Free Sweet Hell on Fire by Sara Lunsford Page B

cervical cancer. She had to make an appointment to go back in for more tests, but she didn’t know how she’d get there because she was in so much pain all of the time that it was hard for her to even get out of bed.
    I went in to work and nothing was any better there. For that week I was two days Seg, two days tower, and one day open. This was an open day, and the cell house they put me in had just had an outbreak of scabies.
    Fucking scabies.
    Scabies are basically skin lice. They’re little bugs that burrow and squirm beneath your skin and make you want to rip your own flesh off to stop the itch. They’re also highly contagious. You can pick them up by a simple touch or contact.
    The whole cell house had to be quarantined and all of the bedding washed, every surface treated. I spent the whole shift drenching myself in hand sanitizer. I felt itchy just being there, but I knew better than to scratch. If I’d accidentally come into contact with any, they could be under my fingernails, or on my fingers or on my skin where I wanted to scratch.
    Itching is my Achilles’ heel. I’d rather hurt than itch any day.
    It wasn’t my Friday, but damn. After spending a shift walking around on my tiptoes, a beer couldn’t hurt. We went to a bar in the city with a mechanical bull. I remember saying I wasn’t going to ride it and I also remember a Hurricane in an orange juice carafe.
    Then I remember lying on the floor. No one would ever tell me if I actually rode the bull or not. I don’t think I did, but what other reason would I have to be lying on the filthy floor of a bar? Aside from the fact I’d drank three of those Jolly Green Giant-sized Hurricanes?
    There were too many people around me, and one guy in particular kept trying to touch me. Before I could knock his teeth out, one of the guys who was with our group, nicknamed Shrek, played knight in shining armor. With one shove, he knocked the guy back several feet and told him to keep his hands off me. He took care of me that night and a couple of others. It was nice to feel like someone really gave a shit about me just because I was me. Not because they felt I owed them something under the hat of wife, mother, daughter, or officer. Not because he was trying to get his dick wet. Because he was my friend. I really needed that. Probably more than I wanted to admit.

I started my period.
    While that was not especially spectacular, the part where I sneezed and parted the Red Sea down my pants like Moses kind of was.
    I had menorrhagia, which means I bled a lot (no more, thanks to medical procedures); I almost died from it once. Sometimes being a pork chop comes in handy. At the time, the emergency room nurse said if I’d been a smaller woman, I would have bled to death.
    I usually kept a clean uniform in the trunk of my car, but today was not a particularly lucky day, and when the Red Storm began, it was ten minutes until I had to be at my post.
    I approached the Captain. A different one today than the one who said women didn’t belong in Seg. But surprisingly, he would have been the easier sell. He had a wife.
    “Captain?”
    “Yeah?”
    “I need to run home.”
    “For what?”
    “A feminine issue.” That should be good enough, right? Everyone knows what that is.
    Wrong. “Being?”
    “It’s that time of the month.”
    “What time of the month?” Really? I think my mouth fell open.
    “Aunt Flo is in town.” I tried to be discreet; there were other officers still in the hallway.
    “Why the fuck do I care about your Aunt Flo?” He looked at me, a curious look on his face.
    Oh. My. God. Are you serious? Really? And I say again, really? At first I thought he was just fucking with me, trying to embarrass me. Until that questioning look on his face didn’t merge into a smirk or a laugh. He was serious.
    Well, fuck Aunt Flo and fuck him. “I’m on the rag, asshole. Riding the cotton pony. Plugging it up. Menstruating. Any of this ringing a bell? ”
    His whole