'Cumulonimbi' by Christine H. Chen

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 where she worked as a research chemist. Her fiction has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Fractured Lit., Ruby, Time & Space Magazine, Wolfsbane: Best New England Crime Stories 2023, and other journals. Her work was selected for inclusion in Wigleaf Top 50 in 2023 and Best Microfiction anthology 2024. Read more at www.christinehchen.com