She Smells Like a Gun
Menstrual rage
I’m four days late and I cannot contain this immense rage building inside of me. She grows monthly, like a garish spore burrowed deep. Men ask if I’m “on the blob,” “on the rag,” or “have the painters and decorators in.” This interior is shedding what it doesn’t need: sloughing off the toxic build up. In Annie Hall, Woody Allen’s character keeps asking these questions, as though it’s an affliction instead of a woman’s most primal time. We bleed and do not die. We bleed out and survive. The nausea tries to expunge us from what they say we have done wrong. The pain radiates across my canvas, gripping every bit of tissue and strangling the life out of it. My bathroom looks like a crime scene: my emerald ring now stained with blood because I dropped it on the floor. The carpet has stains the size of a penny as I hobble from the shower to the bedroom. I burn a stick of dragon’s blood and sit with my thoughts for a while. The smoke forms a halo around the room, leaving me to play the role of nucleus, of life-giver. I can’t walk because of the Cupid’s arrow shooting down my legs. At the spring festivals in Ancient Greece, women would take their blood and spread it on the ground. What is blood? What does it mean in a metaphorical sense? These are the questions I ponder as I stuff a pad into my underwear, wrapping its wings. Each month, I am at war with the world: feeling as though I’m dying. I read The Count of Monte Cristo as my period tracking app asks if I’ve forgotten to input my period. No, no I haven’t. My monthly visitor must still be partying with the wisteria. I don my cotton pants and tinted lip balm for the upcoming battle. Under the shower head I find myself in the cave of a snow queen. The walls are closing in on me, and I need to get out, to smash through the tiles. They think we go mad under the moonlight—eating our clotted blood like sweet jam. What if I did? What if I surrounded myself with quartz and dance to the hooting of the owls? I can’t press the self-destruct button, so I’m here with my quill and ink. My head is firmly rooted in a clothbound book. I think of Jeanette Winterson when she wrote, “When she bleeds the smells I know change colour. There is iron in her soul on those days. She smells like a gun.” I smell like a gun. There is iron in my soul. And here it comes, the rage; the burning rage lighting all the wicks in every church across the world. Save me from the devil’s claws, from Eve’s forbidden apple. I don’t care much for apples anymore. Their skins are unrelentingly bruised, thick as a womb lining.
the title of this is genius