#red clocks

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.

I am constantly recommending the novel Red Clocks by Leni Zumas to people, and I am here to recommend it to you. It’s about post-abortion America*, in which abortion and in-vitro fertilization and other reproductive health-related stuff is banned. The cast of characters is incredible, and the novel manages to be funny and scary and small and big and it’s speculative but it feels very, very real. Reading it made me feel a lot of emotions, but it did not make me any more depressed than the actual world does, and I found it a really enlivening way to frame and think about a lot of the things that are happening in our actual world. <3

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.

The daughter doesn’t agree with Dad that Ro/Miss is a radical leftist; she’s just smart. A smart spinster. If the daughter were to say that word in front of Ro/Miss, she’d get a sermon: What does the word “spinster” do that “bachelor” doesn’t do? Why do they carry different associations? These are language acts, people!

"she with murder honey on her teeth shall bleed salt from where two curves of thigh skin meet. tasting honey from the body of a bee with devil-face shall start this salty blood. faces of bees who have done murder do resemble those of starving dogs, whose eyes grow more human looking as they starve. apis mellifera, apis diabolus. if a town be swarmed by bees with devil-face, and those bees do drip honey into open mouths, the body of a woman with honey tooth, bleeding thigh salt, shall be lashed to whatever stake will hold her. the bee swarm shall be gathered in a barrel and dumped upon the fire that eats her. the honey teeth do catch flame first, sparks of blue at the white before the red tongue catches too, and the lips. bees' bodies when burning do smell of hot marrow; the odor makes onlookers vomit, yet still they look on."