The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: All Hat, No Cattle by Mariah Rigg

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COMPRESSIONS

The first time I spent an afternoon bent over, I had a panic attack. This was nineteen years before I moved to Knoxville, seventeen before I met you. I was eight years old and at the beach, looking for shells. I could not watch my best friend, Bailey, who’d run off with another girl to slip down the algaed lava of the jetty to my right and jump like ‘a‘ama crabs into the broiling water. Ass in the air, face to the sand, I scoured the waves’ residue and found only shattered whorls, topless cowries, and pink drills too small to home the hermits patrolling the shore, smaller even than the moles on my shoulder. Bailey and the other girl swam across the cove to the anchored boats. They kicked to climb. They lay flat on their backs—the sun drying their skin to salt—for at least an hour. On the shore, I gathered palmfuls of broken bones, my breath growing shorter and shorter. Soon, I could not breathe. Soon, I could not stand. And by the time they returned to shore I was in the backseat of my stepmom’s Escape, on my way to the hospital. You strained your intercostals, the doctor told me. Through the closed the door, I heard her tell my stepmom: The spasms were caused by shortness of breath. And then: Does your family have a history of anxiety disorders? Now, two decades later, I do not speak to Bailey though sometimes I like the Instagrams she posts from California—her bleached brows, the ribs that reach like claws from beneath her shirt. I have not been to that beach, or back home to Hawai‘i, for nearly three years, have not held a cowrie in hand, thumbing its smooth mound, still wet and cool from water. Instead, as my shell collection on O‘ahu gathers dust, as my name grows too small to be held in the mouths of those who loved me as a child, I gather violets. I walk the cemetery across the street from my Tennessee apartment and make plans for the flowers—syrup, garnish, vodka sodas. And after I have filled my pockets with blooms, after I have tired myself with laps through cracking headstones and over long-dead bones, I return home to you. You lead me to bed, and as you enter me, your teeth break the pebbled keloid of my earlobe. Violets crush beneath our weight, the air we breathe sharp as the oil bursting from a squeezed peel of lemon. You gasp, and pleasure rolls over me until I drown, my face pressed into our sea of pillows.

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