In Short – Issue 5 (Spring 2026)

May 31, 2026

Image credit: Eyes on Picasso by Judith Beth Cohen

Piece Work

By Melissa Hung

They live three to this room: the girl, the grandmother, and the uncle who smokes in the top bunk. A room rented with remittances. It is late evening, the dishes washed and returned to the drawer at the base of the drop-leaf table. They share a kitchen and bathroom with the other tenants on the floor, waiting their turn to cook, to shit. In another time zone, where it is early morning, the girl’s father rises before the sun for another day of wheeling canned goods, stocking shelves, thunk thunking numbers into the metal adding machine. Where the mother, who made her way country to country towards her husband to join him, will tie on an apron to cook and clean for his boss’s narrow-faced wife. To preserve a family, sometimes you must break it apart. In the one-room tenement, the girl pencils math worksheets by lamplight while her grandmother sits close at the table, sewing gloves. A stack of cut fabric laid out before her: so many empty hands waiting to be matched and paired.

Melissa Hung (she/her) is a writer and journalist who grew up in Houston, Texas, the eldest child of immigrants. She is the founding editor in chief of Hyphen. Her writing has appeared in Longreads, Catapult, wildness, and the anthologies Body Language and Disability Intimacy. She is at work on a collection of creative nonfiction about her mother, inheritance, and grief. Find her at melissahung.xyz