it all counts

Lydia Kim

Stories in Ploughshares, phoebe journal, Nat.Brut, Peatsmoke, and Okay Donkey, among others, as well as in two print anthologies. Work supported by the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Rooted & Written, and McCormack Writing Center, of whom she is a fan/loyalist, as an alum of the novel and short fiction workshops and a former Reading Fellow. Still calls it Tin House sometimes by accident, but not for long. Her story “Sally, or How to Walk a Dog” won the 2022 San Francisco Foundation-Nomadic Press Fiction Award prize, and other stories have been shortlisted for the Tucson Festival of Books fiction prize and The Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize. She’s grateful for the generous support of the de Groot Foundation, which allowed her to complete a novel manuscript about ghost mothers and haunted daughters. Otherwise, she writes about found family, vengeful food, odd bodies, noodles coming out of scalps, normal stuff.

This site is under construction and does not want to be perceived.

Every few days, a hair pokes up from the glossy surface of the hairline pimple she popped. It had crusted over like a manhole cover, then healed and left a slight, smooth curve. She pulls the hair with needle-nose tweezers, just as wrinkly as the first hair she pulled from this spot, but now gray. A woman of a certain age, she covers the gray with dark brown dye (Winter Mink) every six weeks, prays it is not so toxic it cancers her but also understands the cost of vanity. She collects these ramen-hairs in separate baggies, dates each one, puts them on a key ring in chronological order, keeps the key ring on a leather valet that belonged to her ex. She’d kept it because he loved it and he had been awful to her, starting soon after the vows, then desperate on the last day, squeezing her hand until it pulled her arm straight, nearly out of its socket. Horrid every day in between. Possession is nine-tenths of the law, her lawyer had said, take everything you want when you leave. She took the leather valet, the coffee table, all the flatware, and the dog. She also took the Christofle champagne opening set, the world’s most useless gift. There would be a reason for champagne someday.

– from “Pruning Practice,” phoebe journal