'Thereafter' by Christine H. Chen
The window shakes when bus number 71 rumbles by. The floor creaks, the pancake slides to the side on the pan. Ah Ma’s face lightens up when she sees a box of pill roll from behind a cabinet.
“That’s your Ba helping me!”
I roll my eyes.
Misplaced reading glasses on a top shelf, a lost tooth under a chair, a sock wedged between two suitcases. Things she’s lost reappearing suddenly.
“Why doesn’t he help you win your scratch games then?”
“That’s too big of an ask!”
Ah Ba is a pile of ash inside a plastic bag in a wooden box on her mantel. In life, he was blind. In death, he sees everything, she says. She whispers thanks and asks him to make her indoor tomato plant to give her big juicy ones.
I don’t tell Ah Ma I see Ah Ba everywhere too. On the stairs as I’m heading out, I see Ah Ba in my mind’s eyes, seated near the window, listening for my steps fading away. Inside the mailbox as I’m pulling out magazines, Ah Ba asking me to read the news for him. In the side mirror as I’m pulling out of the driveway, Ah Ba’s words resonating “be safe.” On the computer screen, as I write an email, Ah Ba standing next to the Remington one summer, decades ago, listening to the loud click-clacks of the keys when I was practicing typing. In the movies as I crunch popcorn tasting the salt of tears when another father dies before his daughter comes home.
---
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 CRAFT, SmokeLong Quarterly, Time and Space Magazine, and
anthologized in Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions and other
collections and journals. www.christinehchen.com
dlvr.it
