Kim Chinquee
“He Has Juice”

Kim’s piece was originally published in Web Conjunctions. She lives in Buffalo, NY, and her work has been published in The Collagist, NOON, Denver Quarterly, Mississippi Review, Fiction, Notre Dame Review, New York Tyrant, elimae, and other publications. She has received a Pushcart prize and a Henfield prize. Her short fictions “On the Wheel”, “We Decided Not To Give Them Faces”, and “I Was There For The Team” appeared in the first issue of The Collagist in 2009. You can read her Collagist interview here. Kim also judged The Collagist’s 2009 Flash Fiction Contest, the winners of which were published in the December issue.

And now their usual stuff is waiting: the bread and cheese, the boiled egg, sliced portions of a turkey. Ham, and creamer. Jam by his plate and she has butter. They’ll take whatever bread and put it in their pockets: not for hunger, but if anything is left, the lady will bring less. This concerns them. The lady comes to deliver. The lady has no English, but the lady’s son has come to them, all smiles and his hands in, with a nodded welcome.
They’ll climb. Higher and look down, in, the wind slapping. They might sit. Their jackets are thick, like they are, and she will lean there, with his stick up. He might clutch his chest with neither of them laughing, and he would blame nothing.

-from “He Has Juice”

What was your inspiration for writing “He Has Juice”? Was there anything about its writing—your process, any challenges that the piece presented you, your approach to editing and revision—that you’d like to share with our readers?

I was imagining my visit to Austria, at a bed and breakfast, a few sensory details that stayed with me, yet I felt it was important to add some tension, so I invented the relationship between this couple, the possibility of something happening on the hiking trip. I don’t remember much about the editing process for this one, but I do remember, as I was writing it, continually asking myself, what if.

I’m interested in the role of routine in this piece, the power of maintaining certain things in a life, in a relationship. In some places, passages are written in the future tense, as though based on their past actions and routines we know exactly what these two people will do. This seems intertwined with how you play with sensory information, the implications of certain sights and sounds and tastes—of how these associations, too, become familiar. The line “The wind chimes chime, and it smells like cinnamon toast” comes to mind. Could you elaborate a little on these aspects of the piece, and how the sensations and routines arose as you created these two characters?

I wanted to render the routine of things, and those sensory details as more vivid than anything else in the piece; thus, I rendered some of those parts in the future tense: what has happened, what does happen, what might happen. I think at the time, I was working on a series of pieces about a couple who travels overseas together on impulse, but the two don’t really know each other. It was a challenge for me to show what was going on in the relationship, as even the characters aren’t sure. I think, often, the things that we hang onto are those sensory details, the routine of what we know, and in this piece, the feelings and fears are never quite as solid. The woman hangs onto those details she knows. By rendering what “might” happen, I hoped to render the character’s fear, or even her lack of wanting to see the truth, the possibility of danger, of her just living in the moment with the man, hanging onto the sound of the wind chime, the smell of that cinnamon toast.

What work by another writer would be part of your own personal Best of the Web?

Greg Gerke’s “I Want to Write Flash Fiction” . I love the quirkiness of this piece, how the story twists at the end and becomes more than what it is.

Bradford Morrow, editor at Conjunctions literary magazine, tells us about the publication and his thoughts on Kim’s piece.

Please introduce us to your publication: How did it get started? What kind of work do you publish?

Conjunctions began back in 1981 and in 1996 I thought a web presence would be an important ancillary tool to support the print journal.  Little did I know that within a few years of launching the website (www.conjunctions.com), that Web Conjunctions would develop into one of the most important and far-ranging parts of our overall publishing program.  We now publish new work every week, by innovative poets, fiction writers, essayists, and others who are unconfined by the very idea of genre.

What was it about “He Has Juice” that initially spoke to you? What set it apart from the other submissions you were reading?

I’ve always admired Kim’s work, and what she accomplishes in this particular very brief story is rather extraordinary.  Through spare language and minimal narrative gesture, she manages to suggest a vast possibility of meaning and consequence.  “They will go again and they will cross the ocean” is just one example of this.  “The wind chimes chime, and it smells like cinnamon toast,” is another, slightly different in narrative strategy.  So much information, specific and yet just slightly ineffable, is suggested in each (and throughout the piece).  The reader is invited to envision what the fiction only partly unveils, and in this way “He Has Juice” proposes an imaginative collaborative effort on the reader’s part.  I like that a lot.