Christine H. Chen: WINDOWS TO THE SOUL • Cleaver Magazine

Flash by Christine H. Chen
WINDOWS TO THE SOUL

While your parents went out to pitch Ma’s dress design ideas to strangers, you were locked inside the apartment, the tick-tock of the wall clock your only companion. In the box next to the Singer sewing machine, you found the triangular tailor chalks, pink, blue, white like dragées you could suck and crunch, scraps of cloth, and Ba’s tortoiseshell spare eyeglasses. You took the glasses on and off, marveling how the clock looked blurry and the floor slanted. When your eyes tired of squinting, you pressed the frames against a piece of cloth, you traced their rectangles with your Ma’s pink chalk the way you’d seen her do, you drew eyes inside the frames, short eyelashes and shaggy eyebrows like your Ba, you imagined these eyes you sketched could make your blind father see again.

You were twelve when you came home to find your Ba kneeling on the floor, hands groping around him before he knocked down the potted Dragon tree. I can’t find my glasses, he said. You saw his finger bleeding from a broken lens to his right. You rushed to catch his hand before it landed on another shard of glass. Just find my glasses, he insisted. You picked up the pieces. You told him you would have them fixed. You pulled him up, you wiped his finger with a cotton ball soaked in alcohol; blood kept gushing, you felt dizzy, you pushed down the sourness from your stomach, bandaged his finger into a messy ball of gauze and tape while he mumbled it’s nothing, just a scratch. You swept the floor and pushed the Dragon tree further back to a corner.

Years later, you met a man in chemistry grad school who wore eyeglasses for fun. He was a French postdoc and it felt charming when he said, j’ai l’air sérieux; that the eyeglasses made him look serious or be taken seriously, you weren’t sure, but you didn’t fall for it. Your blind Ba wore eyeglasses because he didn’t want to be seen as different, not to fool people for vanity. You fought with Ma to keep his tortoiseshell eyeglasses at the crematorium. You see him wearing them every day in your mind’s eye.

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 The Pinch, Fractured Lit., SmokeLong Quarterly, Time & Space Magazine, and other journals and anthologies. Her work was selected for inclusion in Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions 2023, Best Microfiction 2024, 2025, and Best Small Fictions 2024, 2025. She also dabbles in genre writing and visual narratives. She is a recipient of the 2022 Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship. Read her stories at www.christinehchen.com