Kami was cold. She had been cold when she was woken in the middle of the night and was covered in lesos. She was even colder as she was shoved through the house while her mother refused to meet her gaze. Frozen as she was smuggled under the cover of early morning darkness on boda boda. She knew what it was. It was what her father said was tradition, her birthright, her duty. It was what got Kerubo, the neighbour girl, shamed in town. Kami remembered her walking in town goat innards heaped around her shoulders, a pariah. For being uncut.
She knew it was this or that. As she crossed the county limits, she was frozen solid. It was until she finally met the old women that she finally thawed and shivered. These women loomed over her like an inevitability, they smiled with the fake kindness they had learnt over the years, each performing the deed at most eight times a day. They led her to an old house that stood alone in the thicket, secluded from everything and anyone that might have saved her. She was herded to the corner to sit on the ground with three other girls who shivered like her, recognizing none of them.
Her fear turned to dread when she looked around the room. Seeing the blood on the floor, the crude and bloody instruments as well as the women who sharpened them. She felt powerless, stranded in the midst of strangers each bound to this horrible moment in time. Each girl will remember this moment differently, each with their own pain and fear. The old crones would remember little, if any, the moment lost in a thousand other memories of girls in pain,
Years later when the pain rises in her once more threatening to consume her, she will remember everything about it. The bloody floor and rags that drunk up her blood, the dirty razor that spilt it and the uncaring eyes of the adults that held her down as she almost died. But most of all, she will hold herself weeping as she remembers her mother not looking her in the eyes, her father hurrying her from the house and the little girl who just turned 12, shaking and silently weeping to herself in the corner who both cannot comprehend what or why this is happening and who fully comprehends its pain.