Red Clocks

by Leni Zumas

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 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.

“Do you feel undeserving of a romantic partner?” asked the therapist. “No,” said the biographer. “Are you pessimistic about finding a partner?” “I don’t necessarily want a partner.” “Might that attitude be a form of self-protection?” “You mean am I deluding myself?” “That’s another way to put it.”

Ephraim doesn’t have an orgasm, he stops after a couple of minutes, says he isn’t feeling it. Shifts his weight off her. The first thing she feels is relief. The second is fear. No male teenager ever passes up the chance for intercourse, according to her mom, who last year gave her A Talk that included, thank God, no anatomical details but did feature warnings about the sex-enslaved minds of boys. Yet here is Ephraim, sixteen going on seventeen, passing up a chance. Or stopping mid-chance. “Did I, like, do something wrong?” she says quietly. “Unh-unh. I’m just way tired.” He yawns, as though to prove it. Pushes back his blond-streaked hair. “We’re doing two-a-days for soccer. Hand me my hat?” She loves this hat, which makes him look like a gorgeous detective. But her own clothes: Black wool leggings. Red tube skirt. White glitter-paste long sleeve. Purple loop scarf. A pathetic outfit; no wonder he stopped. “Want me to drop you at Ash’s?” “Yeah, thanks.” She waits for him to say something about the next time, make a plan, allude to their future together, even just You coming to our game Friday? They get to Ash’s and he hasn’t. She says, “So…” “See you, September girl,” he says, and kisses, more like bites, her mouth. In Ash’s bathroom she drops the purple scarf in the trash and covers it with a handful of smushed toilet paper.

They are the products of desire: sexual, yes, but more importantly (in the age of contraception, at least) they come from the desire to recur. Give me the chance to repeat myself. Give me a life lived again, and bigger. Give me a self to take care of, and better. Again, please, again! We’re wired, it’s said, to want repeating.

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?

my mom.” In-breath. Who would pity her daughter for these solo efforts, this manless life. Out-breath. But her mother, who went from father’s house to college dorm to husband’s house without a single day lived on her own, never knew the pleasures of solitude.

the Pink Wall? The border control can detain any woman or girl they “reasonably” suspect of crossing into Canada for the purpose of ending a pregnancy. Seekers are returned (by police escort) to their state of residence, where the district attorney can prosecute them for attempting a termination. Healthcare providers in Canada are also barred from offering in vitro fertilization to U.S. citizens.

But how can you raise a child alone when you can’t resist twelve ounces of coffee? When you’ve been known to eat peanut butter on a spoon for dinner? When you often go to bed without brushing your teeth?

Maybe she Was too young. Was too old—didn’t have the energy. Already had six kids. Knew she was about to die of cancer. Was a tweaker. Just didn’t feel like dealing.

Why did she spend nine months growing the daughter if she was just going to give her up?

“So if something doesn’t make money,” says the biographer, “it’s automatically relegated to hobby?”

After January fifteenth, when Every Child Needs Two goes into effect, no adopted kid will have to suffer from a single woman’s lack of time, her low self-esteem, her inferior earning power. Every adopted kid will now reap the rewards of growing up in a two-parent home. Fewer single mothers, say the congressmen, will mean fewer criminals and addicts and welfare recipients.

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. And heat hurts whales.

“The heart of a sperm whale weighs almost three hundred pounds.”

A boy who moves through the world unafraid. If he weren’t so fearless and handsome and good at soccer, he might have been forced to grow in more interesting directions.

“Have you ever considered, people, how much time has been stolen from the lives of girls and women due to agonizing over their appearance?”

“How many minutes, hours, months, even actual years, of their lives do girls and women waste in agonizing? And how many billions of dollars of corporate profit are made as a result?”

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.

the person she planned to be would care about this mess, would bother to be furious. Too tired to be furious.

“How come nobody’s allowed to criticize a woman’s decision to give up her name for a man’s name? Just because it’s her choice? I can think of some other bad choices that—”

“Shut up, please,”

“Am I fat?” “No!” Voice wobbly: “I weigh eight pounds more than Shell.” “Oh, sweetpea.” She kneels down on the kitchen floor, gathering Bex into her lap. “You’re exactly the right size for you. Who cares how much Shell weighs? You’re beautiful and perfect just the way you are.” The wife fails, as a parent, on so many fronts. “You’re my perfect darling gorgeous girl.” But she will do this one thing right.

“Okay, so, you know how the world is going to run out of energy unless we stop burning oil and make more wind farms?” “Well, among other things.” “So my idea is to harness whales. You could make very light but strong harnesses, like out of steel thread, and hook them up to super-long steel reins. The reins would be attached to turbines, which would be on their own floating platforms, capturing the energy. There would also be generators on the platforms to convert the energy to electricity.”

All the doors have closed. The ones, at least, she tried to open. 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.