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This bird wakes up in a pool of blood one November morning and spends much time undoing her sheets, shoving the offending swatch under hot water in her sink, and staring at the vivid vermillion on the mattress pad with her hand flat against her lower stomach.
This bird has things to put in herself, cotton to soak up the flow that unsticks in the warm shower she interrupts her routine to take. She has packages under her counter, the plastic crinkling like snackfoods, she has pills behind her mirror, she has, she has.
She also has dread, worming through the occasional cramps, and fear, seated in that womb that is hers. This bird rubs soap at the inside of her thighs—this is not the first time she’s cleaned blood from herself, blood from fabric, but it’s the first time she’s felt about it.
Doom—body. This bird’s feathers are often not her own. She decides to wash her hair while she’s at it. In a moment of horror she feels a clot pass, then fall to the tiled floor, the shape of a small bean. She stares at it, that came from her insides, and feels herself begin to disconnect.
Back in the glass cage, she was a weapon. An extension of her talons, just a thing to hold her swords. She grew breasts and her hips filled out and none of it was hers, all of it was for use, for the authority of others, her elbows and knees and the knobs that dripped down her back, none of it hers.
Others bled before her. Hushed exclamations. The cycles that sync with the moon, one of the celestial bodies that she could see sometimes, the light through the sole window. This bird thought, why would the moon use me? And this bird thought, why wouldn’t the moon use me. She put all of her emotions away a long time ago, who’s to say when she’d begin.
How does this bird’s body know the moon, so deep underground?
She touches a breast, feels the tenderness that is not entirely new, but has been difficult when sparring. She hasn’t been moody. She hasn’t been much, lately. She stains the white towels when she dries off, but there’s no way to prevent this. She gives up on the sheets, tosses both in the hamper. Stands.
All before eight. She’ll have to request a new mattress pad. She cups a hand between her legs because she can’t think and bleed at once. This bird is staunchly independent. This bird has never gone through this before. The Headmaster will miss her at breakfast, her routine. She takes deep breaths, the blood on her hand when she goes to fix a slab of cotton to her underwear highlighting the lines on her palm.
She’s always had such a short lifeline.
The stick doesn’t stick, and she doesn’t know why. Her panic breaches. This bird does not know what to do. And she remembers that there is a cat, older than her, learned, beautiful, and this bird is mortified at the idea of asking after her.
This bird can do it herself. She sits on the toilet with her eyes closed, but then images resurface of the times in her cage, an occurrence that happens less often now than then. Her muscles twist in expulsion, doubling her as she grinds her teeth.
This is not her body, and then it is, and then it does things, when she owns it. She can feel her fingers and toes, but this bird is a bird with no ownership, until she is, and then she owns it all. What would The Madame think? This bird clutching her own womb, scared as a child, at an act of nature that occurs to half of the population. This bird clutching The Madame’s womb, this bird out of order, put away into the toy chest as her everything hurts and swirls and turns such a familiar red.
This bird forces the pad to stay, for now, and stands up. She walks carefully, as if to avoid waking someone, to the wall console. Hair still wet, room amok, her voice is small when she says:
“Call Ms. Leon.”