Red Clocks by Leni Zumas

Author:Leni Zumas [Leni Zumas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2017-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

The ice that would chase me is called by the Inupiat ivu and by the Europeans “ice shove,” and it never gives warning. It gallops to shore from the outer sea, a heave of water caught and stropped into an iron tidal wave. But I would be faster than ivu. I would change into a snow deer and outrun it.

THE WIFE

Walks the children down Lupatia Street, killing time. The wind is fast and blue and sharp with late November.

In front of Cone Wolf, she thinks of Bryan’s dimple.

Bryan’s thighs.

The way he looked at her.

“Morning, Susan!” says the passing librarian.

“Morning.”

Goody Hallett’s is gone, Snippity Doo Dah is new, but otherwise the shops and pub and library and church have sat here, in the salt wind, for decades.

Is the wife going to die in Newville?

As they cross Lupatia, a bicycle whips past so close her arm hairs crackle.

“Watch the fuck out!” yells the rider, slowing and turning to look at the wife. “It’s bad enough you chose to procreate on a dying planet.”

“Dick,” she calls after him.

Admittedly she was not in the crosswalk.

Admittedly she has added more people to this steaming pile.

Warm, silky new smell of Bex’s neck.

Her rapturous mouth on the wife’s nipple to bring down the milk tingling in the ducts.

How John slept on her chest with measureless trust.

This planet may be choking to death, bleeding from every hole, but still she would choose them, every time.

“Momplee, is there school tomorrow?”

“Yes, sweetpea.” She signals, brakes, turns off the paved road.

“Why?”

“Because tomorrow’s Monday.”

Up the hill beneath a waving roof of red alder and madrone.

You and I should have coffee sometime.

They could meet in Wenport. For coffee.

She used to pass through Wenport on those endless drives to get Bex to nap—infant Bex who never wanted to close her eyes—when Didier was teaching and the wife didn’t know how to make her baby fall asleep.

The air in Wenport stinks like eggs, from the pulp mill.

She and Bryan could have sex in the backseat of this car.

Maybe not in the backseat; Bryan’s too big.

A motel. Pay in cash.

The trees give way to an open slope, patchy with salt grass and lavender. The dirt driveway. The house.

“We’re home, baby bones!” Bex tells John, who will be scarred for life because the wife told him to shut the fuck up. John, whom she’d give her own life not to scar.

Unbuckle, untangle, lift, set down.

She drops the car keys on the hall table. Her husband is prostrate on the living-room couch.

“Your shift now,” she says. “I’m going for a walk.”

“What about lunch?”

“I ate with the kids in town.”

“But I haven’t eaten.”

“So—eat.”

“I was waiting for you,” he says. “There’s nothing in the house.”

“Untrue.”

“What am I supposed to have, then?”

The wife starts for the kitchen, then stops. “Actually, it’s not my job to figure out what you’re having for lunch.”

“Could you at least make a suggestion? There’s like absolutely rien in the fridge.”

“I suggest you put the kids back in the car, drive somewhere, and buy something.”

“I’m exhausted,” he says.

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