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