"I beg your pardon?"
What had I just said? Rewind short-term memory buffer:
"How's your biological clock doing?"
Holy shit.
It was 7 pm in New York City. We'd both flown in from the west coast that morning to attend a conference and had been going nonstop all day. Now we were eating faux Louisiana food on the lower west side. It was noisy. Conversations were crisscrossing the table as a bunch of mostly young turks tried to transcend the social clusters they came in with.
I tossed it off as an aside to my my friend from San Francisco: How's your biological clock doing? She's younger than me but not much younger. Married with an invisible partner. Child-free as far as I know, but those weren't the words I had intended to summon up. I'd been trying to keep it light.
Nanosecond ticked away as I stared at her incredulous eyes with a look of idiocy on my slack face.
"Wait, no sorry," I said, "No, scratch that my bad," syllables rushing to get out of a burning edifice and crashing into each other at the exit.
"I meant, how are your circadian rhythms?"
lavatory and laboratory
silverware and Civil War