by Christine H. Chen
Do you remember that time in college when my parents came to San Francisco, how they spit out your people to your face, their words meant to slice us apart, how we stole time together after our biology class, after the sun set, after the hallway lights dimmed, and we snuck in an empty office where we found chairs on top of tables, half-open books tangled with maps and old magazines like bodies in heat, detritus on the floor, we hid under a table, behind shelves of atlases, and halfway through, the door creaked open, a professor came in, coughed, and rummaged through his papers while you and I froze, suspended in our movement, you holding me like a dancer in flight, beads of sweat clinging on your forehead glimmered, and you whispered if we stayed like this long enough, our skin would melt and meld into each other’s color.
Christine H. Chen was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Madagascar before settling in Boston where she worked as a research chemist. Her fiction appears or is forthcoming in The Ekphrastic Review, trampset, Vestal Review, Atticus Review, Pithead Chapel, and other journals and anthologies. She is a recipient of the 2022 Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship and the co-translator from French of the novel My Lemon Tree (Spuyten Duyvil, forthcoming in late 2023). Her publications can be found at www.christinehchen.com
Emerge Literary Journal 