Christine H. Chen
Anatomy of a Pencil
Her job is to sharpen pencils for her artist Ma. She checks each pencil shaft: dent-less, perfect silver ferrule, unbruised eraser. No irregular pin tip: smooth and shiny like onyx, sharp like Ah Ma’s eyes. The exposed throat and collar of each pencil: an exact hexagon. No one side higher than the other, just like the collar of her buttoned-up and starched shirt. Each sharpened tool immobilized in its allotted slot, waiting for its fate. Her calloused fingers holding the razor blade cuts, cuts, cuts to the staccato of Ma’s voice, not good enough, and she tries again and again.
Recipe for a Broken Heart
Grind ashwagandha and ginseng to a fine powder, add chamomile and passionflowers to calm and scent your soul. Drop a handful of St. John’s wort yellow blooms, sprinkle purple lavender from Provence to lift your spirit. Blend with hot tears and ashes of burnt photos of the two of you. Set potion aside. Bandage your heart with gauze, sew it shut with silk thread. File your nails. Wait for the cheater to come retrieve his Lightspeed gaming headset. Rip his chest open, squeeze him dry. Drip drops of his warm blood in potion. Sip potion. Watch his carcass melt away.
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’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions 2023, Best Microfiction 2024, 2025, and Best Small Fictions (2024, 2025). She is a recipient of the 2022 Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship. Find her stories at www.christinehchen.com
