SmokeLong Quarterly

I insist I need a corset for under my dress. A wedding. My cousin’s. A purple strapless with a layer of chiffon. My mother is outside the dressing room. She asks if anything fits.

I stare down the mirror. All I can see are curves. Hips and breasts and stomach.

I don’t know how much weight I’ve lost since I began. I don’t weigh myself. I tell this to everyone who asks. Who says, Wow you look great. They mean: you’ve lost weight. And it’s true: I have shrunk. I’ve had to dig another hole into my belt loop. I pull it as tight as it can go: a tourniquet.

In the dressing room, I smooth my hands over the black satin material of the corset. It flattens my stomach, presses my breasts up against gravity. Then I turn sideways: the same silhouette that haunts me.

I am a double zero now, and in my head I say the word gut about my body. I say the word fat.

That gap between my thighs, that vanished muscle: I want more of it.

I want it all to disappear. The fat the muscle the body.

And in the dressing room, my face is hot and streaked with tears.

My mother asks, Are you okay in there?

I snap at her, I’m fat.

She sighs.

It is and isn’t her fault. Genetics. Sometimes I resent her. Her giant breasts, her sixty-year-old gut.

The word gut.

She says, You’re tiny.

I scoff from behind the door, but my eyes are wet and fixed on that damn bulge of flesh at my stomach.

I was told once that some women’s hips tilt forward, some back. If your hips tilt back, you’re screwed. Destined to have a belly no matter how thin you make yourself.

My hips tilt back. They must.

She says, You really don’t need this.

I say, What do you know.

My mother is gentle with me. Maybe she can hear the strain in my voice, the tears. Gentle is not what I need. I need someone to tell me this is not okay, someone to say stop. Someone to say the word disorder.

Instead, my mother says, The dress looked great on you. You’re so thin.

A few weeks later, someone will say stop. Will say disorder. Will say, I’m worried about you. A friend. She’ll sit me down with another friend. They’ll have an intervention. They’ll say, We can hear you in the bathroom. I’ll say, Fuck you.

In the dressing room, I want to scream. I want to carve off my flesh like you cut the fat off a steak. I want a different body. A body that obeys me.

I am weeping now. The word weep.

Outside the door, my mother says, Allie. She says, Are you still there?

How to answer her.

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“The Word Disorder,” originally published in CRAFT, won third place in The SmokeLong Workshop Prize 2025.