I told my mom I loved her at a gas station in Minnesota but I’m not sure she heard. The cashier must’ve been stocking drinks or something so it felt like it was just me and her in there.…
I’m a very visual writer. I think the jumps in my flash fiction come from the influence that film has had on me. I see flash fiction as a series of vignettes that tie together a larger story. My stories are built out of a mental image that I have a hard time letting go of. This time, that image was of a kid meeting their mother at a gas station. It’s strange to picture something meaningful happening in a cold impersonal space like a gas station. Challenging this understanding of place was the subversion I wanted to achieve. I imagined the opening lines as a fraught, intense-for-a-kid, love moment in a place most people use transactionally.
The story opens with “I told my mom I loved her at a gas station in Minnesota but I’m not sure she heard.” There was a sort of visual poetry to me in that first line. Something heartbreaking and something sort of Americana.
I’ve been reading Sam Shepard, Raymond Carver, and Stuart Dybek again. I was thinking of Paris, Texas and Wim Wenders in particular. I can’t help but think that these writers have had a conceptual and/or thematic influence on me. They have all critiqued or incorporated “Americana,” or what is American, into their writing at one time or another. I’m very drawn to these cultural specificities and differences in an artistic way. Being Canadian, I’ve always been curious about the United States. We are inextricably linked in so many ways that at times it’s difficult to think of us as separate. But we are, and my “gaze” on the US is specific. Over the last ten years, my partner and I have made several trips down. I’ve noticed there’s a certain lens that non-Americans put on when dealing with American stereotypes or tropes or even America as a whole. I wanted to frame a story with some of these ideas of Americana while also giving the story a pulse, a beating heart.
SACHA BISSONNETTE is a writer from Ottawa, Canada. He is a reader for Wigleaf TOP 50. His fiction has appeared in Witness, Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Terrain, Ghost Parachute, The NoSleep Podcast, and elsewhere. He is currently working on a short fiction collection as well as a comic book adaptation of one of his short stories. His projects are powered by the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and the City of Ottawa. He has been nominated for several awards including the Pushcart Prize twice and Best Small Fictions thrice. He was selected for the 2024 Sundress Publications Residency and was the winner of the 2024 Faulkner Gulf Coast Residency. Find him on Twitter @sjohnb9.
