Garbage
- Apr 8, 2022
- 2 min read
by Kim Magowan
Walking home tonight, I think about how early this morning, the garbage truck lumbered up our hill, making, as usual, all kinds of beeps and bangs. Somehow I find those early Wednesday mornings comforting: sitting at the kitchen island, drinking my coffee, outside still dark, everyone in the house asleep, despite that loud garbage truck.
All our neighbors, I note, have already put away their three cans — the blue one for recycling, the green for compost, the brown for garbage.
I think, maybe Scott, for once, has put away the cans. Scott works from home. Some days he never even gets out of his pajama pants. Maybe I won’t have to lay down my heavy purse and, while I’m still in my work clothes, drag those cans on their awkward wheels into the garage. That would be a cool surprise. It is, after all, one of the very few chores Scott is designated to do — deal with the garbage — though it’s hard to remember the last time he actually did it.
And I make a promise to myself: if he has put away the garbage cans, I will never leave Scott. Even after the girls go away to college, I will stay. I will remind myself “for better, for worse”: marriage accommodates inevitable disappointments. I will tolerate his moods, his sloppiness, his self-absorption. Lulu and Daisy will grow up and procreate and bring their own children over, and I’ll bake Snickerdoodles with the grandkids, getting out the step stool so they can do the mixing, and after the cookies are baked, Scott will spill crumbs all over the floor. We will grow old together. We will look like those wizened apple dolls my mother used to collect.
By now I am nearly within sight of our house, and I cross my fingers like a kid, like Lulu used to do just a couple of years back. Then our house curves into view. In front of it are the three garbage cans, blue, green, and brown, our house the only house on the street where the garbage cans still have not been put away. I put my heavy purse on the sidewalk and start dragging the cans towards the garage, feeling so relieved.
Kim Magowan lives in San Francisco and teaches in the Department of Literatures and Languages at Mills College. She is the author of 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, Craft Literary, 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
