An Analysis of "I Figure" by Kim Chinquee, followed by some thoughts on the place of flash fiction in American literature

For the second time in a row, one of the stories from the 2019 Pushcart Anthology immediately make me think of thematically similar story from the 2018 Best American Short Stories anthology. This time, however, I think it's the BASS story that comes off looking like the better of the two.

Kim Chinquee's "I Figure" hits similar thematic ground to "Los Angeles" by Emma Cline, which appeared in the 2018 BASS. Both stories center around young women, 20's-ish, who are making use too liberally of "you only live once" or "you learn by making mistakes, so make big mistakes" kinds of advice.

Chinquee's story is flash fiction, so it doesn't have much time to develop theme (or anything else). It relies on one scene and the imagery evoked in that scene. The narrator is lying on her back, post-coitally, balancing a glass of white wine on her abdomen while her lover the heart surgeon goes off to the bathroom to remove his condom and do the other after-sex things men do.

The act of balancing the wine glass tells the reader two things. First, she's in shape, because she's calling her stomach her "abs" and flexing in order to balance the glass. These are the sorts of things someone used to long rounds of ab exercises would do. She's likely someone who works out a lot in order to be attractive, rather than for personal reasons. We know she's had a lot of boyfriends, because she recalls taking a dog out "first with one boyfriend, then another, then another."

There are three refrains of "I figure" in the story. Twice it's to say she figures what she's doing is harmless. At the end, the formula shifts, and the narrator says she figures she's harmless. With each "I figure," the level of protesting too much grows.

It's a story of a woman making, perhaps, a few too many mistakes. The narrative arc doesn't happen on screen. We figure it will likely happen soon after this story is over. What we see in "I Figure" is a woman who's been deceiving herself, but her justifications are starting to become less convincing to herself. This might be the last time she does something self-destructive and calls it "harmless."

Or, maybe, this is the final act of defeating her own inner voice telling her to get her shit together before the voice gives up and stops trying. Either way, we've got a woman whose youthful "learning from your mistakes" phase needs to come to an end.

Like "Los Angeles," it's something of a critique of a youth culture that glamorizes irresponsibility. It's not to slut-shame women for experiencing and enjoying a sexually active lifestyle, even with many partners if that's what they choose, but it does call into question thoughtlessly engaging in that kind of lifestyle without consideration of whether there might be other ways of living that actually make you happier. It's fine to sing "My Way" to yourself as you go through life, but at least make sure it really is your way.

Self-destructiveness is great for the audience, but for how long is it great for the self-destructee? 

Flash fiction in American literature

This is the second flash story to appear in Pushcart this year. It's a good story, although if I were to compare the impact of "Los Angeles" and "I Figure," I'd say I found "Los Angeles" to pack a far stronger wallop. How could it not? With Emma Cline's story, I got to live for much longer in Alice's world (including actually knowing her name!) than I got to live in the world of Chinquee's nameless narrator. It's very hard to be changed by 800 words of fiction. You can receive a glancing blow from it, but not really a knockout punch.

Fiction is sort of like food. You can probably get a microwave meal that isn't terrible and that nourishes you in some way, but to really be satisfied, the food needs to marinate a bit. You need to actually be in the other world.

So why is flash fiction so prevalent? I think there are two reasons, one legitimate and the other maybe a side-effect of the flaccidity of American literature. The first reason is that flash teaches developing (and even experienced) writers critical lessons. It teaches thrift in language, it teaches how to focus on what matters, and it teaches the importance of focusing on tangible, physical manifestations of theme rather than abstract notions in order to tell the story. Flash is a good way to get better as a writer, so we might as well share some of those exercises, just like an etude written to improve musical technique might be interesting enough to play in concerts rather than just in a studio.

But flash's ubiquity might also have something to do with the sorry commercial state of American literature. Most journals survive on the very edge of financial viability, even with an all-volunteer staff and without paying contributors. The only money journals tend to get is from advertising, which is click-based, or from the occasional person buying/contributing to the magazine. (Other income sources include the interest from one-time donations and the entry fees from occasional contests.)

Clicks and contributions both tend to come from one source: family and friends of the people who are published in the magazine. You can get more contributors into an edition if each piece is short. Hence, the popularity of flash fiction.

It may have something to do with why Pushcart picked a few of them. The editors made a note in the introduction of saying they included more pieces this year than ever before. I'm sure a lot of Pushcart sales come from the social networks of writers. Any anthology is going to sell better the more writers it has in it. Flash is one way to get more writers in it.

I'm not really criticizing publishers or editors for doing this. I want hundreds of journals to survive, and they should do what they have to in order to stay alive. Pushcart is good for the careers of the writers included in it, so long may it live. If it's a choice for Pushcart between including two flash stories and being 505 pages long or not including them and being 501 pages long, they should include the two stories. But the inclusion does say something about the choices editors are having to make.

I don't mean to make less of Chinquee's story here, which is a good flash fiction story. But if you are picking the best 100 meals made in America in 2018 in order to serve them to people, you probably wouldn't pick two that were microwave dinners, even if the chef managed to do something with those microwave dinners that was ingenious, given the limitations. But reality has forced editors to put a few microwave meals on the menu.

Nearly every journal outside the elite top 50 or so has to deal with this reality. Even if they don't just accept flash, most have a word limit that tops out around 5,000. Since most journals now only exist online, it's not really a question of space, but it is a question of what their volunteer reading force can get through. Overworked readers are more likely to pick a short piece, because it takes less time to vet it. But by adapting in this way to the reality of the struggling marketplace of serious fiction, many journals are not giving readers what they really look for in serious fiction, which are the stories that take a little longer but are are totally worth it.

I can foresee anger from flash writers asserting that flash really can have as much oomph as a longer story. It can. I don't argue that. Borges has a number of short pieces that are right at the top of my list of stories I think about the most. But it is harder to really hit hard with that little space, and I think the big successes are less frequent. A chef who manages to make a microwave meal taste almost as good as a home-cooked one may be cleverer and more inventive than the chef who makes a meal taste good the old-fashioned way, but I still know which one I'd rather eat.