Mitchie’s mechanical pencil shatters into a hundred billion trillion pieces. “Dewanda, behave!” the teacher screams at me. She don’t know us or our names or remember that Dewanda goes to a new school now. So we don’t call her…
We are thrilled to announce Halle Hill, author of the award-winning debut short story collection, Good Women, as the guest judge for the CRAFT 2025 Short Fiction Prize. In celebration of the contest’s launch, Halle Hill generously granted Editor…
I. Rain gush-pummels our car. Whippet wipers slash frantically at the whitecaps. Off to Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, to watch our daughter, Lily’s, volleyball tournament. It’s the weekend before Thanksgiving, and our son, Hudson, is meeting us there from Pittsburgh. …
We fill up on deep-fried bricks of cheese and rib eyes big as our heads at Burly’s Roughrider Bar & Steakhouse. Our neatly laced Merrells and moisture-wicking Patagonias set us apart from the mud-splattered, steel-toed boots under most every…
Peterborough, New Hampshire We get lost and it’s my fault. I think I know a shortcut. Mary knows only the long way around. I have an appointment for a man to look into my mouth and tell me my…
Naomi Cohn was sighted until the age of thirty, when her vision began to decline. Now in her sixties, her pathological myopia has progressed to the point that she is legally blind. One of the ten percent of blind…
Kelsey Norris and I spoke in December. She was in Washington, DC and I was in St. Augustine, Florida, two arguably very different spaces to prepare for the holidays. We were also preparing for her to join me at…
Essay by Shara Kronmal • My Mother in Havana by Rebe Huntman is a memoir about journeys and the lessons learned along the way. In the memoir, the journeys are threefold in nature: physical, a literal journey from Ohio…
By Tim Bascom • When I was twelve, I wrote my first short story, which was about a boy who, while hiking alone, falls off a mountain cliff and lands on a narrow outcrop, unable to get down or…
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.
