In sum of her PARTS, Laura Besley provides us with a beautiful series of briefly illuminated windows - vignettes that offer glimpses into the moments of intimacy that make up a life. Besley writes tiny, furious fiction concerning an increasingly fractured world. Each story acts as part mirror, part shard, as cutting as it is revealing. This sentiment is perhaps embodied best by "shattered," in which a self-hatred over physical appearance culminates in a speaker smashing a mirror and stating, "with the shards of glass / I give myself a new face."
Besley gives a new face, not just to the nameless speaker of "shattered," but also to the presumed limitation of flash fiction. Her creative approach to the visual presentation of flash fiction gives the collection a strong visual identity, a new face. Utilising poetic lineation techniques, Besley’s work shatters and reforms our presumptions about the form.
The collection is carefully threaded together by a series of intimacies, perhaps most centrally the intimacy one must have with oneself. In the refined and precise prose that is present across all four of her published works, Besley presents the reader with moments of physicality that ripple out beyond the pieces' short word counts. Often, the body of the speaker is positioned as an object of discussion, like a museum exhibit - an object transformed by a thread of absurdism that contrasts with the collection's physicality. In one story, the speaker is transformed into a trumpet, in another, a character grows an extra arm to hide their face. Bodies in Besley’s work are central yet malleable. They are expressed through a series of familiar quirks and fault lines, "thick middles," "haggard faces," and "bruises" that can become beautiful or bizarre at a moment’s notice. When reading Besley’s work, one is left discovering, through her typical sharp and wise immediacy, a new strangeness within oneself.
In one of my favourite stories from the collection, "fractured," Besley writes:
consent form." I sign. "If you could just remove your
bruises, multiple, along the collar bone and across the patient’s back
home, he might be awake, be wondering why I’m not
there is a bed ready for you now." I don’t
Here, the body, while still central, is cut in two by the story's perspectives. The lineation is cleverly used to construct the patchwork of the patient as observer and subject. "Patient’s back" flows cleanly into "back home," as if the thoughts of the patient effectively interrupt the clinical observation. Time is clipped and stitched as the request to "remove your bruises" merges observable reality and individual desire for escape. A clashing moment of exterior reality and interior doubt culminates in the piece's final unfinished fragment, "I don’t." The final line, when read within the context of a domestic abuse victim refusing the (albeit limited) protection of the hospital, is haunting. The lack of a concluding full stop implicates all the possible moments this patient may inhabit after this one, leaving the ending of the piece jagged and frayed.
In just thirty-four pages, Besley draws us into a network of bodies, thoughts, and conversations, always, as flash necessitates, with scant context. Yet the brief nature of each piece illuminates just how interconnected we all are, each jagged edge implicating a matching edge that may yet lie beside it. The sum of the collection's parts is a moving and sharply observed portrayal of the complexities of embodied life, where one must place gentle intimacies right alongside painful metamorphosis and absurd possibilities.
Nina Walker is a first year PhD student at the University of Leicester studying the impact of digital technology on the contemporary American novel. She also co-runs the Leicester based creative writing group Amateur Hour. She enjoys writing poetry, reading speculative fiction, and pub quizzes.
