Bright Red Swirls 7

“Why are you standing so far away?” she says to me with just a little bit of the energy she usually has. She pushes the sheet off her body and very carefully swerves her legs over the side of the bed and on to the floor.
“I’m coming.” I say to her as I slowly walk over. Samiha is now standing up and grabbing something from around the foot of the bed. I’ve seen something like it before so I think I know what it is. I think it’s a bedpan. There is no continuity when she moves. She is slow and every step is taken with great effort. She places the bedpan only a couple of feet from where I’m standing. With her legs straddling it, she pulls up her dress up then yanks down her panties. In her panties there is cloth and what might have been gauze.  She squats to pee in the pan. I look at the stream flowing down. It’s bright red.
“Why is it red?”
“It’s blood Nanny. That’s why it’s red.”
“Does it hurt there?”
“Yes, It hurts a lot.” She says as she pats the area between her legs with a cloth. I can almost feel the hurt in her tone. I look again at the thick cloth in the crotch of her panties. She stands up and slowly pulls the underwear up again and lets the hem of her dress drop down. One slow step after the next she walks back to her bed. Meanwhile I edge closer to the bedpan to take a look inside. It’s bright red with swirls of darker red all through out. I’m mesmerized by the ruby red concoction. Along the side of the white pan is a blood droplet that looks like a teardrop. It’s slowly elongating along the cheek of the pan as a tear would along my cheeks after I’ve cried. I gaze at the drop that is slowly turning into a line. It’s crawling its way down toward the clay floor of the house about to leave its mark. I notice the ground is full of stains. I look closely at the floor and wonder what caused them. I wonder if the floor in Aunt’s and Gidews homes are full of stains too. Maybe I just never noticed them.