REVIEW: Baby is a Thing Best Whispered by Keely O’Shaughnessy

Flash Fiction. 79 pgs. Alien Buddha Press. August 2022. 9798844456459.

In her flash fiction collection Baby is a Thing Best Whispered (Alien Buddha Press), author Keely O’Shaughnessy assembles a series of stories about the way dynamics change in the physical and emotional sense as one matures into adulthood. The twenty-two stories in O’Shaughnessy’s connection are all linked by the way their narrators are put at beginnings and endings of relationships and how they fit into the roles of mother, daughter, sister, and more. It’s through her use of and lack of detail in these stories that O’Shaughnessy examines how these roles and dynamics changed when confronted with external forces like death, violence, and isolation.

The first story in the collection is the titular story, and this story expertly sets the tone and themes for the remainder of the collection. In the story, a disabled pregnant woman goes through her wedding hiding her pregnancy, although her anxiety and worries begin to manifest in body horror. Immediately, O’Shaughnessy examines how a woman at numerous points in her evolving life has to address them. She’s in a public setting that’s all about her, but she’s also completely alone and unable to broach this subject with others due to her growing anxiety. “The room is muted. The waves of nausea, the pain, the blood and mess, and the baby, these are mine alone,” O’Shaughnessy writes.

Many of the other stories in Baby read like they could be interconnected pieces due to how easily the themes and motifs of O’Shaughnessy’s work are carried through. There are a few that are about the relationship between the narrator and her sister. “The Asarco Smokestack ‘93” and “Teaching a Clean Front Kick” both deal with how sisters grow up and grow apart together, with the former story following a sister who leaves their family after a poor blending, and the latter about how the two sisters will be divided due to both of them experiencing different situations regarding a problematic family member.

There are also a few stories that deal with motherhood, whether it’s impending motherhood or mothers existing on their own. “The Manicure” is an anecdote of a stepmother helping her stepdaughter paint her nails, but is also a meditation on how their relationship formed. “What If We Breathed Through Our Skin?” is about a single mom caring for her son as he undergoes a bizarre transformation and her ways to protect him from his estranged father. Then there’s “The Locked Cupboard,” about a pregnant single mother having a tense lunch encounter with her mother and how their views of parenting and children differ.

Aside from exploring relationships, O’Shaughnessy’s collection also looks at how we can assign relationships with natural spaces. There are a few pieces that center around a carnival and corn mazes, and how these fun places serve to be a step for maturity in young women. Then there are a few pieces set in coastal areas, where the wide expanse of the sea represents the unknown and the hopeful, a place where danger and rejuvenation both exist. Each of these pieces look at how one can link their personal history to these spaces, but also how the spaces can evolve over time, where the corn maze in “Loss is Riding the Log Flume at Splash Town in Late Summer” represent stages of female maturity. “Loss is how, if the field was sown with corn, it would flatten under the weight of your bodies,” she writes. Or how the sea in “The Depths at Which Spider Crabs are Found” represents future goals and an attempt to understand the past.

Baby is a Thing Best Whispered is a rich collection of how we evolve and change in our dynamics with others and our environment. O’Shaughnessy links her pieces together by examining the moments these dynamics start and end and uses her precise detail to look at the point the change occurs. Through her flash fiction, O’Shaughnessy evokes how these moments can occur at any time, but that the details of these shifts can remain with us for the rest of our lives.