Red Clocks

by Leni Zumas

the ascribing of human feeling to a body so inhumanly itself is wrong.

Maybe everyone pictures it, maybe not as often as twice a week but—

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

She was just quietly teaching history when it happened. Woke up one morning to a president-elect she hadn’t voted for.

She’s one of those people who think they will understand something if they hear its name, when really they will only hear its name.

“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.”

Yasmine, who made him use a condom but got pregnant anyway.

“Let’s spend the taxpayers’ money to criminalize vulnerable women, shall we?”

“Laws aren’t natural phenomena. They have particular and often horrific histories. Ever heard of the Nuremberg Laws? Ever heard of Jim Crow?”

Can the biographer remember first thinking, feeling, or deciding she wanted to be someone’s mother?

It’s creepy that you relate so much to lighthouse keepers.

They started talking about this thing called the Personhood Amendment, which for years had been a fringe idea, a farce.

She couldn’t believe the Personhood Amendment had become real with all these citizens so against it. Which (the disbelief) was stupid. She knew—it was her job as a teacher of history to know—how many horrors are legitimated in public daylight, against the will of most of the people.

What happened to the Ro/Miss who says we have better things to do with our lives than throw ourselves down the stairs?

But fuck this shitty list. She’s sick of being grateful. Why the fuck should she be grateful? She is angry—

You can’t say it was rape or incest—nobody cares how it got into you.

A less envious, less hateful person would not be hoping that Mattie Quarles was arrested at the Canadian border.

Like I tell my daughters: be the cow they have to buy.”

She doesn’t want to skip the Math Academy. (She kicks Nouri’s gothsickle ass at calculus.) Or to push it out. She doesn’t want to wonder; and she would.

Too tired to be furious.

More like too privileged

Mínervudottír may have felt free; but she was a cog in a land-snatching, resource-sucking, climate-fucking imperialist machine.

In the first fairy tale Uncle taught me, a glass splinter in the eye would make all the world ugly and bad. I have such a splinter now.

“Yeah, we take the surveillance state and male-supremacist legislation pretty seriously. Call us crazy.”

Up through the gummy darkness in her chest, through the self-pity and resentment, poke thin stalks of gratitude. The Polyphontes aren’t just shaking their heads.

she grins wide. “Well,” she says, her relief unmistakable, “that happened.”

Unless she’s being stupid. Naively ascribing common decency to people in power,

Zero weeks, zero days.

“God’s blood,” said the blacksmith. “Algae,” corrected Mínervudottír.

“I don’t see how gutting fish and washing six kids’ underwear by hand is equal to doing research in the Arctic Circle.” “Why not?”

How much of her ferocious longing is cellular instinct, and how much is socially installed? Whose urges is she listening to? Her life, like anyone’s, could go a way she never wanted, never planned, and turn out marvelous.

She and Cotter started the girl. The mender, with her body, continued the girl. For a time her clock was full of water and blood and a kicking fish. Which is both important and not important.

She wants more than one thing.