Red Clocks

by Leni Zumas

The sea does not ask permission or wait for instruction. It doesn’t suffer from not knowing what on earth, exactly, it is meant to do.

“Well, I worry, kiddo. Don’t like the idea of you being all alone.” She could trot out the usual list (“I’ve got friends, neighbors, colleagues, people from meditation group”), but her okayness with being by herself—ordinary, unheroic okayness—does not need to justify itself to her father. The feeling is hers. She can simply feel okay and not explain it, or apologize for it, or concoct arguments against the argument that she doesn’t truly feel content and is deluding herself in self-protection.

Last year one of the seniors threw herself down the gym stairs, but even after she broke a rib she was still pregnant, and Ro/Miss said in class she hoped they understood who was to blame for this rib: the monsters in Congress who passed the Personhood Amendment and the walking lobotomies on the Supreme Court who reversed Roe v. Wade. “Two short years ago,” she said—or, actually, shouted—“abortion was legal in this country, but now we have to resort to throwing ourselves down the stairs.”

They rob the poor under the cover of law, he said, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage.

The wife made persons. No need to otherwise justify what she is doing on the planet.

The biographer once watched, on television, a church group chanting “Hurray!” outside the funeral of a politician’s wife who had used IVF to acquire two children and thereby had summoned (said the church’s press release) her own death by cancer. She and her husband coveted things that were not theirs, they reared up in fury, decided to show God who was boss, and meddled in matters of the womb. The politician’s wife was now a resident of hell. Flee her example.