certain ends

by Sacha Bissonnette

We were on our way back from the lodge covered in each other’s spit and sweat and low on gas and you told me to pullover. And while I was pulling over you popped your seatbelt, slid your hand onto my thigh and kissed me somewhere between where my jaw meets my neck and you told me something I’d only repeat if the world was ending. The kiss was happening to me live and I watched it in the rearview, somehow paused in time, and now deeper and more profound because of its simultaneity.

In the gas station people were also paused, staring at the tv, under some sort of trance and it made me think that the tv might be doing all the bad things as the tv often does, but this was different. The woman speaking on the news was scared and also pretty and she usually was the one reassuring us that our cities were safe. I thought of her putting on make-up before announcing the end. When I went to pay I swear she was addressing me directly and I got nervous and dropped my soda. And when it exploded and they turned to stare I knew then, as I know now, the gig was over and that we were to blame.

When my mother was dying she spoke of a man that wasn’t my father, and another child that wasn’t my brother and I knew how the cancer ate away at her body and her brain so she couldn’t tell between memory and fantasy and by then it didn’t matter because she was smiling and who was I to rewrite or correct any part of her story.

I thought about her now, her unwillingness to settle, and her secrets. And though I swore to not be like her, maybe that too, is futile. And how we never figured it out. My mother’s truth. Or how in all that secrecy she remained more sweet than bitter. So I grabbed your hand, squeezed it tight, knowing that it was soon our time for hiding. 

And if we had family out there, fingers crossed, hoping we had family out there we hadn’t burned yet, family that didn’t know we were to blame, maybe they’d let us in. And maybe, just maybe, I’d repeat to them, with all its beauty, comfort and light, what you told me, before we chose to end certain things.

Photo of Sacha Bissonnette

BIO: Sacha Bissonnette is a writer from Ottawa, Canada. He is a reader forWigleaf TOP 50. His fiction has appeared in Witness, Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Terrain.org, Ghost Parachute, The No Sleep 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 at sachajohnbissonnette.com or on Twitter @sjohnb9.