Red Clocks(44)

While they take their quiz, Ro/Miss is doing a weird thing with her fingers on the sides of her face. Rubbing in a sort of violent way. Her eyes are closed. Bad headache? 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!

The witch is a spinster too. She is bold and cold and wouldn’t be agitated by the Nouri Witherses of this world. In the daughter’s shoes, instead of fretting over some little melancholy jelly Ephraim prefers, Gin Percival would either quit caring or take revenge. Devise a potion that made Nouri’s fingertips numb for the rest of her life, so that if she went blind in old age, she couldn’t read braille.

Except she can’t make potions in jail.

“Everyone finished?” goes Ro/Miss. “If not, too bad.”

She hurt the principal’s wife, according to the newspaper.

“Ash, stop writing. Now. Give me that paper.”

Except she didn’t seem like a person who would hurt anyone.

Do they provide tampons in jail? Gin Percival might not have brought any with her. And what if they give her the wrong size? A Slender when she needs a Super Plus?

Yasmine coached the daughter on the phone when she lost a tampon inside herself. Explained how to find the muscles that would expel it. “Pretend you’re stopping yourself from peeing.”





Pack ice could block, trap, gouge, or outright crush a three-hundred-fifty-ton ship. Mínervudottír wanted to acquaint herself with this brute.





THE MENDER


She is come from walking on the bottom of the sea. There the tiny eyeless and the footless walked with she. Ran with she the finned and flattened, sailed with she the lungless; swayed with she the fantom grasses, lantern fishes, wolf eels. To the north bathed viperfish, who did not even see she; to the south flew goblin sharks, who did not even eat she. Toed a wolf eel, thumbed a skate, fingered the sucker of a cockeyed squid.

And back again, on waking, to the concrete bed.

Like the cell of any hive.

“Here’s your tray,” says the day guard, who has six fingers on her off hand. Hyperdactylia is a sign of the visionary. “And you got a letter.”

On white paper, in pencil:

Dear Ginny,

Everything will be all right. I’m feeding the animals. And I took care of the other thing. I hope you like this kind of chocolate.

C.



So polite, Cotter. “I’m going to put it in now, okay?” he said, the first time they had sex. Polite till the cows come home. In, and in, and in. Her scabbard hurt after.

She had been curious to try. They did it five times, on four different days, on a blanket on the floor of Cotter’s parents’ basement, until she decided she didn’t want to do it anymore.

Cotter was sad but still walked her home from school, and they didn’t talk much, sometimes not at all. Her scabbard stopped hurting. They listened to the scroof and bap of their shoes on the sidewalk. The tsunami siren went off so loud the mender fell to her knees—“Will we drown?” She hated to swim, was frightened of sharks. “No, it’s just a test,” he said, and crouched to hug her.

Cotter was not her future husband, even though, back then, he sort of wanted to be. Scottish virgins used to douse charred peat with cow piss and hang it in their doorways, and whatever color the piss-moss was, next morning, would equal the color of their future husbands’ hair.

Has Mattie Matilda solved her problem by now? Or is the little fish still inside?

“The letter says chocolate,” she tells the guard.

“You’re not allowed to have the chocolate.”

“But it was sent to me.”

“You’re in jail, Stretch. Nothing here is yours.”

“At least tell me what kind it was?” she yells at the guard’s back.

The other guards are eating the chocolate, she knows. Smearing it all over their faces.

They took away her Aristotle’s lanterns too. Her neckcloth.

“If we go to trial, it will help if you look as mainstream as you can,” said the lawyer. “Studies have shown that juries are influenced by grooming and attire.”

Her grooming won’t change one inch of itself. She won’t let him bring her any department-store clothes. Her aunt yells from the freezer: Show those fuckshits how Percivals do! The mender has been refusing the instant mashed potato and pork nuggets; she eats her own nails and the brickling skin around them. The lawyer has promised to bring better food. He said, “I’ll have you out by Christmas.”

Christmas, her favorite criminal. Stockings are hanged, trees chopped, geese shot, children threatened with coal.

Christmas is next week.

Medical malpractice: who’ll believe forest weirdo over school principal? Naturally that prick became a principal—plenty of little ones to boss around. Wasn’t enough for him to boss Lola. “You divorce me at your age, you’ll never get another man, it’s just numbers, babe, you’re at the wrong end of the numbers,” she told the mender he’d said.

They think the mender harmed her grievously. Think she waved her broom at the moon and saved her own menstrual blood in a cat skull and dipped a live toad in the blood and tore off one of the toad’s legs and stuffed it into Lola’s butthole.