“Having Weight” is a modular story that mirrors the narrator’s fractured state of mind, prompting the reader to collaborate in constructing meaning from the apparent chaos. Each time the reader visits the page or clicks “Shuffle,” the narrative reorders itself, resisting a straight plot in favor of emotional constellations. The print button generates different “permanent” versions, further emphasizing the mutability of memory and how everything depends on when an event occurs. “Having Weight” utilizes simple HTML code and random number generation (RNG).
Click here to read, shuffle, and print “Having Weight”: https://havingweightcatemcgowan.netlify.app/.
Cate McGowan is the author of four books. Her poetry collection Sacrificial Steel, winner of the Driftwood Press Editors’ Prize, was published in June 2025. Brill published her memoir-essays, Writing is Revision, in 2024; Gold Wake Press released her novel, These Lowly Objects, in 2020; and her debut story collection, True Places Never Are (2015), won the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award. Her work appears in Norton’s Flash Fiction International, Glimmer Train, North American Review, Shenandoah, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. McGowan holds an M.F.A. and Ph.D. and teaches writing and literature in Florida, where she lives with her husband and a menagerie of animals. Visit her at www.catemcgowan.com.
The Disappointed Housewife 