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. Today its walls are high, white lather torn, crashing hard at the sea stacks. “Angry sea,” people say, but to the biographer the ascribing of human feeling to a body so inhumanly itself is wrong. The water heaves up for reasons they don’t have names for.

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

“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?

Too chickenshit to leave first, she will blow up her life instead.