“God Is Dead” was scrawled on the flimsy wall of the bathroom. It must’ve been done with a paint pen, given the drip streaks running down them. If it weren’t such a vibrant red, it might have looked like blood. It had clearly been there a long time; not only did other unrelated graffiti obscure it at the perimeter, but it also looked like someone had tried to scratch it out and write “JESUS LOVES YOU” but it had been written over again to hide the scratches.
Reading potty poetry was the only thing she was able to do right now as she hovered herself over the toilet while her uterus performed its monthly thrashing. She didn’t dare let her butt touch the seat, not at the poorly maintained lavatory at the public park. There was plenty of evidence that you couldn’t catch any type of disease from a toilet seat, not unless you were doing something reckless like licking it, but even learning verifiable facts didn’t completely assuage long-held superstitions.
“God Is Dead” Her eyes kept drifting back to it. Of all the various superstitions out there, religion was probably the most prevalent one. She personally no longer believed; she was raised as a good Catholic girl, but the facade began to crumble after reaching college and learning that “good Christian boys” stopped being good the second they smelled even a crumb of pussy. The burden of keeping pure until marriage was set squarely on the shoulders of her and every other girl or femme, while anyone masculine held no such responsibility and could blame “feminine wiles making his eyes stray” for his indiscretions. To say nothing of the risk of pregnancy, that would have been entirely a female-only burden, at least up until recent legal decisions barred her gender from anything other than indentured servitude.
The lower half of her body took the opportunity to contract painfully, as if she needed a reminder why she was trapped in the bathroom. Her periods had never been regular so when it did finally show up, she was often caught unprepared. A crumpled spare tampon in her purse was only for emergencies, long enough to get her to home or the nearest convenience store, and she’d already used it this morning. So here she sat, or hovered, trying to decide on her next move. She had been looking forward to this day for a while, she had planned it out to be a perfect escape from the world and retreat into nature, at least for a few hours worth of hiking. But now, doubled over in pain as her internal lining scraped itself out of her womb, she couldn’t imagine anything less appealing than sweating up a mountain and blistering her feet in sweaty shoes up a mosquito-infested forest.
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