endometrium

I’m about to start my period.

You can tell because my pants are too small, I’m craving salt, fat and sugar, my eyes are gritchy, essential oil blends containing copal smell like chicken noodle soup on my skin, my head hurts, my uterus twinges, and I’m really easily upset and annoyed.

When I actually start my period, a thick, red, clot-rich liquid, resembling and containing but not identical to blood, which is now lining the walls of my uterus, will ooze out through my vagina. This will continue for five days, although long about the fourth day the liquid will be more brown than red. Also, my uterus will be under the mistaken impression that muscle contractions of equal strength are required for the disparate tasks of expelling this fluid and expelling an eight-pound human being, and will twist up agonizingly in accordance with this impression.

This is because I am a fertile female who has been wilfully barren for thirteen years, ever since I was nine and first became fertile. It is nature’s punishment for wasting my best childbearing years.

It is small consolation that I also have the temporary superpower of being able to sit on household gods and thereby render them invisible.