By Kristi D. Osorio
In the prison visiting room, Mom asked the guard to give me a maxi pad. It was thick and white, nondescript. No brand I’d ever heard of.
We ain’t got Always with Wings in here, the guard said, laughing.
I was twenty-five, but I felt like some dumb teenager, getting my period at the worst time. I wasn’t allowed to have my purse, couldn’t even wear a belt into the visiting room. It was the first time I’d seen my mother in seven years, and now I had red splotches crawling up my neck from the guard’s joke.
My period had always been a problem. Painful, unruly. I’d never know when it was coming. In high school, I sat doubled over at my desk, face down on my notebook. Before the murder, before she was gone, sometimes Mom had to pick me up early. By the time she pulled up to the school parking lot, the blood had dripped down my leg, soaked one of my socks. I hoped it wouldn’t get on the Vans I’d bought with the money my grandma gave me for pulling weeds out of the gravel driveway.
Good job, Betty had said with a cigarette hanging from her lips, handing my brother and me some bills she’d cashed out from the casino.
It happened again, I’d say to the answering machine. I need to go home. I always knew she could pick me up. I knew she wasn’t at work, wasn’t anywhere important. She was probably at the poker room or hooked on a slot machine with some guy hitting on her. Her job selling AVON makeup wasn’t going very well since the tubes of lip gloss and concealer she was supposed to sell were sitting half-used on the counter in the bathroom we shared. After she picked me up, I’d get home to find I’d ruined another pair of underwear or jeans or even shoes, the stains impossible to get clean.
I’d gotten my first period on Father’s Day at the casino buffet. They only served crab legs on special occasions, and Betty always had discounts because she worked there. It was better not to ask where a rural town in New Mexico sourced them. I hated butter, even the smell of it, but I loved cracking the legs open, sucking the meat out like one long limb between my teeth. I never liked using the silver crackers that came on the tray. They were too imprecise, too bulky. Instead, I’d break each leg in half by hand and run my fork in a straight line down the middle. Sometimes, when the meat was really stubborn, my fingers bled from the jagged red edges of the shell.
All I remember from that first time was the dress I wore—a blue Limited Too hand-me-down from one of Mom’s old boyfriend’s daughters—and the pain. It was the last time I’d ever wear that dress and the last Father’s Day I’d ever celebrate with my stepdad. The next day, Betty brought home a pack of chocolate Entenmann’s Doughnuts from the grocery store, and I ate half of them alone in front of the bathroom mirror, picking at my acne, trying to read the impossible instructions tucked inside the tampon box.
In the prison bathroom, I wondered, Why now? like a pre-teen in a Judy Blume novel. I couldn’t bring myself to open the pad, stick it to my underwear. Instead, I shoved a wad of toilet paper in my pants and slipped the pad in my back pocket. The guard smirked at me when I returned to my chair across from Mom. We weren’t allowed to sit next to each other, per the list of rules posted on the wall. NO CONTACT, it read.
When I got home, I added the pad to a small shoebox of her things I still owned. A light pink lipstick, a pair of tweezers, a single earring she used to wear. I never found the matching one. I thought maybe it could have been in Betty’s room, lost after the blood was cleaned up, the CRIME SCENE tape torn down. Mom had missed almost everything since then, since I was fifteen. Prom, heartbreaks, graduations, jobs. But she had been there for my period. She’d picked me up from school when I needed her. And now, she’d gotten me this pad—the only motherly act she’d been allowed to do in a decade.
Kristi D. Osorio is the author of The Sound of Burning: a Mother, a Daughter, a Murder (University of Georgia Press, 2026). In 2023, she won the Indiana Review Creative Nonfiction Prize selected by Camonghne Felix and the Sonora Review “Mercy” Contest in Nonfiction selected by Maggie Nelson. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere.