The first time was an accident. She was slicing carrots, trying to keep them thin and angled, assaulted on her left by the blaring television in the living room, and on the right by her children squabbling in the…
When the fish is dead, it lies in the shallow of water that never goes away, in the dirt, the remnants of blood from my forefinger where I pricked myself four times over, maybe some from that pike, too.…
Zones of your brain affected: frontal, temporal, parietal. The doctor points at them in turn on the scan of your brain. Those traitorous parts, shrivelling out of existence, threatening to take pieces of you with them. I look from…
The Marine said his name was Dusty. She said hers was Laila, which was the name on the fake ID Kareena presented to the bouncer at the Wave Waikiki. If Crystal hadn’t led the way in a tube top…
By Devon Halliday • When I worked as a literary agent assistant, one of my tasks was to read (or skim) the manuscripts that my boss had requested from promising, unagented authors to determine whether my boss should offer…
Dark birds fly from my eyes. Disappear. Where do the kittens come from? We don’t have a cat. Just kittens lumped together like a single entity. A litter. In a box a blanket a bag on the passenger seat?…
She says go like this and bares her teeth at me, lips pulled back. All the other girls lean in to see inside my mouth, too close. I smell the leather of their shoes, but I don’t flinch. Jagged,…
The first thing they had to do was name us, as if we were rescues or strays. As if they would need a way to gossip about us, to get our attention. We mostly did not like our new…
Number one had cerulean blue eyes and haloed heat as we danced at Sadie Hawkins in our matching flannel shirts and he wandered night stairs and stars almost as stoned as his mother and strummed “Dust in the Wind”…
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.
