On "Flicker" by Kim Chinquee (246 words) ***

This little doozy is about a kind of creepy obsession. It's one that we can have sometimes, in work situations--or be the victim of--as taking advantage of the context is just too easy and too hard not to indulge. Here it's a building super. Read the story here at Center for Fiction.

On "I Was There for the Team" by Kim Chinquee (305 words) ****

The track meet was mandatory at my school. It was a small school, and I suppose the idea was that few of us would have participated had the meet not been mandatory (at least until my senior year, when the participation in the meet was attached to a "beach party" on another day and suddenly people actually wanted to attend). I was, like the narrator in this story, no good at any of it. I ran the mile, since at least I could feel like I accomplished something, as opposed to coming in dead last in a 100k or something and feeling incredibly stupid. In fact, running the mile also offered one the ability to place sometimes, since so few others wanted to run it. Last, but third or fourth--not too bad. Here, Chinquee gets the feel of a good long run to those of us who aren't professionals, the way we're reading to hit the dirt--with our faces, not our feet. Scroll down to the bottom and read the piece here at the Collagist (while you're at it, why not read the other shorts ones too?).

On "Shots" by Kim Chinquee (761 words) ***

Previously, I wrote about "Shot Girls" by Kim Chinquee (here). Here's another story with a variation on the same theme. Although I typically end up enjoying one story much more than another, I like it when authors write two versions of a story and share them both. It's simply interesting to watch the way in which a mind can go in different directions with the same idea--the meaning a given piece will take on and the emotions that piece will elicit. It's also interesting insofar as usually one piece is much longer than the other, more full bodied, less stream lined. Some authors, of course, only write a very few stories, over and over and over--Poe was one of those. Perhaps, all authors do that to an extent, but most are more subtle than presenting the same "buried alive" theme/plot device (one of Poe's favorites) again and again. Another author I enjoy who has written stories that closely parallel one another is Brock Clarke. Unfortunately, the two pairs of stories of his that I see as parallel are no longer available online. You can read Chinquee's "Shots" here at Willow Springs.

(Note: In an e-mail exchange with Kim herself, sometime after I read the story, I discovered that "Shots" and "Shot Girls" were written four years apart. So this was indeed a case of an author returning to fertile ground to explore the same setting and some of the same themes again, rather than a story taking two directions and both being written and published.)

On "Shot Girls" by Kim Chinquee (5097 words) ****

This is a story about two sisters, each of whom wants to be like the other, about what it means to become the other. Okay, I've made the story sound like Parent Trap 3, but it's not like that at all. The girls in this story go through some messed-up stuff. Okay, maybe it does sound like Parent Trap 3--but this definitely isn't Disney fodder. These girls aren't smiling at the end. These girls grow up, in some rather unpleasant ways. Read the story here.