Red Clocks

by Leni Zumas

“A woman wants to know why,”

But who cares what the girl looks like, if she is happy? The world will care.

Two years ago the United States Congress ratified the Personhood Amendment, which gives the constitutional right to life, liberty, and property to a fertilized egg at the moment of conception. Abortion is now illegal in all fifty states. Abortion providers can be charged with second-degree murder, abortion seekers with conspiracy to commit murder. In vitro fertilization, too, is federally banned, because the amendment outlaws the transfer of embryos from laboratory to uterus. (The embryos can’t give their consent to be moved.) She was just quietly teaching history when it happened. Woke up one morning to a president-elect she hadn’t voted for. This man thought women who miscarried should pay for funerals for the fetal tissue and thought a lab technician who accidentally dropped an embryo during in vitro transfer was guilty of manslaughter. She had heard there was glee on the lawns of her father’s Orlando retirement village. Marching in the streets of Portland. In Newville: brackish calm.

“The comparing mind is a despairing mind,” says the meditation teacher.

Over the course of human evolution, did men learn to be attracted to skinny women because they were not visibly pregnant? Did voluptuousness signal that a body was already ensuring the survival of another man’s genetic material?

Why did “thirty” loom like an expiration date?

What does the word “spinster” do that “bachelor” doesn’t do? Why do they carry different associations?

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

She is too chickenshit to leave her marriage. She wants Didier to leave it first.

Don’t repeat your mistakes. Like I tell my daughters: be the cow they have to buy.” “Sorry?” “Don’t be the free milk.”