POO ON YOU — KIM MAGOWAN
/My husband wants our four-year-old Hannah to know how to spell. Charley wants Hannah to explain to him, when he refused to read her the Five Little Monkeys book neither of us can stand and she said, “Well, poo on you!”, whether she meant “pooh” or “poo.” “Pooh” with an H, for Charley, would be sweet in a Victorian, Alice-in-Wonderland kind of way. “Poo,” though, would be crude and scatological; “poo” would require a time-out and consequences.
I tell him he’s being ridiculous, but then the whole world is ridiculous. The other day Hannah told us very solemnly that at her pre-school, “‘Ha ha’ is a bad word.”
Any man who could call a four-year-old “crass” and “disrespectful” is questionable. Any man who gets all red in the face over trifles is by definition trifling. “With an H or not? What do you figure?” he keeps asking me, as if it matters, as if the answer isn’t obvious.
I want to tell him that in Spain, getting shat on by birds is considered a sign of good fortune, that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with poo on you, but Charley is beyond the reach of humor.
I have many reasons to leave Charley, not the least of which is I am crazy about my boss, George, but if I leave (and I say “if” because of Hannah, and because I do love Charley, in a worn-out way), I’ll tell him that our parenting styles don’t mesh, and that will be at least partly true. I already know my exit line.
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, Forge, The Gettysburg Review, Passages North, 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
