Red Clocks

by Leni Zumas

Mr. Zakile paws through his notes, likely ripped whole from online, searching in those cut-and-pasted sentences for the brain he wasn’t born with.

Susan has a knack for commiserating with suffering she hasn’t suffered.

The biographer would be asking something of her that she doesn’t believe should be asked of anyone. Deepest convictions, trampled.

She can’t decide what to call this feeling. It isn’t sadness. More like a wilting. A deflation. The skin of a balloon after all the air except a breath or two has seeped out.

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.