Bloody Dead Girls

 

You wanna know what really sucks? Having your period while perpetually wearing a white sheet: that really sucks. It was one of the most surprising and disappointing things about death.

Admittedly, I’d thought about death before. I mean, I’d thought about it a lot. Probably more than is strictly healthy for a fourteen-year-old girl. It’s definitely not all it’s cracked up to be by the way. Zero stars. Definitely would not do again, though as far as I can tell, you only get to do it once. And then it's just… this.

You kinda just float around in the dark. Every now and then you bump into another white sheet. I’ve tried talking to them, but they usually just stare blankly. Even the few that spoke didn’t stick around long.

“I’ve been dead for eighty years,” one sheet said when I asked. “It saps away your concern for anyone or anything when there’s nothing at stake… nothing to live for…” The sheet then shrugged and floated off without further comment.

I’d been dead, floating through the dark nothingness, for nearly a year when I bumped into another bloodstained sheet.

“Do you have your period?” I asked.

The sheet waved a noncommittally.

“I think I have my period too,” I said. “I had it when I died, and it still hasn’t stopped. Why hasn’t it stopped?”

“Death washes our wounds, but blood not borne of violence shall forever remain,” the sheet replied. It floated off again before I had the chance to ask if that meant exactly what I thought it did.

So yeah. Eternal periods. Who woulda thought? Geez, I could’ve timed that better. I could have said I had my period, and Dad would have let me stay home from school. I would have missed the whole thing. Would have watched TV and seen Gale Weathers reporting live from the street while screams and gunshots came from inside the classrooms behind her. Dad would have held me while I cried.

Dammit, now I’m thinking about poor old Dad. So naive. “Teenaged girls on their period are the scariest thing in the world,” he used to say. I wonder what he’d think of dead teenaged girls on their period.