Lawyer v. Stairs

“Sorry, Miss Harman,” the secretary said with an affected chirp, “The lift is currently out of order. You're going to have to take the stairs.”
Michonne glared at her. It was a strategy, of course. The deposition could be held anywhere, and the only person on either legal team that a flight of stairs would trouble was Michonne. The lift probably wasn't even broken.
She didn't say that, of course. The secretary probably wasn't even aware of the strategy that her bosses had cooked up, and- well, it would make her look rather paranoid, ranting about conspiracy over a couple dozen steps. She didn't check then, but you never knew when there might be a paparazzo lurking behind a pillar waiting to snatch a big story. And the city's single most prominent black female criminal defendant throwing a fit over a busted lift would certainly be a big story.
“I see. No problem at all, I see the stairs there.” She checked her watch, though she knew the time already – quarter to nine in the morning – and all she gained from the gesture was a reminder that she needed to have her jeweller put a new hole in her calfskin watch strap before 'uncomfortably tight' became 'unwearably tight'. If only it was so easy to extend the life of her blouses and skirts so simply.
“I suppose it's lucky I decided to arrive fifteen minutes early.”

“I guess so! I'm just glad I work on the ground floor, climbing stairs in these heels is tough,” the secretary laughed brainlessly, the top buttons of her blouse straining tortuously as they struggled to constrain the cause of her employment. For a second Michonne felt the pangs of jealousy. Her buttons were straining just as much as those of this secretary, but they were the buttons on her blouse that constrained her gut, not those over her breasts. Oh, and of course there was the button struggling the most, the one on the waistband of her skirt, but that was buried deep enough in the padding of her belly that it wasn't really visible...

She made her way over to the stairs, though she was unable to prevent herself from shooting a longing glance at the lift as she did so. There was warning tape across the door, but for a moment she still wondered if perhaps it would be worth the risk. Right now, the idea of being quickly transported to the floor of the deposition without delay or effort sounded perfect. Instead, she shouldered her way through a narrow door and was confronted by a tall flight of stairs. She counted them unconsciously as she took a moment to rest against the rising handrail. Twelve, twenty-four. Then another couple dozen for flight two, totalling forty-eight. She felt an unfamiliar feeling of dread beginning to materialise in the pit of her stomach. Or one of its pits, anyway. With the amount of food it could put away without complaint, it certainly had a lot more than one yawning void within it – even after the two stacks of syrup pancakes, a doughnut, two caramel lattes, sausages, bacon, and four bagels that she'd eaten for breakfast.

Forty-eight was a lot of stairs. It was probably more stairs in one go than she'd tackled so far this year. She made a point to avoid them these days, even changing her regular coffee shop for one without steps to enter – and where the taxi could drop her closer to the entrance.

Of course, she could demand that they held it elsewhere. Accessibility was a right, and if she simply said that she couldn't properly represent her client if the deposition was held up two flights of stairs, they'd be legally obliged to obey.
But she was proud, and she knew what the papers would say. She knew what they already said.
And, she reassured herself, it couldn't be that bad. She was... physically unsuited to exercise these days, that much she could admit, but she wasn't disabled. She tried to avoid steps, but she didn't find them impossible. She'd been obliged to take two steps just to get into the building!
And at that memory, an inconvenient little voice in the back of her mind piped up – weren't just those two shallow steps kinda... difficult? She'd made it up them, but there'd been a reason she'd been so much more puffed by the time she made it to the secretary at this company's front desk compared to when reaching the lift at her own. Her monumental memory helpfully provided the specific data. Thirty-six paces from the front door to the lift when entering the lobby of her own firm. At that point, she'd typically feel a mild ache in her knees, a slight shortness of breath, and she'd be sweating enough that her blouse would be sticking. Nothing that a long ride in the cool lift couldn't solve... though she had to admit, these days she'd taken to 'accidentally' hitting a couple of extra buttons before her own floor so she had a little more time stationary before the inevitable walking again towards her corner office. There, at least, she could remain near-totally sedentary until at least 1030.
Whereas here, it had been thirty-two paces, plus the two stairs, to the front desk, and that had left her... well, almost legitimately winded. The unfamiliar burning in her deep-buried thigh muscles, the twinging ache in her knees, the dark arches of sweat that she could already feel forming beneath her armpits... she couldn't deny that she was in worse shape right now than she'd normally be.
Perhaps, said the part of her brain that won court cases, the part that she should really have learned to heed by now, perhaps you're less able to deal with stairs than you think.
Hush, said the part of her brain that squealed every time she saw her name on a 'most significant New York lawyers' list, or when she got a promotion, or when she was asked for an interview on contemporary legal debates by esteemed newspapers. Hush, we can do this. We can do anything.

Chin held high – not that you could much tell with so much flab hanging from it – Michonne assaulted the staircase.

Step one was so easy she was on step two before she really knew what she was doing. One, two, in quick succession, right leg then left. Perhaps, she thought victoriously, she'd undersold herself. That would be a first in her life.
Three, four. Oof, four was a strain. The muscle in her left thigh - wherever it was beneath the pillowy expanse of flab which surrounded it – caught dully ablaze, aching inside its blanketing. Still, four consecutive steps! She hadn't done that since she'd last visited her aunt the year before last. She hadn't visited since then, for one reason or another...
Five, s-six. Both her thighs were aching now. She'd spend years avoiding exertion like this – she should expect that her body would log a few complaints. Surely it would quieten down once it got back into the swing of things.
Seven, eight. Suddenly, quite suddenly, she was ailing. The landing looked miles away, the four steps remaining stretching away into the horizon. What little muscle she had in her thighs and buttocks burned, and her knees were sending vigorous little twinges of pain through her each time she asked them to bear the mass of her overgrown body. She was sweating, and not just in the regular way that a woman of her size sweated constantly as her body tried with difficulty to cool a body clad in far, far too much insulation.
Without halting, without hesitating, she hefted herself and barrelled up the last four steps onto the landing like a straining steam train, barely-controlled, puffing and huffing and running under far, far more pressure than it was originally designed. Almost tripping on the last step as her weaker left leg struggled to lift, she stumbled onto blissfully level ground and collapsed against the handrail with a long wheeze.

For a long moment she remained there, gulping down the conditioned air of the office building as sweat dripped steadily from the end of her nose and onto the laminate of the landing. The air was chill, almost cold, but she was sweltering within herself, sweating like a pig as she tried unsuccessfully to catch her breath. For a moment, she wasn't sure if she'd ever feel rested again – or if she'd ever be able to walk properly again, as the abused muscles in her legs burned with the unaccustomed use. This had been a terrible mistake...

Finally though, after several solid minutes of slumping against the handrail, cooling off under the air conditioning and sucking down air in deep ragged gasps, she began to recover. Slowly, she began to feel almost human again. That last desperate rush had been a mistake, her analytical mind decided. Slow and steady would have been smarter. She should try a new strategy for this next flight.
She looked up at the flight in question, and was taken aback as she felt almost sick at the sight of it. Her stomach churned, clearly upset by this disruption of its usual routine. It was used to being fed six (minimum) times a day, with plenty of snacks in between, and absolutely, positively, no jolting. Now, it had been shaken and bounced and generally upset, and like the rest of her body it was making its displeasure known regarding this unusual abuse.

She rallied. She was already a quarter of the way finished, and the staircase wasn't going to get any shorter over time. She just had to go for it.

This time, even the first couple of steps were hard. Perhaps if there had been somewhere to sit, somewhere to properly rest, the muscles in her legs could have fully recovered - but instead she'd been standing, and at her size even simple standing was exertion. Her breathing, only just returned to normal, was immediately ragged again, her throat feeling too narrow as she huffed her way up the first few steps. Her heart pounded, beating faster and louder than she could remember as her muscles screamed. She was suddenly acutely aware of every part of her massive body, from her aching ankles to her gut slapping uncomfortably against her thighs with each step to the constant trickle of sweat dripping down her double chins.
She could feel herself struggling, but she was only halfway up the flight and even in such a state she remembered the lessons from the previous steps. Slow and steady wins the race. Not that fast was exactly an option right now...
So she plodded heavily on up the stairs, taking them achingly one at a time. Four stairs to go and her left leg felt like it was about to fail, her joints and muscles screaming out for relief. Her knee felt like it was about to burst open, and the flabby muscle buried deep in her thigh threatened to tear itself loose with the sheer strain of hefting her massive body. Two steps left. Her left leg wasn't going to make it so she took them both with the right, levering her weight up the last few inches with extensive help from the handrail, before promptly doubling over to gape and gasp like a fish out of water. With how long it had been since she'd last done any exercise, she really was as out of her element as a fish drowning in air...

Slowly, her awareness returned to her. She could feel her whole body slick with sweat, chocolate skin gleaming like it had been varnished, but the damp did nothing to extinguish the burning of her lungs and of her muscles. Even if she made it to the deposition, at this rate she was going to be in such a state she wouldn't be of much use to her client. She'd not been so uncomfortable, so physically, fleshily exhausted in- well, ever. She avoided discomfort in all its forms. Her body felt huge, unwieldy, the twinging and aching and sagging and quivering reminding her of its true scale for the first time in a long time. The taxis and lifts and air conditioning of modern life often made it possible to forget just how huge she'd become, but now she was aware of every fold and bulge – and at her size, there were certainly plenty of those. She'd spent years ignoring her body, stuffing it with food and refusing to use her muscles for anything more intense than lifting another doughnut to her mouth, and of course her body had adapted for its use. It became an eating machine, able to efficiently force down thousands of calories in minutes, digest them and process them into jiggling, useless lard without even a process. It had learned that, clearly, there was no point in maintaining  muscles that were never going to be used, and so they had shrunk away to make room for yet more stores of flab. How could it not draw these conclusions, when its mistress treated it in such a way?

Her gut – her actual gut that was, the organ of her stomach, not the massive pillowy swell of fat that sagged from her midsection that she often thought of as her gut – churned hard, and just for a moment she was certain she was about to vomit. After a moment though it passed, and she finally managed to straighten up a little. She was still hideously uncomfortable, her entire body aching and burning at once, focused into spots of painful fire around her knees, her ankles, her chest, but she could move again.

Halfway there. She was only halfway there.

She wasn't going to make it. That last flight had almost killed her; another two would finish her off. Her heart was still pounding 250 times a minute, racing impossibly fast as it struggled urgently to supply her overgrown body with the oxygen it needed to keep going, and she wasn't yet sure if she was going to even keep down her breakfast. Every system in her body was in open rebellion.

Her mind cast quickly around for alternatives. She could go back down – but her mind discarded that option at once. Going down was as hard on her knees and ankles as going up, and she felt sure she'd fall – and at her weight, falling down even one stair could be lethal. It would be like falling while carrying a piano, and probably as loud.
She could stay here on the landing, but that too was hardly viable. Someone was sure to come by soon if the lifts were out of order, and she was too proud to be found too fat to climb the stairs on her own. Plus there wasn't anywhere to sit down except for on the ground, and she wasn't at all sure if she had the physical capacity any more to get up unassisted from the floor.
One other option – she could leave at this landing and check if the lifts were out of order here as well. Perhaps, she thought desperately, it wasn't the lifts that were out of order. Perhaps it was just the doors on the ground floor...

She caught herself. This was pathetic. She was a strong woman. She'd never let anything halt her in life before. Every obstacle she'd come across, all the prejudice she'd faced, the racism, the sexism, the sizeism, she'd steamrolled straight through it all, so determined and self-assured that she couldn't help but succeed. She wasn't going to let something as ludicrously mundane as a few extra pounds hold her back now.

Filled with a new vigour, she turned to the next flight of stairs. Suddenly it didn't look so tall after all. After all, this wasn't really any harder than the cases she dealt with every day. What was a step compared to cross-referencing a tricky testimony? What was lifting a leg compared to days after days of working through notes and assembling a case that could convince a prejudiced jury?

She could do this.

She approached the flight of stairs with confidence, ignoring the way her body was still crying out in a hundred different ways. Her gut was churning, her heart beating painfully quickly, her body literally dripping with excess perspiration as her muscles burned and screamed for rest – but it really didn't matter. What mattered was her mind, her spirit. Her sheer bloody-minded determination to succeed. Her body was irrelevant.

She hefted her right foot up onto the first step. Slick skin rubbed past itself, her monstrous buttocks slipping past one another, her thighs wrestling for space, her gut slumping down to get in the way as it so often did. Her foot was up. Now her body just needed to follow.
She threw herself into it. Her hand on the railing pulled, her left leg kicked off, and her right leg heaved. God, she was heavy, so impossibly heavy. Her body was a near-immovable object, its sheer weight and bulk and quivering formless mass resisting any attempt to shift it. And yet shift it she did, and she was up onto step one.
She didn't pause to congratulate herself. Instead she carried on, taking the second step with equal vigour, then the third.

It was around step five that she realised she wasn't going to make it to the top. Her heart was pounding wildly in her ears like a mad jazz rhythm, so fast that she couldn't even distinguish the individual beats. Sweat was pouring down her chocolate skin in constant rivulets, soaking her blouse, her skirt, even her socks. She could feel a constant trickle down between her pendulous breasts, and another wending its way between the folds of flab on her back to disappear between her monumental buttocks. The critical issue though, the fatal blow to this stupid venture – and possibly to herself, if she wasn't careful – were the muscles in her right thigh. Her left leg was still almost useless after that last flight, her knee popping and spiking pain through her if she put too much weight on it, so she was forced to take them all with her right. The unused muscle of her right thigh was suddenly being asked, again and again, to take the entirety of her bulk on its back, and it was failing. She could force her way through discomfort, but the muscles of her right leg were approaching their mechanical limits, and that was not something that could be ignored.

She halted for a moment, tottering in the middle of the flight. Her lungs were burning. Her throat felt tight, like she'd eaten something she was allergic to – though she had no allergies that she knew of. Her body was perfectly happy to consume anything that went between her pudgy lips.
She couldn't go back down. She wasn't even sure if she could turn around on these stairs without falling. She couldn't see her feet, not past the meaty barricade of her monumental breasts and the monstrous slab of gut flab that supported them like a pillowy bed. And even if she could see her feet, she was deathly afraid that twisting in that way would put her left knee out of action for good...

But then, she couldn't carry on, either. The muscle of her right thigh was ruined, hot spikes of pain burning through it with the slightest strain. It was like an ache but a thousand times worse, and she wondered whimperingly if she'd torn the muscle. It couldn't take much more abuse – definitely not seven steps more.

Eyes blurry with frustrated sweat, Michonne let herself drop forwards and began to crawl the rest of the way up the stairs.

Crawling wasn't much easier than walking. Her massive gut scraped every step, and it was more about hefting that heavy mass of flab over each lip than anything else. It was simply so big that she could barely reach the stairs around it, almost tipping her over backwards down the flight. She could feel the sweat still dripping from her, leaving a mark of her passage on each step like some impossibly massive slug – and the grubby steps themselves left a mark on her too. Her bare knees were immediately dirty, her pudgy manicured hands instantly scuffed with whatever everyone else had had on their shoes.
One step, then another. This was a nightmare.

She hefted her gut up another step, dragging it up more than lifting it – and a button of her blouse caught on the lip of the step. She tried to move back, but her momentum tore the already-strained button instantly from the fabric and abruptly the bulk of her gut was bulging free. The buttons immediately above and below the unfortunate victim instantly failed with the sudden increase in stress, popping free to bounce away down the steps back to the last landing.
Michonne whimpered as she had no other choice than to continue. The jiggling balloon of chocolate flab clinging to her midsection now drooped even lower without the constraint of her blouse, and she scuffed the stretch-marked skin on each following step as she heaved herself pathetically onwards. There was only one button left at the bottom of her blouse now, and every time her gut caught on a step and bunched backwards it heaved pressure on that last fastening – until inevitably, it too gave up, skittering down the stairs to join the other buttons at the bottom. Her blouse was now completely loose except for the two buttons over her heaving breasts and the entire monstrous mass of her runaway gut was exposed, slick with sweat and scuffed by the rough edges of the steps.

She was almost at the top of the stairs.

Her swollen gut, overdeveloped by the past years and years of endless gorging, was now unconfined by her blouse – which meant that the only thing restricting its bulk in the slightest was the waistband of her skirt. Once she'd preferred to fasten her skirts over her stomach, but that had become impossible some years ago now, and she'd been forced to start the unflattering – not to mention frustratingly fiddly – practice of fastening it beneath the overhang of her gut instead. Wedged in beneath that the pillowy mound of flab, its own button was now straining dangerously as the chocolate lard above it inflicted unsustainable pressure on the poor abused garment. For months it had suffered endless abuse at the hands – or rather the body – of its corpulent mistress, straining day after day to restrain a belly, hips and buttocks that jiggled and quivered and grew heftier by the week. Now, with its ally the blouse gone, it gave up the fight quickly. A quick pop, then the unpleasant grinding sound of a metal zip being forced down were all the warning Michonne got as her skirt split open at the front.

She didn't care though. She couldn't. All that consumed her thoughts now was the dream of reaching the top of this flight of stairs. If reaching the top involved the complete annihilation of every scrap of her clothing, she'd take that deal in a heartbeat – which, at the moment, was an extremely short amount of time indeed.

Two steps left. She dragged her stomach up over another step, wincing as it scraped her fragile skin. She was almost there. She could see the landing. Her muscles burned, her joints were bursting. Her lungs were aching. Her heart was pounding impossibly hard. Every part of her was in ruins.
Last step. Her hands were already on the landing, she just needed to heft the bloated, overgrown mass of useless flab that she'd made of her body up to join them. She was still pouring with sweat, her hair lank against her pudgy forehead.
Her gut scraped another step and suddenly she was rolling onto her back on the landing, gasping and wheezing, pinned beneath her piled-up fat. A vast, shapeless, quivering pudding of a woman.

Eventually, she would recover enough to sit up. Perhaps, given half an hour or so, she might even feel strong enough to risk a return journey back down the last flight of stairs back to the first floor, where she could wait in shame for the lift to be repaired so that it could heft the load of her body back down to ground level.
What she certainly wasn't going to do was try her luck climbing any more stairs, today or ever. The deposition could go to hell for all she cared. What she wanted right now was to be comfortable again, for the burning in her joints, in her muscles, in places she didn't even know could hurt, to go away. Well, she wanted that and a dozen doughnuts. And a caramel latte. And maybe a long, relaxing soak in her double-width bath.

She wanted a lot of things, but most of all she wanted to never see another stair in her life.