How to Keep Yourself from Floating All the Way Up
Kim Magowan

Anchor yourself to a heavy man. We’re not talking literally in terms of weight here, but of gravitas. He should read The Wall Street Journal, remove his outdoor shoes when he returns home, and don house shoes with sheepskin lining. When he tells you about something funny that happened in the office, he always means “funny” in the sense of peculiar rather than the sense of haha.

Have sex exclusively in the missionary position.

When in the kitchen, always hold something in your right hand—a wooden spoon, a lemon zester, a meat thermometer. The item doesn’t need to be heavy, so long as your grip is firm.

Avoid sitting on your back deck, especially if you live on a hill. If you do need to go outside, for instance to clip a sprig of rosemary for your lamb stew, make sure not to gaze at the low-hanging, fat-bellied clouds that swiftly scud overhead.

If all else fails, have two children, first a boy, then a girl. Crop the daughter’s hair short, and keep the son’s hair long, particularly if he has ringlets. Eventually, if you’re careful, it may be safe to take them to the playground behind the library. There, make sure to stay low to the ground: sit in the sandbox, or squat at the base of the slide to catch your children when they roar squealing down. At all costs, avoid the swings. Avoid their long, tangled, hypnotic chains.

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Kim Magowan’s Comments

My writer friends and I do these “flashathons” a couple of times a year, where we take turns sending each other prompts every hour on the hour, and spend a chunk of the day—usually 4 to 6 hours—knocking out a bunch of messy first drafts. Two of these stories were drafted during a manic flashathons on August 17 that I did with Michelle Ross, Michael Czyzniejewski, and Karen Craigo.

“How To Keep Yourself from Floating All the Way Up” was inspired by prompt 2, at 9 in the morning. Michelle wrote this prompt, asking us to pick whatever we wanted from a list (a very weird list!) and draft a story of less than 500 words. The items I chose from Michelle’s bizarro menu—though their presence is perhaps obscure in this story—were instructions for or from a household item, a kitchen utensil, a mysterious pain, and a question of the sort you’d see in an advice column.

The mental images that immediately sprang to mind when I read Michelle’s prompt were a wooden stirring spoon and, for some reason, the long chains of a playground swing; both show up in this story. This is one of my favorite stories I wrote all year, a real oddball. I love doing these flashathons because other people’s prompts generate outside-of-my-wheelhouse stories, the kind of thing I won’t come up with on my own.

These three stories are all about marriage, and about coping with a problems unrolling in real time, so even though they were not written as a triptych, I think they go together well.

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