Sappho's Overhead Projector by Bonnie J. Morris

Author:Bonnie J. Morris [Morris, Bonnie J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612941400
Publisher: Bywater Books
Published: 2018-10-08T04:00:00+00:00

• • •

There came a day when Hannah was in the bathroom and it occurred to her that she hadn’t had her period in five or six months. This isn’t perimenopause any more, she thought with a strange pang of regret. I am entering actual menopause. Goddess knows, I am certainly not pregnant.

She studied herself in the mirror while older and younger women moved busily around her, hastening to rejoin their tour groups or workdays. So, this was aging. Some gray hair, not much. A few wrinkles. Definitely more facial hair than before— but what counted as “before”?

She had always identified fully with whatever age she was at the moment: kid, adolescent, underage baby dyke, grad student, middle-aged scholarly warrior. Isabel loved her now, and touched her aging features with wise and affectionate hands: that should be all that mattered. How did the menstrual cycle even connect to vanity? Why had she gone from thinking about her disappearing periods to wondering if her face would disappear? How much had she bought into the beauty myth? What sort of feminist was she? Where were her overalls and bandanna, now that she worked for— oh, no— the government?

As if to underscore this point, the twenty-two-year-old woman next to her at the bathroom mirror carefully applied a gloss of blood-red lipstick, straightened her tightly clinging yoga pants and sashayed out, leaving Hannah alone in the room. Oh my god, thought Hannah forlornly, I’m a hundred and two.

At that minute, the phone rang.

She ran for it, grateful no one else was around. The phone felt sticky. There was almost a sensation of the ringtone throbbing right into her lower belly. And then a rich, thick current of a voice chuckled into her ear: “Missing me already?”

It sure wasn’t Isabel— or her mother. “Who is this?” gasped Hannah.

“This is your menstrual cycle calling you to say goodbye. It’s been a great thirty-eight years, but I’m done and you’re free. I left the keys on the sink and you don’t owe me anything, though you might have had a baby, you know, and maybe given me a year off. This whole deal with lesbians is just bewildering, I must say. Any last questions, before I head out?”

Hannah had hundreds of questions, but couldn’t find her voice. Her cycle? Goodbye? What keys? How could her period talk?

“Sorry for any hurt I’ve caused,” her period sang. “You always hurt the one you love . . . Did I ever mention my favorite punk band is The Cramps? Say, did you hear the one about the four little kids who don’t have enough money between them for a Saturday outing, and then they decide to pool their two dollars and buy a box of tampons, because the box says if you use tampons you can go skateboarding, waterskiing, swimming . . .”

Hannah’s period, it seemed, also moonlighted as a stand-up comedian. “I have plenty to ask you if you’ll shut up for a moment,” she shot back. “For instance,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.