Page 62 of Even Robots Die
“Finished sulking?” he finally asks.
Not so silent after all.
I won’t react. I won’t react to the taunting man.
“If staying outside bothers you so much, I’m not preventing you from going back inside,” I tell him.
I know it’s childish, but he riled me up—like he always finds a way to do—and I need to be alone for a while so I can think straight again.
These damn hormones aren’t helping either.
It’s been a couple weeks since I've been here and my body is not so gently reminding me that I didn’t have fun with the barmaid on the day I arrived, but also that I’m due for my period.
I have no idea if the shifters have to go through the kind of shit us humans have to deal with, but I know I’m a horny mess a few days prior to my period and then when it’s here … Well, I’m just a mess.
I don’t think the shifters are ready for that.
Because one would think humanity would have made progress when it comes to what human women have to survive—yes, I said survive—every month, but no.
To some extent, they made progress. I’ve heard back in the day, they had to take pills every single day to have contraception, that it might not have been so easy to get them, too depending on where you lived. Now we get a yearly shot and we’re good to go. Men started to have their own contraception too, even if some still think it’s not manly enough to get the shot—bunch of sissies.
So yes, there’s been progress. Except it’s all centered around not getting pregnant.
The only progress that’s been made about periods—that half of the human population has once a month for fuck’s sake—is for shifters to avoid them altogether, or, well, as all humans call them, angels, vampires, and a whole bunch of other names that I don’t even remember.
Actually, scratch what I said earlier. I do know that shifters don’t have to go through the same shit I do.
For one, I don’t know how often theynormallyget their period, but now it’s like they don’t have them anymore.
And two, that shot I take yearly to avoid getting pregnant—because believe me, after helping raise four sisters, I have absolutely no will to be a mother—it can be combined with the “no period” one.
And when I said it’s not made for humans? Well, I know for sure. I learned it the hard way.
Because I’m a mess before and during them, when I was eighteen-years-old, I decided to get both. Why not before? Because weirdly you have to be recognized as an adult to decide by yourself to get that shot.
Before that? It’s the adult responsible for you who decides. In my case, my dad.
And there’s no way around it. He doesn’t have a uterus, he doesn’t know what women go through every month. So he said ‘yes’ to the contraceptive shot—he wasn’t ready to be a grandad while he still had a toddler to take care of—but decided against the one that would give me freedom from pain.
Except it didn’t.
Because those damn shots weren’t made with human women in mind. And one can’t forget how the shifters heal so much faster than we do.
Or, well, someone obviously forgot, or the dosage would have been different.
Maybe they’ve changed it since then, but when I was eighteen, it was still not curated for my kind.
That’s why I ended up throwing up my stomach—not my stomach literally, but its contents—for a week every month for well over a year.
Seventeen months, to be exact.
Seventeen months of pain, but also seventeen months of ‘I told you so’ from Dad.
If I have to trade one kind of belly pain—plus that damn glint of knowledge in his eyes—with another to avoid my period, it kills the whole idea behind the process.
Needless to say, there is no way those shots will get close to me anytime soon—even if it kills me to do what Dad wanted from the beginning.
I’m looking the other way on the contraceptive one because it’s too damn practical—and doesn’t have side effects that I can see—but I’m pretty sure my ovaries have shrunk because of that.
