It’s that simple.

Another exercise in flash fiction, this time with a YA tilt.

Nadia locked the stall door behind her. She pulled the cotton pellet out of her jeans, the shallow cloth pocket turning out after it. She had tried the applicator kind before, no luck. It’s like her body had a gate up there, programmed only to occasionally let mysterious fluids out, nothing in.

Leyla’s voice echoed in her head, insisting “Nadia, pads are so gross.” What Leyla didn’t know: mom would never actually allow Nadia to use anything else. First Nadia had gathered loose quarters and taken them to the public library, where she did homework after school every day until mom could pick her up. She dropped a coin into the dispenser for a single cardboard-encased tampon. And again. And again. The day after this failure of insertion–she hadn’t actually been on her period and was dry as desert sand–she’d skipped lunch, fidgeting with the dollar bills in her jeans pocket while her stomach called out for chicken tenders. After school Nadia briskly crossed a wide suburban intersection to the nearest shopping plaza.

The drug store’s automated door slid open, welcoming her into the fluorescence, and she beelined to the feminine hygiene aisle. A plastic sea of pink, purple, powder blue. Confounding language was plastered everywhere: regular, super, comfort, glide. Protection. Pearl. Radiant. Sport, paired with an image of a woman kneeing a soccer ball. Playtex-kotex-tampax. What was with all the Xs? And why were these bits of cotton so expensive? Nadia reached for the…