Red Clocks

“What do you call a time-traveling flower shop?”
Ro/Miss raises one eyebrow.
“Back to the Fuchsia,” says the daughter.

Somebody’s mom came to class who’s a dental hygienist and said even the nub of an adult tooth growing in still needs to be brushed.

“Which roots and herbs, exactly?”
She’s one of those people who think they will understand something if they hear its name, when really they will only hear its name.

She doesn’t want the kid to wonder why he wasn’t kept.

And she doesn’t want to wonder what happened to him. Was he given to parents like hers or parents who scream and are bigots and don’t take him to the doctor enough?

Can the biographer remember first thinking, feeling, or deciding she wanted to be someone’s mother? The original moment of longing to let a bulb of lichen grow in her until it came out human? The longing is widely endorsed. Legislators, aunts, and advertisers approve. Which makes the longing, she thinks, a little suspicious.

Laws aren’t natural phenomena. They have particular and often horrific histories. Ever heard of the Nuremberg Laws? Ever heard of Jim Crow

She with murder honey on her teeth shall bleed salt from where two curves of thigh skin meet. Tasting honey from the body of a bee with devil-face shall start this salty blood. Faces of bees who have done murder do resemble those of starving dogs, whose eyes grow more human looking as they starve. Apis mellifera, Apis diabolus. If a town be swarmed by bees with devil-face, and those bees do drip honey into open mouths, the body of a woman with honey tooth, bleeding thigh salt, shall be lashed to whatever stake will hold her. The bee swarm shall be gathered in a barrel and dumped upon the fire that eats her. The honey teeth do catch flame first, sparks of blue at the white before the red tongue catches too, and the lips. Bees’ bodies when burning do smell of hot marrow; the odor makes onlookers vomit, yet still they look on

In Europe they once held trials for misbehaving animals. Wasn’t just the witches they hanged. A pig was sent to the gallows for eating a child’s face, a mule roasted alive for having been penetrated by its human master. For the unnatural act of laying an egg, a rooster was burned at the stake. Bees found guilty of stinging a man to death were suffocated in the hive, their honey destroyed, lest murder honey infect the mouths that ate it.