Do I “heart” this? My finger hovers over the outline of a heart beside a photo of a curly-haired woman grinning, her arms wrapped around two tan dogs. It’s a Friday night, a few months after I moved to…
Kimberly King Parsons, whose sparkling debut novel We Were the Universe is a USA Today national bestseller, is serving as our guest judge for the CRAFT 2024 First Chapters Contest. From the outset, Associate Editor Rowena Leong Singer was…
My first time in Miami is tiny cups of sweet Cuban cortadito; and going to the Miami Open with my husband to join the crowds cheering for Carlos “Carlitos” Alcaraz, the Spanish teenage sensation and World #1; and rainy…
Content Warnings—alcohol overdose, death Welcome to the Grocery Supreme Aptitude Test™. This test is divided into the following five sections: Commuting and Tardiness, Opening Duties, Product Management, Customer Service, and Long Answer Questions. A few important notes: You…
I think it matters that her husband was older. He owned his own house when they met. He also owned a coffee shop on Lattimore. And Mrs. Haverhill, then—to distinguish herself from the other long-necked, loose-sweatered girls in the…
Here’s a secret about movement: speed cares only about distance, but velocity is aware of direction. Here’s another secret about movement: every living creature on this planet is moving fast. But the body tricks us into not noticing the…
1. The first ghost I ever learn about is God, circa 1998, in a kindergarten classroom in Queens, New York. My parents have sent me to Catholic school not out of religious devotion, or some need for strictness, but…
CRAFT is thrilled to welcome Ingrid Rojas Contreras as guest judge for our 2022 Creative Nonfiction Award. Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Hailed as “original, politically daring, and passionately written” by Vogue, her first novel, Fruit of…
My father, after slipping backward on a stretch of rooted Alaskan ice and hitting his head, miraculously walks the three miles to get back home—heavily concussed and alone—with our two unleashed labs directing him in the winter dark. He…
When you were three years old, you climbed up your Ma’s massive mahogany bed, you poked her gently, then shoved, and when she still didn’t move, you tried to pry open her eyes with your fingers because you didn’t…
For a long time, I couldn’t write about my father’s death because it was too intimate, painful, the sort of pain that is searing, raw, and unsuitable to be written in metaphors. I didn’t even think I would ever write a story about my father, let alone have it published, but grief has its way of simmering and bursting out of my writing when I least expect it.
This story was born in a workshop led by Nancy Stohlman when she asked us to “subvert the sacred,” and by “sacred,” she meant difficult moments that do not easily lend themselves to storytelling, moments that my friend and fellow writer Eliot Li described as “[these] incredibly intense bursts of story, with all the connective tissue removed.” I think “Story of You” is one immense exhale of pain. I find myself thinking a lot about death lately, questions like what are the moments that we remember of a person’s life, what is the result of the sum of all these moments?
Though there are some autobiographical elements in the story, I have changed some details and added some fictional ones to deepen the emotions. I used a second-person point of view to show how the narrator is trying to distance herself, nudging the pain away, going at it in a slanted way because it is too painful. In the story, the “you” refers to the father whose life story was handed down to the daughter from the fragments she’d been told. It’s a chance for the daughter to honor her father, to tell him all the things she didn’t tell him while he was alive.
I’m also a big fan of one-sentence structured stories. In my story, the one-sentence structure works like a time compression, a lifetime flashing in jagged images in the space of 3.47 minutes (that’s how long it took me to read the piece), and this bubbling, rushing, bursting of words has this overwhelming effect on the reader, it’s a painful regret tearing out like an avalanche, the sum of all the moments remembered and lost to the continuum of time, the sum of all the suffering the father had endured to give what he couldn’t have in his life to his daughter, only for him to die a lonely death.
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 has been published or is forthcoming in Boston in 100 Words, Tiny Molecules, Gone Lawn, The Pinch, Hobart, SmokeLong Quarterly, Gordon Square Review, Pidgeonholes, Cleaver, and other literary journals. 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.
