CNF: Me Without You
by Jasmine Sawers
I used to wish you dead and think wistfully on this motherless version of me: someone who was allowed to flush the toilet at night; someone who doesn’t cower when the dishes clatter in the sink; someone who doesn’t shake when voices are raised; someone who never learned how hard your hands are when they’re done being soft; someone who hasn’t been told a thousand times that you’d trade them for the 1980 miscarriage—the angelic never-child who would never hurt or disobey you; someone who never lived with your threats to kill them echoing between their ears; someone who didn’t spend a lifetime straddling the line between damned if you do, damned if you don’t; someone who crushed under their heel all those eggshells I spent a lifetime minding; someone who never grew out of the phase of wishing they were beautiful—that is, wishing they were white; someone without Thai simmering beneath all the English in their brain; someone who never learned the right way to make rice; someone who never learned to pour fish sauce liberally on American food to make it better; someone who never bathed outside in a barrel during the monsoon; someone who never chased chickens around a house on stilts; someone who has never been the fifth passenger on a motorcycle taking a bunch of kids to school; someone who doesn’t know when they’re being insulted in Thai; someone who’s never ducked beneath scaffolding in Bangkok only to discover a bustling halal restaurant, tucked away like a wink; someone who has never heard the call to prayer sweep over the canal at dawn; someone ignorant of the way you were passed around your family to be their workhorse, their wet nurse, their punching bag; someone who mourned a saint suspended in the perfect amber of memory; some fool, some poor fucking fool.
Jasmine Sawers is a Kundiman fiction fellow whose work appears in such journals as Ploughshares, AAWW’s The Margins, SmokeLong Quarterly, and more. Sawers serves as Associate Fiction Editor for Fairy Tale Review and debuts a flash collection through Rose Metal Press in 2023. Originally from Buffalo, Sawers now lives and pets dogs outside St. Louis.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Me Without You”? I entered this by setting myself a challenge to write a complete narrative arc in a single sentence. I’d done so successfully before in a story that could be viewed as this one’s spiritual cousin, but I would define that piece as more of a carefully curated run-on than a grammatically sound sentence. The opening phrase had been knocking around my head for a long time, but it never opened to me before suddenly slotting into my complete sentence plan. I intended to end on a note of derisive pity for this narrator’s alternate self, who would never know they mourned a woman who hated the reality of them as much as she loved the idea of them. However, as I was drafting what was essentially a list of the effects of trauma, it started to come off as whiney and one-note in its bitterness, no matter how true or earned. To be more honest and nuanced in my depiction, I had to step back and look with more objective eyes—more tender eyes—on the character of the mother instead of merely letting this narrator wallow, which allowed the piece to bloom into a fuller picture. I’m more of a planner than someone who wanders into a piece without a roadmap, but I always leave room for discovery, for something I never expected to sprout up, because it’s inevitably what ends up giving my work its beating heart.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
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Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.
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