A Stranger in My Home
Kim Magowan and Michelle Ross
One evening after work, I return home and find a woman in my kitchen. She’s arranging purple fingerling potatoes onto my roasting pan. I smell her before I see her. Or more aptly, I smell the fruits of her labor—garlic, parsley, fish. Next to the cutting board is my best wine glass, the only one that has survived from what was once a set of four. Although made of glass, it has always reminded me of a medieval chalice. Inside it: something clear-ish, bubbly.
The woman turns toward me. The way her big, brown eyes widen, then quickly narrow, I think of bobbers on a fishing line, how they sink as the line is tugged from below.
“Dinner will be ready in about forty minutes. Don’t you want to put that down?” she says, eyeing my handbag, which I note with some surprise is still slung over my shoulder. Normally, the first thing I do when I walk through my front door is deposit my handbag on the table in the hallway. I call it a “table,” but it’s not really a table. It has a number of small, impractical drawers—the kind I would have adored as a girl, that I still adore, though they’re always getting stuck. When I was married to Paul, he called it “that goofy thing by the front door,” a cumbersome, antagonistic name. Paul took plenty of items I was attached to when he moved out, including a brass coat rack that reminded me of a deciduous tree in winter. I used to imagine that in its spring, that coat rack had produced golden apples. But Paul didn’t try to claim this table. I was relieved that he hadn’t. But, also, I wondered how I could have spent eleven years of my life with someone who didn’t value this piece of furniture I love.
As I deposit my handbag, the woman says, “Something to drink?”
When she turns back toward the roasting pan, she waves her fingers over the pan, and salt trickles from those fingertips like snow.
“Oh, I can get it myself,” I say.
“Please. Let me,” she says.
“Thank you,” I say. “I’ll have what you’re having then.”
When she presents me with the glass of wine, I think she has given me her own. But no, hers is still on the counter where she left it. Somehow there are now two good wine glasses.
I’ve had this dumb fantasy since I was a kid of what evenings coming home from work would be like once I was married. The scent of dinner being prepared, my husband making me a cocktail, then holding my face in his hands as he kissed me. I watched a lot of old television shows growing up, read a lot of fairy tales. My mother used to say I had quite the imagination. She didn’t mean it as a compliment.
I accept the glass. Don’t ask where it came from.
Michelle Ross is the author of three award-winning story collections: There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You (Moon City Press, 2017); Shapeshifting (Stillhouse, 2021); and They Kept Running (UNT Press, 2022). Don’t Take This the Wrong Way, a story collection she cowrote with Kim Magowan, was published by EastOver Press in March 2025. Her work is included in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, the Wigleaf Top 50, and the Norton anthology, Flash Fiction America. It’s received special mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology. She is an editor at 100 Word Story. www.michellenross.com
Kim Magowan is the author of the short story collection How Far I’ve Come (Gold Wake Press, 2022); the novel The Light Source (7.13 Books, 2019); and the short story collection Undoing (Moon City Press, 2018). Don’t Take This the Wrong Way, a story collection she cowrote with Kim Magowan, was published by EastOver Press in March 2025. Her fiction has been published in 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
Table of Contents for Flaw and Favor