Twenty Thousand Steps

by Kim Magowan

When my husband pisses me off, I take long walks. I get lots of exercise. Like the other day, when Sam “helped” me activate a new credit card, which required setting a password with all sorts of stipulations (lowercase letters, uppercase letters, numbers, and special characters). The first three passwords I thought of got rejected. None of the error messages explained why, what requirement was unmet. Sam said “Just choose a goddamn password.” I asked Sam to suggest one, and he proposed “I Am a Child @42.” After the credit card was activated, Sam said “You’re welcome! You’re welcome!”
 
I said, “Thank you”; what I meant was fuck off. I grabbed my parka and walked.
 
Sometimes it takes six miles, sometimes eight or nine. Eventually, the muscle burn, the pump of my arms, the cool wind, and the damp silver city unrolling before me airlift me away from my divorce-scheming. It’s like a mechanical claw seizes me from a scrum of dusty toys. Eventually, I see something so pretty, perhaps sunlight gleaming upon the corrugated bay. I calculate how many more years are left until both kids are off to college (five); then I return to for-now home.

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, co-authored with Michelle Ross, forthcoming from 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.