Kim Magowan ~ The Habit Is You

You acquire a habit, then the habit is you. You are a per­son-sized con­tain­er that the habit pours into. The habit fills to your edges. You are a trans­par­ent pip­ing bag, a pil­low case, a jel­ly, a frag­ile mem­brane. You are ambu­la­to­ry and have pock­ets which con­tain a wal­let which con­tains mon­ey which feeds the habit, the habit that you con­tain but (let’s be frank) con­tains you. Your role now is to nur­ture the habit, to poke its embers into flames. You are the keep­er of the habit that keeps you. You acquire a habit, then the habit acquires you.

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Kim Magowan lives in San Francisco and teach­es at Mills College at Northeastern University. She is the author of the short sto­ry col­lec­tion The Last Day (2026), pub­lished by Moon City Press; Don’t Take This the Wrong Way (2025), co-authored with Michelle Ross, pub­lished by EastOver Press, and cho­sen as one of LitHub’s 100 Most Notable Books of 2025; 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.