Red Clocks

by Leni Zumas

Well, the biographer will figure out how to send her baby who does not exist yet to college. If the baby chooses to go to college, that is. She won’t push the baby. The biographer herself liked college, but who’s to say what the baby will like? Might decide to be a fisherperson and stay right here on the coast and eat dinner with the biographer every night, not out of obligation but out of wanting to. They will linger at the table and tell each other how the day went. The biographer won’t be teaching by that point, only writing, having published Mínervudottír: A Life to critical acclaim and now working on a comprehensive history of female Arctic explorers; and the baby, tired from hours on the fishing boat but still paying attention, will ask the biographer intelligent questions about menstruating at eighty degrees below

This fact outlasts all other facts.

Off the coast of Greenland they saw the Crimson Cliffs: enormous shoulders of red-stained snow. “God’s blood,” said the blacksmith. “Algae,” corrected Mínervudottír.

Which is both important and not important.

Like many things at Ambrosia Ridge, the pond is depressing and soothing in equal measure.

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.