Fat Bridget

Every night, fat Bridget ordered greasy Chinese food for dinner, which she wolfed down, like a beagle who had gotten into his bag of kibble, arched over her coffee table, staring lifelessly at her TV screen.

One night, fat Bridget ordered a particularly exorbitant amount of food, which arrived exactly seventeen minutes after she’d put down the phone. After paying, she peeled open the bag of food and the familiar aroma tickled her nostrils. The order was so large that it was double bagged.

Bridget anchored herself at her coffee table, spread the carton's all around her and began eating: slurping down noodles, swallowing spring-rolls whole, eating ice-cream scoop sized bites of chicken fried rice. She was inebriating herself with take out Chinese.

She polished off her order: grease stained her flower-patterned muumuu, her chin was slick and her flaxen nails had food stuck underneath them.

Her fortune cookie in hand, she got up with difficulty and waddled over to the window, out of which she saw into the apartment across the airshaft. She saw two, young, fit people, lips locked, hands roaming freely all over each other’s quazi-naked bodies.

She cracked open her cookie. Her fortune said: “Today, you will lose something.”

And she did. She lost twenty-seven dollars worth of Chinese takeout into the slurping porcelain toilet bowl.