Period Piece

You are the Warrior.

And you have just been betrayed.

The searing heat inside your skull boils behind your eyes, a familiar electric jolt coursing down your throat, mingling with your breath. It burns beneath your ribs for but a moment before dripping down into the very pit of your stomach, where the wound still screams. Slowly you pull your hand away, gritting your teeth as you dare to look.

Blood has been spilled this night, and soon shall more follow.

"Please," she replied, rolling her shoulders. "I was born ready. I literally came out of the womb fists first, and I punched out the doctor for spankin' me!"

"Oh I'll do more than just spank ya," he countered, hesitating as he reconsidered the implications of his choice of words.

"Lay one hand on this ass and I'll serve you a slice of your own grilled sausage!"

He laughed it off, but she could see him picturing the result in his mind, and, as someone who probably valued his sausage in its most raw and ungrilled state, the laughter on his face quickly drained away into a certain perturbed discomfort.

Heh.

"Okay, for real now!" He turned to face her, tightened the belt on his robe, and took his stance.

She nodded, feet apart and arms at the ready.

"...FIGHT!"

He lunged forward with his right fist, just as she'd predicted. She swung left with a shrug, absorbing the blow with her shoulder before turning sharply on her heels to counter with an uppercut. But he was quick, and deflected with his free hand before hopping back into a more defensive pose.

She cracked her neck, keeping an eye on his feet. Sure, he was a formidable opponent. Probably even number two on the dojo's Most Formidable List - behind herself, naturally - making him a far deadlier opponent than all of the other twelve-year-old students and that one mom. But, for all his towering height and his beefcake arms, he was only as formidable as he was predictable. His attacks always came in pre-packaged patterns, like a timing-based boss battle. He was a combo king, not a button masher. And the only way to beat a combo was with a better combo.

Looks like he's gonna throw a triple-jab salvo, she analyzed, plotting each limb's path in her mind. Then he'll fake a jump kick to get me to block high before he changes it into a sweep kick down low. So if I jump kick at the apex of his fake-out...

He lunged before her thought completed. She blocked right, then left, then right again. Then he leapt, drawing back one leg for a fake kick. She took a step back, then made her leap.

But something was wrong.

The moment his feet touched ground, he stretched skyward again with a vicious left uppercut. She was already airborne, there was no way to stop it. With a sly grin on his face, his fist connected and threw her sideways to the floor. He pulled back into his stupid victory pose like the smug jackass he was.

Then her vision flashed white.

She felt time itself slow down as a spacey gong sound echoed inside her head, accompanied by a single resounding thump of her own heartbeat. The entire dojo seemed to draw in a sharp breath, silent with anticipation.

...god, how did he hit so HARD?

"What was that about grillin' my sausage again?" Raf taunted, swiveling his hips exultantly. "Hmm? What'd'ya say?"

Jacqui groaned loudly, pushing herself up on her knees. "Ugh...you wearin' a ring or something? Like a ring made of rusty nails? Fuck...".

"Oh...oh geez, I didn't hit you too hard, did I?" Having busted out the concerned dad voice, the rest of the dojo collectively sighed, disappointed the fight was over, and they all resumed minding their own damn business, thank you very much. "I-I really didn't mean to hurt you like that...".

"Psh, I ain't hurt…" she grumbled, still struggling to get up on her feet. "Just feels like you went and had metal spikes grafted onto your bones or something. Fuckin' mutant..."

"I...really didn't strike THAT hard," he said, raising an eyebrow. "You gonna be okay?"

Jacqui paused before answering. Something else had emerged from the impact zone. A familiar pain. That indescribable splash of déjà vu...like an egg timer had just finished ticking on a time bomb planted deep inside her guts.

...ah, shit.

"Ugh...I think I'm done for today, Raf," she fumbled, fishing for a convenient phrase to brush him off with. "I'mma change and head home."

"Aww what? So soon?"

"Just...don't worry about it, okay? It's...nothing."

She could feel him watching - clearly worrying about it despite her instructions - as she made the walk of shame over toward the cubby rack behind the front counter, trying not to clutch her stomach too obviously. She wasn't sure which defeat was more humiliating, her defeat in front of the other patrons, the defeated walk to the front door, or the true cause of her defeat.

Mother fucking Mother Nature, she seethed, her mind already clouding up with thoughts of red. Why can't this ever happen when I'm alone and don't have to give a fuck who's staring at me? The hell's the matter with you, body? You so excited for this bullshit that you gotta interrupt my special Bro Time with Raf like the asshole clam jammer you are? Go fuck yourself.

...and not like that, shut up.

She didn't even have to look down at her pants to confirm the damages as she folded her robe and placed it back on the shelf. She knew what was coming. She knew how to deal with it.

She just really didn't fucking want to.

"...I really am sorry, Jacqui," Raf added, approaching from behind. "You gonna be alright?"

"I'll be fine, it's just…" she caught herself, an unfortunate victim of social conditioning to never speak of her 'affliction' in public, "...a...badly-timed...bodily reaction."

"...what, ya gotta poop?" he chuckled, a bit more nervously than he needed to.

"Not that kinda function, sweetie," she said with a sigh, snatching up her umbrella from its place of honor behind the counter. Jacqui had been a member of the dojo so long that she'd outgrown the need for things like lockers - or paying for lockers - and would usually just toss her belongings behind the counter...or at least she would when good old Raf was working the front. "Anyway...I'm out for today."

"You'll be back next week though?" he asked hopefully.

"Raf, when do I EVER miss practice?" She shot him a side glance. "...besides right now, I mean."

He sighed and nodded. "Yeah, yeah, I know...you've been a regular here for years now. Kinda surprised you don't own the place already."

Despite the incoming pain, Jacqui managed a half-smile. "If I owned the place, first thing I'd do is get you demoted to janitor."

"Hey!"

"...so that you could become the unsuspecting janitor who nobody realizes is actually a master martial artist, and you'd spend the whole movie hiding in plain sight, like a plainclothes cop who hops into the fray at the last second and--!"

"Yeah yeah, whatever," he brushed her off, making a move to punch her playfully on the arm, then stopping short. "...eh, better not take a chance at hurting you even more. I swear I really didn't hit you any harder than I usually do. No idea what happened."

"Pretty sure I know," she replied, making a face.

"...maybe all that training is finally paying off and I don't know my own strength anymore?" he suggested, scratching the back of his head.

"Uh-huh, sure," she scoffed and prodded his belly with the umbrella. "You hit about as hard as a porn star in a pillow fight and you know it. This is...a different kind of pain. I already told ya, don't worry about it."

He continued to wrestle with the concept as she left, trying fruitlessly to bear understanding toward issues beyond the scope of his own imagination. "...like...emotional pain...?"

"...you're fuckin' adorable, Raf," she said, shaking her head as she stepped out the front door. "That's why I love ya. Keep the porch light on, I'll be back next week."

"Okay. Bye Jacqui..." he said vacantly, watching the door close behind her and slowly placing his hands on his hips as he continued to wonder just what on God's green earth could have possibly gotten into her.

Jacqui sure didn't have to wonder.

And so, deep breath of fresh September air inhaled and mask of stern facial disposition secured, she slagged her way out of the recreation center, into the main courtyard junction of the college grounds, and prepared to face the dreary trudge down the dreaded Bible Belt.

The centuries-old, custom-ordered cobblestone path had been so named for a variety of reasons. Most people assumed this was because it passed by an old Christian church that the school board - led by a former radical Baptist preacher with long flowing wizard locks - had insisted remain on school grounds as a "historical landmark", despite ubiquitous disapproval from students and professors alike. Lately, its status as a landmark had become wholly defined by the ongoing graffiti war decorating its walls. Crosses, pentagrams, ancient runes and rudimentary scribbles of body parts all fought for dominance across its surface, making it very easy to point out for first-years.

Other students had taken notice of the way the road seemed to wrap around the middle of the main campus grounds when viewed on a map, like a large belt around the body of a Santa Claus, putting the church just below said belt. This applied almost exclusively to Psychology students, who were always trying to see shapes within shapes and quoting Freudian theory like there was no other theory.

But the most keen of observers knew that it was really called the Bible Belt because the path itself was notoriously Straight and Narrow. It had been engineered by a team of hyper-conservative Puritan constructioneers, specially designed to maximize celibacy and chastity among young hormonal students by virtue of being exactly one and a half people wide. No room to walk arm-in-arm down the Bible Belt, only room enough for you and Jesus.

Then again, people like Jacqui didn't really care whether or not Jesus had room to walk beside her. She preferred to carry herself like she was one and a half people wide anyway. She may have been short, but she made damn sure she wasn't small. Body and mind, she was built like a dwarf; stocky, stout, and full of potentially untapped rage. All she needed was a beard, a battle ax, and a bubbling enmity toward tall, pointy-eared boys that belonged in shampoo commercials, and she'd be mineshaft-bound.

And now, the evening crowd had come out in full swing, only to veer off into the grass on either side of the Bible Belt as they passed by her. Even though they didn't know Jacqui by name, they knew someone with a bitchface game as strong as hers was clearly not someone to be trifled with. Many of them also regarded the umbrella in her hand with suspicion. There wasn't a raincloud in sight today, which, according to the unwritten Law of Movie Logic Trumping The Real Kind, could ONLY mean the umbrella was packed with drugs or qualified as a valid murder weapon.

Jacqui rubbed the thought away with a grimace. The weekly trip from the rec center all the way down the Bible Belt to her own dorm building was typically only four minutes long, but accounting for tonight's battle damage, it may as well have been forty...

The incandescent orange clouds of the waning sunset, the rustling of umber brown leaves as they drifted down from the stark branches to the eager grass below, the decidedly sharp smell of chilling air laced with fresh-harvested apples and pumpkins...all of it would have been poetically beautiful if it weren't for the impending knife-twisting sensation brewing down below. None of it was allowed to be beautiful anymore. She just wanted to get home quickly, where awaited things that WERE beautiful. Things like heated blankets and painkillers and various forms of ingestible chocolate...

Using muttered four-letter words as fuel, Jacqui finally arrived at the drab - but at least very symmetrical - brick-and-mortar student dorms. She yanked the front door open with her free hand, nearly barreling headlong into another student somberly carrying a broken microwave to its final resting place, and made a beeline straight for her own door.

And then, finally inside her consecrated shrine of solitude, she promptly cast her umbrella to the floor and threw herself face-first into the expectant embrace of the holy mattress with a disgusted and lifeless "...ugh".

It wasn't really the pain that bothered her. She could handle pain. She TRAINED to handle pain. But this? This was more than just a feeling of pain. This was a recurring misery that would unleash hell for days at a time, then mysteriously vanish overnight, not for a day, not for a week, but for an entire month, leaving behind nothing but a false sense of security before it finally showed up at the door again, tossing a brand new knife between its hands...

Every month from your first tweenage birthday until your silver years, this misery would show up again and again for the sole and explicit purpose of wrecking your shit all to hell. You could set your watch by it, you could predict lunar cycles by it, you could even build a software application that used it to calculate how often to place automatic orders for ginger tea and chocolates and romantic comedy movie collections on DVD and blu-ray. But the one thing you couldn't do was ignore it, no matter which pills you took or which magic spells you imbued yourself with. The pain was an inseparable part of you, and like the curse of the werewolf, it was guaranteed to overtake and ravage you, mind and body, every month, until your body finally started breaking down and the curse decided you weren't worth it anymore, when at last you'd lived long enough to attain the exalted, mystical rank of "grandma".

...or so the legends said, anyway.

Jacqui flipped over on her side and sighed. She knew she should probably change into something dirty, or make sure she actually had a supply of blood-capturing devices on hand, or brew up some twisted variety of logic-defying snack, but...the energy just wasn't there. Every needle on every gauge pointed to E. All there was enough for right now was making sickly groaning noises and rolling around in search of a more comfortable position in which to lie immobile. She cycled through enough poses to make her own yoga routine before realizing that none of them were helping at all.

And, she'd decided, it just wasn't fair anymore.

"So ya like fightin' dirty, do ya?" she asked aloud, as though reproductive organs had ears. "Well that's a two-player game, ain't it! Let's see if we can even up the score a little!"

Jacqui chucked herself off the bed and staggered to her feet, fighting the twisting strangulation feeling inside her body. "Alright, what's the most effective way to torture an involuntary bodily process that exists for no reason other than makin' me miserable?"

Her eyes made their way across the room, coming to rest on the image of her own livid and damned face in the bathroom mirror, and an idea slowly took form. She strode up to the mirror and yanked it open, nearly separating the door from its beloved hinges. Among the goodies stashed inside, the crown jewel of the collection was a proud plastic bottle made of magic and dreams sitting front and center. She snatched it, flipped it in the air, and caught it behind her back.

"Alright listen up, uterus," she announced to the one uterus present, "You've ruined my sacred sparring time, fucked up the first day of my favorite season of the year, and turned my own home into a goddamn warzone. So, as a reward for all your hard work, I'm downing half a goddamn bottle of Nyquil! Have fun trying to torment me now, sucka!"

She could almost hear the dramatic thunder and lightning crashing outside behind her as she held the sacred bottle aloft. "...if there IS a god out there, watchin' over me like some kinda creepy-ass voyeur shitlord, then may he send me into a sleep so deep and a dream so vivid that it drowns out my entire consciousness until this period of suffering passes!"

And with a villainous cackle, she tossed her head back and took several massive gulps straight from the bottle like brandy from a flask, tossing it over her shoulder back into the sink with a loud belch.

"O death, where is thy victory? O uterus, where is thy sting?" she mocked, head tilted skyward as she reached under her shirt to perform the Secret Nighttime Ritual of Breast Liberation. "That's a Bible quote, isn't it? Or something vaguely religious, right? I don't know, and I don't even have to care right now, cause NOW it's time for Loopy Nyquil Dream Theater!"

She carried on mumbling incoherently to herself as she stumbled her way back into the bed, quickly drifting off into a cozy sleep-aid slumber. Hopefully a slumber devoid of abdominal stabbing, and perhaps filled instead with dreams of ice cream and cherries, or perhaps one of those freaky zombie survival flicks the brain likes to concoct during fever season. It didn't really matter. ANY dream movie would be better than the nightmare of this consciousness.

Her eyelids fused, the lights in the theater dimmed, the crowd hushed and silenced their phones, and the opening credits began to roll...