Red Clocks - Leni Zumas

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of the Gunakadeit Lighthouse, north of town, where she has come after school with the person she hopes to officially call her boyfriend. From here you can see massive cliffs soaring up from the ocean, rust veined, green mossed; giant pines gathering like soldiers along their rim; goblin trees jutting slant from the rock face. You can see silver-white lather smashing at the cliffs’ ankles. The harbor and its moored boats and the ocean beyond, a shirred blue prairie stretching to the horizon, cut by bars of green. Far from shore: a black fin.

      “Boring up here,” says Ephraim.

      Look at the black fin! she wants to say. The goblin trees!

      She says, “Yeah,” and touches his jaw, specked with new beard. They kiss for a while. She loves it except for the tongue thrusts.

      Does the fin belong to a shark? Could it belong to a whale?

      She draws back from Ephraim to look at the sea.

      “What?”

      “Nothing.”

      Gone.

      “Wanna bounce?” he says.

      They race down the spiral staircase, boot soles ringing on the stone, and climb into the backseat of his car.

      “I think I saw a gray whale. Did you—?”

      “Nope,” says Ephraim. “But did you know blue whales have the biggest cocks of any animal? Eight to ten feet.”

      “The dinosaurs’ were bigger than that.”

      “Bullshit.”

      “No, my dad’s got this book—” She stops: Ephraim has no father. The daughter’s father, though annoying, loves her more than all the world’s gold. “Anyway,” she says, “here’s one: A skeleton asks another skeleton, ‘Do you want to hear a joke?’ Second skeleton says, ‘Only if it’s humerus.’”

      “Why is that funny?”

      “Because—‘humerus’? The arm bone?”

      “That’s a little-kid joke.”

      Her mom’s favorite pun. It’s not her fault he didn’t know what a humerus was.

      “No more talking.” He goes to kiss her but she dodges, bites his shoulder through the cotton long sleeve, trying to break the skin but also not to. He gets her underpants down so fast it feels professional. Her jeans are already flung to some corner of the car, maybe on the steering wheel, maybe under the front seat, his jeans too, his hat.

      She reaches for his penis and circles her palm around the head, like she’s polishing.

      “Not like that—” Ephraim moves her hand to grip the shaft. Up down up down up down. “Like that.”

      He spits on his hand and wets his penis, guides it into her vagina. He shoves back and forth. It feels okay but not great, definitely not as great as they say it should feel, and it doesn’t help that the back of her head keeps slamming against the door handle, but the daughter has also read that it takes some time to get good at sex and to like it, especially for the girl. He has an orgasm with the same jittery moan she found weird at first but is getting used to, and she is relieved that her head has stopped being slammed against the door handle, so she smiles; and Ephraim smiles too; and she flinches at the sticky milk dribbling out of her.

      The explorer went to the lighthouse whenever allowed, at first, and once she could handle the boat alone, even when forbidden. Her uncle Bjartur felt bad that her father was dead and so let her come, although she bothered him with her questions; he was a lighthouse keeper, God knows, because he preferred his own company, but this little one, this Eivør, youngest of his favorite sister, he could find it in his chewed heart to let her run up the spiral stairs and dig through his trunk of ships’ debris and on drenched tiptoes watch the weather.

       THE WIFE

      Between town and home is a long twist of road that hugs the cliffside, climbing and dipping and climbing again.

      At the sharpest bend, whose guardrail is measly, the wife’s jaw tenses.

      What if she took her hands off the wheel and let them go?

      The car would jump along the top branches of the shore pines, tearing a fine green wake; flip once before building speed; fly past the rocks and into the water and down forever and—

      After the bend, she unclenches.

      Almost home.

      Second time this week she has pictured it.

      Soon as the groceries are in, she’ll give herself a few minutes upstairs. It won’t kill them to watch a screen.

      Why did she buy the grass-fed beef? Six dollars more per pound.

      Second time this week.

      They say grass-fed has the best fats.

      Which might be entirely common. Maybe everyone pictures it, maybe not as often as twice a week but—

      A little animal is struggling across the road. Dark, about a foot long.

      Possum? Porcupine? Trying to cross.

      Maybe it’s even healthy to picture it.

      Closer: burnt black, scorched to rubber.

      Shivering.

      Already dead, still trying.

      What burned it? Or who?

      “You’re making us crash!”—from the backseat.

      “We’re not crashing,” says the wife. Her foot is capable and steadfast. They will never crash with her foot on the brake.

      Who burned this animal?

      Convulsing, trembling, already so dead. Fur singed off. Skin black rubber.

       Who burned you?

      Closer: it’s a black plastic bag.

      But she can’t unsee the shivering thing, burnt and dead and trying.

      At the house: unbuckle, untangle, lift, carry, set down.

      Unpack, put away.

      Peel string cheese.

      Distribute string cheese.

      Place Bex and John in front of approved cartoon.

      Upstairs, the wife closes the sewing-room door. Sits cross-legged on the bed. Fixes her stare on the scuffed white wall.

      They are yipping and pipping, her two. They are rolling and polling and slapping and papping, rompling with little fists and heels on the bald carpet.

      They are hers, but she can’t get inside them.

      They can’t get back inside her.

      They are hurling their fists—Bex fistier, but John brave.

      Why did they name him John? Not a family name and almost as dull as the wife’s own. Bex had said, “I’m going to call the baby Yarnjee.”

      Is John brave, or foolish?—he squirms willingly while his sister punches. The wife doesn’t say No hitting because she doesn’t want them to stop, she wants them to get tired.

      She remembers why John: because everyone can spell and say it. John because his father hates correcting butchered English pronunciations of his own name. The errors of clerks. John is sometimes Jean-voyage; and Ro calls him Pliny the Younger.

      In the past hour, the kids have

      Rolled and polled.

      Eaten leftover popcorn stirred into lemon yogurt.

      Asked

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