Chinquapins, R. T. Smith's new collection of short short stories, is comprised of two distinct groups of fictions, the first, which lends its title to the overall volume, is a series of sixteen flash fictions, most of them between five hundred and a thousand words, each focusing on a single Appalachian man or woman, many narrated, almost whispered, by the primary character and centering on a single scene, often the crisis point of a swiftly summarized history. The characters deal with desire, death and disappointment and reveal their surroundings and actions in earthy highland speech, which reinforces the gritty realism of the people and their surrounds.
In "Two Owls" a wife observes two young birds and hopes that watching them will soften her husband, but she does not realize that he's witnessed a tragedy that day. The main character of "Caterwaul" is the famous banjo picker Dock Boggs, who is also a miner and a rogue whose wife will not let him play the Devil's music in the house. In fact, music is a motif running through "Coffin Dulcimer," "Bell Choir" and "Pretty Redbird." "Windfall," the longest piece, is a young fugitive's account of a meeting with a solitary woman on a hardscrabble farm and his apprehensions about her even as he attempts to charm her.
The majority of the stories in this section involve yearning, disappointment and the ubiquitous threat of death, but in a few, like the story of young Syl Ponder offer hope that a sweetness endures among the rough hollers and slopes of the Blue Ridge.
The final story, however, is entitled "Chinquapins," a small fruit that ripens and falls from the chinquapin oak. It returns to the couple in the opening story and reveals the fate of the marriage between the owl-loving (and chinquapin tea drinking) Hildy and her husband, no longer taciturn but alone.
The waters, flora and fauna of the region are nearly as lively as the people in these economical "sudden fictions," and Smith, who lives in western Virginia, explores the threshold between story and narrative poem as he observes the dangerous and endangered nature of the people of his region.
The second section, entitled "Colonel Othniel Sweet's Mysteries of Nature," offers seven brief rhetorical flourishes masquerading as articles or addresses delivered by a sometimes misinformed and opinionated amateur (but authoritative) "professor." Colonel Sweet is an interpreter of arcane explanations and meditations concerning events or practices one might expect to find in tabloids or reality TV, if it had existed in the nineteenth century. The tone is elevated, often to humorous effect, and the narrator is a mysterious polymath who prides himself as a connoisseur of the offbeat (a man who lives in a salt cave, blackbirds fallen from the sky, people who spontaneously burst into flame, traveling hermaphrodites) and the transgressive (a New Orleans "soiled dove," water diviners).