Comorbidity
When you cook you use every pot, including ones that can’t go in the dishwasher, because I clean; when I cook, you poke my Brussels sprouts with your fork, pronounce them “mushy,” and push aside your plate.
You call my favorite show “aristoporn.”
On Saturday, you preened in the mirror before bar-hopping with your co-workers, so I knew awful Glenda would be there.
In short, there’s no grand, instigating incident.
But the cumulative effect of these irritants has worn my love into a soap so soft and thin that, the next time I shower, it will dissolve in my hand.
Kim Magowan lives in San Francisco and teaches in the English Department of Mills College at Northeastern University. She is the author of the short story collection Don’t Take This the Wrong Way (2025), co-authored with Michelle Ross, published by EastOver Press; the short story collection How Far I’ve Come (2022), published by Gold Wake Press; the novel The Light Source (2019), published by 7.13 Books; and the short story collection Undoing (2018), which won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her fiction has been published in Colorado Review, The Gettysburg Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and many other journals. Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is the Editor-in-Chief and Fiction Editor of Pithead Chapel. www.kimmagowan.com
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