Review by Emily Webber
Tara Lynn Masih’s How We Disappear is a collection of twelve stories and a novella all with a strong connection to the natural world and characters who are recreating their own worlds. Masih’s characters are either trying to disappear into something new or afraid they will disappear. The stories take the reader to different environments and time periods including Utah, France, Belgium, and Puerto Rico, all richly detailed landscapes and with complex characters equally as interesting as the places they inhabit. These stories tell us what happens when we look away from our current lives in search of a reinvention—a bond with a stranger, transformation even through something ordinary but different from our own experiences, or a retreat inward.
One character reflects:
To sing and dance and not to have to write, to not be someone’s daughter or wife or mother, to just be floating in your own ether? (50)
One can imagine many of the characters in these stories saying something similar, getting in the car, and driving away from their current lives. And some do just that. “In a Sulfate Mist,” a woman drives to the house of a man that she met online, getting caught in a once-a-year bug swarm.
GPS keeps redirecting me when I make wrong turns. Till I realize it’s not rain but bugs slapping in the windshield. Soon, it’s a storm of black bugs. The wipers smear them on the glass so I can almost not see. The voice on the GPS is telling me to take another right, and as I do, I keep turning, sliding, almost going off the road. But I bring the car back out of the roadside weeds, my heart pumping.
Stay on course, stay on course, I chant to myself, leaning forward into the steering wheel. Don’t worry about what you may have gotten yourself into. Don’t worry that you didn’t tell anyone where you are going. Have faith in your judgment. Have faith you won’t disappear. (72)
We don’t know why she’s taking the risk of going to a stranger’s house, but we can easily imagine the trauma or loneliness that drives it. In “Delight,” a woman, born with a congenital disability, runs a store and sells her expertly crafted sweets, finds unexpected love and a way to stand up to her abusive father. There’s both hardship and transformation in these stories
“Agatha: A Life in Unauthorized Fragments” reflects on moments from Agatha Christie’s life and her eleven-day disappearance and shows something that Masih does particularly well—the environment her characters are in are not simply a backdrop but pair with the interior turmoil of her characters and offer its own insight:
It wasn’t the hard, dangerous edge of cliff that her mule traversed. For that was excitement. It was the butterfly that the guide pinned to her felt hat, still alive. Fluttering in agony. She could feel its pain, hear its silent scream. But she did not want to hurt the nice guide, so she kept it all in till it came out in floods of tears. She did not yet know how to express herself anyway, so with relief, it was her mother who knew what was wrong and finally unpinned the now dead Purple Emperor. (45)
Masih explores disappearances of all kinds—those grand choices we make ourselves to get away and the more subtle ways in which life is about disappearances. The first story in the collection, “What You Can’t See in the Picture,” is about a woman who works for the police identifying faces from closed-circuit TV monitors and involves the abduction of a girl. Masih focuses less on the action and suspense and more on quiet interiority. In the first line, the narrator tells us, “It’s my job to bring back ghosts.” Ultimately, it feels like her job searching for faces, for the worst possible reasons, turns everyone into a ghost, even after a small moment of connection. Despite catching the bad guys, a deeper loneliness and sadness runs through this story, pointing out how hard it is to know and connect with another person. This story doesn’t involve a character actively turning away from their existing life to something new. Instead, it focuses on how we come and go in each other’s lives. Similarly, in “Fleeing Gravity,” the character retreats inward and away from the world as a response to betrayals and trauma.
The novella “An Aura That Surrounds That Night” closes the collection. Most of these stories are on the shorter end, and Masih expertly crafts them, creating characters with intricate lives and strong interiority, even in the short space. So I wondered if reading the novella would feel weighted down compared to the stories that come before it. But it is as good, and it is a wise choice to close out the collection because it flips the angle of some of the previous stories. In the novella, we see someone who stays put but how life changes anyway and framed from the experience of dealing with a loved one who has disappeared:
“You know, honey”—she tries to hold me with her eyes and these words—”I’ve been getting into folks’ minds for years now. And what I know is this—the world is mostly divided into folks who can’t let go, and folks who can’t stay. Only a few lucky ones find balance. You gotta do both, let go and stay. Can you do that for yourself?” (135)
Tara Lynn Masih’s collection, How We Disappear, is populated by people who are holding on and letting go, offering diverse perspectives on relationships and transformations paired with fascinating landscapes.
How We Disappear by Tara Lynn Masih
Press 53, 2022
9781950413454
Paper. 164 pages.
9781950413454
Emily Webber has published fiction, essays, and reviews in the Ploughshares Blog, The Writer magazine, Five Points, Split Lip Magazine, Brevity, and elsewhere. She’s the author of a chapbook of flash fiction, Macerated, from Paper Nautilus Press. You can read more at www.emilyannwebber.com and @emilyannwebber.