FlashFiction.Net

When I first received Kim Chinquee’s Oh Baby, I opened the collection and found “Eve.”

Eve

It is fifteen below so we stay inside, making candy out of pudding that we put in the freezer. We recycle melted chocolate. It is a reunion of sorts.

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In reading a novel, I find myself picking out the essential words or images that lead to meaning, like the images of daisies, eggs, eyes, in-carnations in Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. Or maybe it’s the men Dorothy finds in Oz  I direct my attention to. She is surrounded by them, even Toto, all but the Witch and Glinda. In reading Kim Chinquee’s work, nothing can be ignored, and even the tiniest pattern, the tiniest deviation, matter in large ways.

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“Eve” begins with “It is” and ends there too. Between these two sentences is the deviation, the sentence that begins with we. Pronouns, both of them (the it and the we), missing referents, and they are both like Eve (appearing without a referent) and unlike her (for she is named). The pronoun without reference raises questions: What is it? Who are we? What might you substitute for the it of the beginning? Is it the world that is fifteen below? And, if that is so, that you might substitute the world for it, then what a wondrous thing this piece becomes, the way it brings in the world without naming it, the way it brings in you (Reader) without your being quite aware of how it happened.

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That second it feels trickier, the it of “It is a reunion of sorts.” The it might refer to the we, might refer to something of melted chocolate and pudding, might refer to both, might refer to something else.

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It’s fifteen below. That we know for certain. It is the coldness, then, of outside that brings them inside. Or should I say what Chinquee says, to make them “stay inside.” I begin to notice frozen things here, and stay is part of that, as is freezer. Inside, things melt, unless these things stay inside freezers. Re-union and re-cycle feel connected, beginning with re-, “a prefix, occurring originally in loanwords from Latin, used with the meaning ‘again’ or ‘again and again’ to indicate repetition, or with the meaning ‘back’ or ‘backward’ to indicate withdrawal or backward motion” (Dictionary.com). Eve, too, has that sense of something that occurs before something, as in New Year’s Eve & Eve herself (her name meaning life). But eve also occurs at the end of days, a shortened form of evening. And of course evenings melt into dawns into days into evenings, a recycling, each moment a reunion of sorts.

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What does it mean? That seems maybe the wrong question. I read “Eve” and ask myself, instead, “What does it do?” And for you, a different kind of reader, that might be the wrong question, too. Here’s what it does for me. It makes me think of people being frozen together, melted apart, reformed, recycled, reunited, from dawn until eve, from Eden and onwards. It works to unmelt some “fifteen below” emotion inside me because, if one counts the words (twenty-nine), can one guess the word frozen in the middle?

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It is we.

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