Prayer Garment

This morning I woke up to a horrible pain gnawing at my stomach. My back also hurt, so severely that I felt like an eighty-year-old grandmother unable to stand on her feet. I went to the bathroom—a concrete slab with a toilet seat and sink, parts of it broken. Here was that cursed surprise again, showing up unexpected, as it does every month. I looked everywhere for a sanitary pad but couldn’t find one. Not in the markets, not in the shops, not with any of the women in the camp. My mother told me to use a piece of cloth. But I decided to use nothing. To just wear a prayer skirt. “Your blood is impure and prayer requires purity, yamma. Don’t dirty the prayer garment, you’ll ruin it, and these days it’s too expensive to be replaced. Enough with your stupidity,” she scolded me.