Red Clocks by Leni Zumas Read Free Book Online Page A

year, so he qualifies for an accelerated math and language-arts program. You guys aren’t vegetarian, are you? We’ve been getting the most heavenly beef from our friends down the road. Their cows are grass-fed, no antibiotics whatsoever, just pure happy beef.”
    “You mean happy before they’re slaughtered,” says Didier, “or once they turn into food?”
    She doesn’t bat an eye. “So when you guyscome over, I’ll make steaks, and the chard will be ready soon. Gosh, we’ve got
acres
of it this year. Fortunately the kids love chard.”
    Still raining hard on the way home. Wipers furious.
    “Shooting?” says Didier.
    “Too quick,” says the wife. “What’s a very slow poison?”
    “Hemlock, I think,” he says, taking a hand off the wheel to caress the back of her neck. “No, wait—starvation! Hoist themon their own, like, whatevers.”
    “Petards,” she says.
    “What is a petard, anyway?”
    “Can’t remember. But I vote for starvation.”
    “‘I notice you’ve got some unsoaked nuts on the premises, and I’m a little concerned. Frankly I wouldn’t dream of feeding my children an unsoaked nut.’”
    “What are you guys talking about?” says Bex.
    “A TV show we saw,” says Didier, “called
The World’s Smallest Petard
. You would like it, Bexy. There’s an episode where every time a person farts, you can actually see the fart—there’s these little brown clouds trailing behind the characters.”
    Bex giggles.
    The wife moves his hand from her neck down to her thigh and closes her eyes, smiling. He squeezes her jeaned flesh.
    She remembers what she loves.
    Not the fart jokes, but the sweetness. The solidarity againstthe Perfects of this world.
    She will ask him tomorrow.
    In the car-window fog she draws an
A
.
    It was bad, yes, the last time he refused. She promised herself she wouldn’t ask again.
    But the kids adore him.
    And he really is sweet sometimes.
    I got the name of a person in Salem,
she will say,
who’s supposed to be fantastic, not that expensive, does late appointments. We can get Mattie to sit—

    And she has seen herself driving off the cliff road with the kids in the car.

 
    When the polar explorer turned six, she was shown the best way to hold the knife and how to make a slice across the lamb’s throat—just one, they don’t feel it, do it hard, watch your brother. But when she had the knife, and her mother was squatting beside her with the little wriggler, she didn’t want to. Eivør was ordered twice to cut it and twice she said
“Nei, Mamma.”
    Her mother puta hand over hers and drew the knife under the lamb’s face; its face fell off; Eivør fell with it, screaming; and her mother hoisted the animal above a washtub to bleed.
    Eivør was beaten on her thighs with a leather strap used for hanging slit lambs in the drying shed. And she ate no
ræst kjøt
that Christmas or
skerpikjøt
that spring, apart from the occasional secret bite her brother Gunni savedin his shoe.

THE BIOGRAPHER
    Doesn’t know for a fact that Gunni saved pieces of fermented lamb in his shoe when Eivør wasn’t allowed to have any, but she writes it in her book, because her own brother used to hide cookies in his napkin when their mother told the biographer she didn’t need more dessert unless she wanted to get chubby. Archie would leave the cookies in his drawer for her to retrieve. Each timeshe opened the drawer and saw the grease-darkened napkin tucked among socks, a flame of happiness lit in her throat.
    She wrote the first sentences of
Mínervudottír: A Life
ten years ago, when she was working at a café in Minneapolis and trying to help Archie get clean. When she wasn’t driving him to meetings or outpatient appointments, she was dropping leafy greens into smoothies he didn’t drink.She was checking his pupils for pinnedness, his drawers for needles, her own wallet for missing cash. Sometimes he would ask to read the manuscript. He liked the part where the polar explorer