A Handbook for Identifying Bird Calls by Kim Magowan
Associate fiction editor Zoa Coudret on today’s bonus story: The aftermath of a marriage is difficult to capture succinctly, but Kim Magowan illuminates a range of emotions and makes the characters palpable while leaving plenty to the reader’s imagination.
A Handbook for Identifying Bird Calls
I’ve changed my ex-husband’s contact info to “Asshole,” but still when Jake calls I feel a lurch in my chest that makes me understand why apothecaries and poets once believed that emotions reside in the heart. He’s sitting on his deck, Jake explains, drinking a beer, listening to the damnedest bird. “I’ve never heard anything like it. What kind of bird makes a sound like a can opener?” It’s a ridiculous thing to feel victorious about, I know, but it makes me happy that he’d call me instead of Googling it, or asking Kristi, his dumb, gorgeous wife. “Here, listen,” he says, and I listen, picturing Jake holding his cell phone up towards the sky, the sunlight catching all the fine hairs of his extended arm.
Kim Magowan lives in San Francisco and teaches in the Department of Literatures and Languages at Mills College. Her short story collection Undoing (2018) won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her novel The Light Source (2019) was published by 7.13 Books. Her fiction has been published in Booth, Colorado Review, The Gettysburg Review, Hobart, Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and 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. Visit her at www.kimmagowan.com.
