Now Are You Sorry?
Kim Magowan

They say, talk to someone who’s in a coma. Even if they’re not responsive, they can still hear you. Allegedly hearing is the last sense to go.

Though who do I mean by “they”? Is this actually a medical fact, or just some pop culture myth? Something I might have seen on Grey’s Anatomy when you were out getting drinks with Dwayne or maybe on some business trip, because you always hated that show?

At any rate, I can’t remember any of your doctors telling me to talk to you. Though it’s not like I’ve retained much in the past three days. My brain is full of holes. Which is bad timing, because one of us needs to be conscious now. One of us needs to hold it fucking together.

I guess it can’t hurt, talking to you.

Though maybe it can? Since all I can think of right now are shitty things.

Like that year you were crazy about Ashley Peterson, and I had no idea if you would stay or go. Every time you looked at me, I could see you trying to make up your mind, and let’s face it, the decks were stacked in Ashley’s favor (newer, younger, sweeter, desperate to please). Whereas I was so angry at you! Trying my best to hold it in, so you’d stay, but I couldn’t control the fact that every time I looked at you, I wanted to burn a hole through your stupid, infatuated head.

Or remember all the shit you said about my mother? That she was cheap and passive aggressive. That she had terrible politics. Well, your mother’s are more terrible! I could have said that, but I didn’t. I bit my tongue. That’s the saying, right? I bit my tongue until it fucking bled.

Why is it that we’ve been married for 32 years, mostly happy enough—I mean, no married couple is blissfully happy, right? Unless they’re way too young or else delusional. Yet all I can remember now is the bad stuff. Likely it’s some kind of defense mechanism. Sour grapes, like that fable. Me trying to adapt to the possibility of losing you, by reminding myself that you aren’t all that.

I guess this isn’t anything you really need to hear.

I should be more positive, right? Incentivize you?

Joe, why don’t you wake up and tell me to stop giving you a hard time, stop kicking you when you’re down? Like in those bad Ashley Peterson days, when you said, “Can’t you show just a little compassion?” Like I was supposed to sympathize with the fact you were in love with someone else. Like I was supposed to feel sorry for poor you.

Joe, will you please open your eyes and tell me to shut the hell up?

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Kim Magowan’s Comments

“Now Are You Sorry?” was written to our group’s 10 a.m. prompt. This one was mine. I’m intrigued by how to handle a huge swath of time in a very short story, as George Saunders does so brilliantly in his flash story “Sticks,” or Kathy Fish so masterfully in “The Once Mighty Fergusons.” So my prompt, called “Milestones,” asked us to do exactly that: cover many years in very few words. One of my suggestions for how to do this–this language is straight out of my flashathon prompt–was to produce a slideshow effect: “husband in a crisis makes his wife think of all the fights they ever had, or the cruel things he said about her mother, or the small ways he let her down, or the craziest ways they had sex. Draft a paragraph of cascading milestones.” If you read my story, you’ll see how closely I followed my own prompt.

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