Kim Chinquee's collection Oh Baby is packed with very short, very lean flash fictions and prose poems, each work lacking the unmistakable fat that accompanies the digression and tangents of other writers while still retaining just enough weight to knock the reader out with her punchy ending lines and sharp observations. 

One of the finest stories in the collection is titled "History" (originally published in elimae), and at just over a page is still one of her longer stories.  More narrative than some of the other works in Oh Baby, "History" tells the story a young mother and military lab technician stationed in England at the same base her husband once worked:

I heard stuff, found stuff, ran into women on base and I wondered how he knew them. They laughed and giggled, wearing no bras and thin shirts. I tried to concentrate on work and on my baby. When my boy laughed, he laughed like his father. At work, I found old charts with his initials: documentations, daily checks, temperatures and values.

Now everyone was sick. It was sinuses and viruses. When I didn't have lab work, I checked in patients. I penetrated people's histories. People will tell you anything. 

Stories like "History" reveal Chinquee's greatest gift as a writer, namely the ability to cut away every extraneous detail from a story, until all that is left are the most necessary words, until each remaining detail is a landmark in the life of a characters, leading us to the moment where characters reveal themselves as who they really are, who they might one day become.   Over and over, Chinquee crams heartbreak and reconciliation into the small spaces between her spare sentences, laying down associations that will challenge the reader to mentally follow her leaps from phrase to phrase, all the while promising that what is on the other side is worth the effort.   Luckily, Oh Baby delivers on these promises again and again.  This is an impressive debut collection by one of flash fiction's most prolific and talented practitioners, and shouldn't be missed.