It seemed to be a time of the month when every woman was on their rag. That’s certainly how the trash in the stall of the airport bathroom at Charles de Gaulle made it look. Or maybe it was simply that no employee in the terminal was all that interested in tending to the trash on a regular basis. Even though this was a peak travel time. More than peak, really—for there was a mass exodus like few in the history of Paris as the Olympics attendees proceeded to abandon ship in droves now that “the games” were over. Now that their erstwhile “playground” was no longer of any entertainment value to them. Or at least not the kind of entertainment worth sticking around for.

In short, Paris had lost its luster for a while, had become too overexposed—even in the minds of Americans, who typically ate that merde up no matter what. But the time had come to return from whence they came, leaving in their wake, among other trash varietals, this overflowing receptacle of tampons. Or what the French would call tampons hygiéniques, lest anyone confuse the word tampon on its own for a stamp. Best to be specific by adding that extra hygiénique to the end of it. Or even périodique, for ultra-graphic clarity.

In the stall of that bathroom, Martine (herself trying to get the hell out of dodge), saw the kind of bloody carnage she imagined World War II (or I) veterans must have in their day as she tried to cram her own tampon into the burgeoning depository. If this were another version of American Psycho, the trash’s “mouth” might have started moving to diabolically demand, “Feed me a stray tampon.” But this wasn’t that. It wasn’t anything other than another unpleasant detail in the liminal space known as the airport. The kind of unpleasant detail risked in any public place, really…so grotesque were humans when it came to being hygienic anywhere but their own home (if that).

As Martine started to “re-plug” her vag with a fresh tampon, the trash next to her had the audacity to, essentially, burp in her face, regurgitating some of the excess refuse it could no longer contain. It was very much “bursting at the seams.” And it wanted to take its abuse out on Martine—literally. Like a stray bullet, one of the disused tampons landed on her foot, totally exposed as she had foolishly opted to wear sandals while traveling. This was her punishment for being so cavalier. The top part of her pretty much bare left foot bore the brunt of this “menstrual shrapnel.”

Resisting every urge to scream out of sheer disgust, Martine plucked some toilet paper out of the dispenser, wadded it up and picked the stray tampon off her foot using the toilet paper wad like a surgical glove. She closed her eyes and cringed as she shoved it back into the rectangular plastic mouth, in turn, making contact with other “debris” that then also fell out—as though insisting that they needed to compensate for the “piece” she had just put back by freeing themselves instead. If she wasn’t still seated on the toilet with her underwear down, she would have run out in horror.

All at once, the bathroom stall felt like a hot zone for contamination (that is, more than it ordinarily might have). Doing everything in her power to dissociate, Martine stood, pulled up her undies, arranged her knee-length skirt so that her ass wasn’t out and waited to hear the sound of the toilette automatically flushing. Tiptoeing around the pussy-produced wreckage, Martine did her best to warn the next woman waiting oh so eagerly to use the stall. She didn’t seem to understand, nor did it seem to matter to her—Martine could have told her there was a nuclear reactor in there, and it wouldn’t have made a difference. When the urgency of needing to piss is that real, nothing else is relevant. Besides, Martine had already “cleaned up a bit” for her, whoever she was—maybe just another American in the process of fleeing Paris.

As for Martine, she wasn’t heading anywhere quite so far-flung. To be exact, she was going to Mallorca, where a friend of hers named Mathilde had rented a house and invited a few others to join her in paradisiacal bliss. Mathilde was the type of chic single woman that other single women (and also women who were coupled up) aspired to be like. Living what people would refer to as “her best life.” She knew how to do that without even the faintest trace of loneliness not despite being “childless” (the more derisive-sounding alternative to child-free) and husbandless, but because of it. In fact, she seemed happier than any married or child-packing person Martine knew. And Martine knew plenty of those.

All she wanted was to get to Mathilde’s “magic castle” in Mallorca. The only obstacle left now (after the tampon effluvia) was getting through the security checkpoint. As Martine had expected, it was as teeming as the period paraphernalia in the bathroom’s trash bin. Worse still, Martine ended up walking behind a teenage boy who had, arguably, the greasiest, sweatiest head she had ever seen. It was topped by a black baseball cap that, out of nowhere, he decided to remove so that he could shake out his sweat-drenched hair like a dog. But before Martine could slow down or move out of the line of fire, several beads of the boy’s sweat managed to fling themselves right onto her face. The shock was so great that Martine stopped in her tracks, bottlenecking the queue behind her. The woman that she caused to crash right into Martine’s back was a self-superior mother “leading” her family of three—two daughters and a husband. As such, she acted especially affronted by this supposed slight to her “motherly graces.”  

“What the hell is wrong with you?!” the mother caterwauled, automatically assuming Martine spoke English.

Martine pretended not to, responding in French (while wiping her face of the foreign sweat), “Je m’excuse madame.”

Before the woman could say or do anything else, Martine skittered away, now keeping a fair distance away from Sweat Boy, who she also presumed to be American (it was the back of his shirt, which read, “These colors don’t run” above an American flag, that gave him away). And here she thought Europeans were supposed to be the “gross” ones. The smelly and the sweaty. But no, that hadn’t felt like the case this Olympic summer.

Praying that nothing else foul would befall her after the security line (and the additional encounter with bodily fluids belonging to other people) was endured, Martine decided to take pause in the duty-free shop. She wanted to get Mathilde a little thank you gift of some sort (likely alcohol) for inviting her to Mallorca. From rescuing her from what was left of August in Paris. Even though Mathilde had chosen the worst possible time to summon her. Honestly, couldn’t she have invited Martine back in July, when this Olympic hellscape first began? Maybe, in the end, Mathilde was a sadistic fuck like all the rest. Or if not that, then certainly a selfish one for failing to consider that Martine might want to escape from Paris sooner. Not later, with all the non-French riffraff that was jettisoning the city more readily than a Jewish person escaping German-occupied Paris during WWII.

On the plane, toting two plastic bags’ worth of liquor from the duty-free shop, Martine presumed she had finally managed to get out relatively unscathed. That is, until, mid-flight, when she made the mistake of leaving her seat to go to the bathroom, her duty-free bags still stowed under the seat in front of her. Somehow, though, in the short time she was gone, yet another “snag” in her journey transpired. For, when she got back, the passenger in the middle seat regarded her sheepishly as he told her that he had managed to accidentally step on a number of the bottles while he took the opportunity, in her absence, to “stretch his legs,” causing Martine’s entire seat area to reek of alcohol. The flight attendant then made Martine stand off to the side near the bathroom for what felt like an eternity, like some sort of pariah, while he cleaned up the numerous shards on the floor.

When she deplaned, smelling like a distillery, she desperately needed to drink the amount of liquor that would match the odor that was currently emanating from her. Though she had gotten away from the Summer Olympics in Paris, it was debatable as to whether or not she had fully survived.