It’s raining fathers, faceless fathers, featherless fathers, good, bad, rad fathers straight from a crowded sky, migrating fathers descending on faithless daughters, rebellious daughters of nameless fathers, tamed daughters of strict fathers, we shelter behind closed doors, cover our ears with electronic beats, watch fathers spattering on windowsills, sliding off glass panes, washing through the streets, calling, daughters where are you, where have you been, come back right now, and we turn our eyes and our battered hearts to fatherless men drizzling into our lives, so they’ll take us in their arms to blanket us from irate fathers, haul us away from monster-fathers with hidden bunkers of slave-daughters, lead us to the altar where Father will bless us, we will live happily ever after, we will make fathers out of you, watch you melt into water, evaporate into thin air, swarm the sky with gray cumuli, unleash flood on earth.

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Christine H. Chen was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Madagascar before settling in Boston. Her fiction work has been published or forthcoming in Boston in 100 Words, Tiny Molecules, Gone Lawn, The Pinch, The Margins, CRAFT, Hobart, among others. Her work was longlisted in the June 2022 Bath Flash Fiction Award, and she is a recipient of the 2022 Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship. She occasionally tweets @ChristineHChen1

Photography by: Ante Hamersmit