backing into it like a drain overflowing, and the pressure in her throat builds until she's swallowing against it, trying to keep it down. She can taste it now, sweet and cold and chemical, rising up her esophagus. She presses her lips together and swallows hard, but the cream is still coming, the fourth can still emptying, and her belly is beyond anything she's ever seen on her own body.
It's enormous. It's a planet. It's the fullest she's ever been, and she's moaning without meaning to, a low, guttural sound that vibrates through the dome of her belly and into the floor. The cream pushes higher in her throat, and she opens her mouth to breathe and a little of it spills over her lower lip, white and thick, dripping down her chin onto her chest. She can't stop it. She doesn't want to stop it.
She meets her own eyes in the mirror, dark and wild and wet, and she smiles around the mouthful of cream just as another surge rises up and spills past her lips to splatter on the towel between her knees.