Red Clocks. Leni Zumas

seeing the witch, Susan would act supportive and serious, then laugh about it behind the biographer’s back. With Didier. Oh, poor Ro—first she’s buying sperm online, now she’s tramping into the forest to consult a homeless woman. Oh, poor Ro—why does she keep trying? She has no idea how hard it’s going to be.

      On her teacher’s salary she will die holding notices from credit-card agencies, whereas Susan and Didier, who also live on a teacher’s salary, are debt-free, as far as she knows, and pay no rent. Bex and John no doubt have trust funds set up by Susan’s parents, fattening and fattening.

      “The comparing mind is a despairing mind,” says the meditation teacher.

      Well, the biographer will figure out how to send her baby who does not exist yet to college. If the baby chooses to go to college, that is. She won’t push the baby. The biographer herself liked college, but who’s to say what the baby will like? Might decide to be a fisherperson and stay right here on the coast and eat dinner with the biographer every night, not out of obligation but out of wanting to. They will linger at the table and tell each other how the day went. The biographer won’t be teaching by that point, only writing, having published Mínervudottír: A Life to critical acclaim and now working on a comprehensive history of female Arctic explorers; and the baby, tired from hours on the fishing boat but still paying attention, will ask the biographer intelligent questions about menstruating at eighty degrees below zero.

      As a girl, I loved (but why?) to watch the grindadráp. It was a death dance. I couldn’t stop looking. To smell the bonfires lit on the cliffs, calling men to the hunt. To see the boats herd the pod into the cove, the whales thrashing faster as they panic. Men and boys wade into the water with knives to cut their spinal cords. They touch the whale’s eye to make sure it is dead. And the water foams up red.