Wicked Americana by Sacha Bissonnette

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 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.…
“She cursed that baby—” “Her thirteenth, I heard, and who can blame her—” “You can’t blame her for thinking it, but doing—” “Who among us—” “I wouldn’t—” “That’s you, though, isn’t it?” “You’re better than us?” “You think she’s…
“The fuck you take your gloves off again?” you growled, never letting up, the oldest. Brother trip, our third in two years, anywhere there’d be northern lights. We hiked out of the frozen Alaskan woods—the black-dark, wraith rider intimidation…
I should have noticed when my wedding ring fell out of my pocket. I should have heard it strike and plink on the concrete floor in Big Willie’s dressing room behind the bar when I slung my jacket over…
Since we’ve moved to England for the year, my son Bodhi fears being alone. He can’t verbalize what it is he fears. Everywhere we go he follows, hand linked into an arm or fingers pinching the fabric of a…
Orode walked slowly on the wooden bridge. The water beneath him assaulted his senses. It smelt of tar and shit. He strode across the wooden planks. Reeds broke the surface of the murky river. Toads croaked loudly. Mosquitoes buzzed…
Here they are, the two men in my life who have stepped forward in an executioner’s line. We’ll take the shot, they’re saying, as they assume positions in twin chairs stationed in every cardiologist’s office we’ve visited since my…
Sometimes Mrs. Bowman rode the school bus to her jobs. She’d be waiting on the road with her children—her daughter, Suzette, and son, Buddy—both of whom I knew to be in High Levels of reading and math, as were…
By Joseph Young • Writers are often told, whether by their instructors or about the internet in general, that in their finished stories, there should be no wasted words, no extraneous sentences, no details or lines of dialogue, that…
When Ford made love to Calla, she felt something in him fight. It wasn’t against her ugliness. That matter was settled business, though Calla, in her youth, had held onto the idea that she was a winter-apple sort of…
“Sweet Knife” has been such a shapeshifter. It was a short story and then a shorter story, and finally flash fiction. The primary character, Calla, has been struggling all her life to find the antidote to her discontent; a salve for the pain of being born ugly and staying so. I initially imagined it as a revenge tale in which Calla turns the tables on a high school beauty whose mere existence tortures her. But revenge rarely delivers on the relief it promises, so I started toying with another idea:
What if we all have a fixed place like stars in a constellation, with some brilliant in their stellar brightness and others little more than failed stars? It’s not a question of fairness. It just is. So, if you’re barely a flicker, like Calla, because to the world, you’re ugly and dull—her skin is literally gray—what would you do to get just one person to believe you’re the sun?
There’s a brutality to the world of this story: disconnection, ugliness, lust, envy, adultery, butchering, blood, death. But I like using language that leaves readers with feelings that might seem discordant with what’s happening on the page. It’s like wrapping broken glass in the petals of a flower.
Word choice and the rhythm of a line are very important to me. So is texture, and the presence of the natural world. There’s very little dialogue in “Sweet Knife.” The first few drafts had none at all. I’d envisioned the characters moving through their world in complete silence, with only the sound of wind sweeping through the outdoor scenes. The dialogue that’s now included is brief and pierces just the tiniest hole in that silence, but it tethers these three emotionally solitudinarians to one another by forcing them to say what they’d rather not.
Calla’s ending is right. I imagine she won’t ever go home to Ford. To return to him would mean a return to fallow fields, and a man who fights when he’s inside of her. She’ll stay on Otter’s farm with the pea pods and the chickens, where wild things grow, and the wind spirals quietly through the flowers.
DANA BREWER HARRIS is a writer based in Washington, DC. Her writing has been published in Atticus Review and DarkWinter Literary Magazine. Her short story “Sweep” was recently nominated for Best Small Fictions and featured in Stanford’s The Writer’s Spotlight. She is a docent-in-training at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Find her on Twitter @DBrewerHarris.