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.

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.

shaken. Hello, beautifuls. Their tongues are hard and clean. First time she saw a goat’s pupil—rectangular, not round—she felt a stab of recognition. I know you, strangeness.

Magic was of two kinds: natural and artificial. Natural magic was no more than a precise knowledge of the secrets of nature. Armed with such knowledge, you could effect marvels that to the ignorant seemed miracles or illusions. A man once cured his father’s blindness with the gall bladder of a dragonet fish; the beat of a drum stretched with the skin of a wolf would shatter a drum stretched with the skin of a lamb.

Babies once were abstractions. They were Maybe I do, but not now. The biographer used to sneer at talk of biological deadlines, believing the topic of baby craziness to be crap for lifestyle magazines. Women who worried about ticking clocks were the same women who traded salmon-loaf recipes and asked their husbands to clean the gutters. She was not and never would be one of them. Then, suddenly, she was one of them. Not the gutters, but the clock.

He’s told her many times that a whale can be killed by the pressure of its own flesh. Out of water, the animal’s bulk is too heavy for its rib cage—the ribs break; the internal organs are crushed.

A whale is a house in the ocean.

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.

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 did not leave behind money or property or a book or a child, but her corpse kept alive creatures who, in turn, kept other creatures alive.

She wants more than one thing. To write the last sentence of Mínervudottír. To write the first sentence of something else. To be courteous but fierce with her father’s doctors. To be a foster mom. To be the next principal. To be neither. She wants to stretch her mind wider than “to have one.” Wider than “not to have one.” To quit shrinking life to a checked box, a calendar square. To quit shaking her head. To go to the protest in May. To do more than go to a protest. To be okay with not knowing. Keep your legs, Stephens. To see what is. And to see what is possible.