SSM 2011: "Labor," "The Waves Were Low," and "Goose" by Kim Chinquee (reviewed by Kathryn Houghton)

Kim Chinquee's three connected shorts from Willow Springs 64 follow a couple from just before their baby is born until a short time after. The first short, "Labor," begins with the narrator—the unnamed wife—speaking with her husband as she leaves work and he arrives. The story begins:

I got off at four, he'd come on at three, we overlapped a bit, but he'd be there until eleven. He worked chemistry, I worked phlebotomy, drawing blood all day, mostly veterans on Coumadin, pregnant wives and babies.

The narrator, who is herself pregnant, takes their car home, does some chores, and begins to make dinner. Then, after delivering the car and the dinner to her husband at work, she walks home again, by herself, walking "along the flightline" where she can "watch the planes landing and descending." A quarter of a page before the end of the piece, before she's even home, the narrator goes into labor. She calls work and speaks the one line of dialogue that is in quotation marks: "'Where is he?'" It feels inevitable, then, to hear that her husband has left early, that no one knows where he is. The piece ends with the suspense of the narrator still alone.

The second short, "The Waves Were Low," takes place only a few days later, when her "stitches weren't [yet] closed." On this day, the couple, now with their new son, is attending a cookout at their neighbor's house. The scene is split by gender yet domestic: the men are "on top of the boat, drinking beer and grilling," while the women sit with their babies nearby. It is a quiet day, a day that is a lull in their lives. Yet breaking this image of peace are the details of what her husband smelled like when he finally drove her to the hospital, as well as a quick retelling of the disturbing events that happened just the night before when the narrator says she had "run to the neighbor's with my shirt ripped." And yet, despite these memories, what the narrator focuses on in this moment is the good, and she closes with the line, "My husband sat next to me and I sat rocking."

"Goose," the final short is only one paragraph long, and while, like the other two, it could stand on its own, it grows for the reader that has read the first two pieces. Here, a strange woman comes to the door looking for the husband, and the husband lies to the narrator about where he has been. "The dump," he says, and though the narrator doesn't make the explicit reference to it being a falsehood, the juxtaposition of the two events, the hints given in the earlier prose, doesn't allow the situation to be read any other way.

Chinquee gives her character a very real reason to feel anger—or at least indignation and frustration—but the narrator doesn't pity herself. She is quiet on the page, her main reactions that of acceptance and diligence. When the tension rises, she observes rather than reacts. This is seen most clearly in "The Waves Were Low" when she runs to her neighbor's house during the night:

My baby cried and the fisherman's wife said hush. Hush, as if she were the mother to us all. I had curled over, and my husband banged the door, saying let me in now, and the fisherman neighbor got up and stood there in the doorway. He was big, taking all the door frame.

It's a reflection of Chinquee's prose, then, that her character's passivity doesn't alienate the reader. Instead, the piece feels fresh. The all-too-familiar situation of a bad marriage relieves the need for complex plotting, letting Chinquee's sharp attention to detail propel what could have been just another story it into something poignant. There's a rhythm in her writing—in both the lines and the stories themselves. It's like the waves, flowing in and out, and so rather than leave the reader with a sense of finality or substantial change in any of these stories, there's a sense that she only closes the moment, but that it might—or will certainly—come again.

Kathryn Houghton

Kathryn Houghton holds an MFA in fiction from Eastern Washington University. She writes book reviews for The Collagist and blogs weekly at the Willow Springs blog, Bark.

Find out more at
http://kathrynhoughton.com.