Photo by boris misevic on Unsplash
by Kim Magowan
I went to a bar called (I kid you not) The Last Chance Saloon, and ordered a double. “A double what?” said the bartender, wearily, and so I said “A double rye,” because rye was the first bottle my eyes landed on, though from the strange look the bartender gave me, that wasn’t the kind of double folks typically ordered. But what did I know? I was just saying a word in real life that I’d only heard in movies, because the fact was I wanted none of this to be real—me in my black dress and lace spider-web tights that, it had occurred to me walking to Grace Cathedral, my stepmother would look at askance and call “inappropriate.” I couldn’t deal with any of it: my stepmother’s waterproof mascara and crocodile tears, or the sentimental eulogy showcasing how close he and my dad were that my stepbrother would give, because he’d been picked to give it, not me. Plus my shoes were giving me blisters, but I’d worn them because they had old-fashioned hook-eye fasteners that reminded me of ice skates, that reminded me of my dad helping me put on my wobbly ice skates, before he left my mother for terrible Claudia, and so I decided fuck the funeral, I just couldn’t deal, I would go to the ice rink instead, because if there was one day I should get a free pass, it had to be today.
Kim Magowan is the author of a novel, The Light Source, and three story collections: Don’t Take This the Wrong Way (2025, co-authored with Michelle Ross), How Far I’ve Come (2022), and Undoing (2018). She is the Fiction Editor and EIC of Pithead Chapel.
