In the acknowledgments section of this beautifully crafted, revelatory collection, Tara Lynn Masih mentions her realization, while putting the book together, that many of the stories are connected by the theme of disappearance. Indeed, the collection explores literal and metaphorical disappearances, and how these lead characters to transformative discoveries about themselves and, in some cases, about the spiritual world.
The story “Fleeing Gravity” begins with the legend behind a “Ghost Wolf” that for many years haunts the protagonist. Before being taken down by a gunshot, the wolf “melt[ed] in and out of the night like a demon ghost,” killing hundreds of cattle and sheep in its stalking grounds in Montana, the setting of this story. Yet the creature doesn’t fully disappear, at least not to the main character, Brandy, who, according to his Cree mother, has “some of that spirit wolf” in him.
As a child, Brandy acts like the wolf, and as a young man, he still feels the creature’s presence. After Brandy’s parents die, he leaves the family’s mountain home for work across the Missouri River. Before crossing the river, he finds evidence of the Ghost Wolf’s paw prints at his campsite. He bids the creature goodbye, speaking loudly and “hoping his voice will carry across the divide between two parallel lives.”
In a certain sense, his hopes are rewarded, and part of this story’s power resides in the way in which it shows the porousness of that divide for Brandy, who seems especially attuned to the spiritual world. Eventually, he gets a job as a caretaker of a tourist attraction: a ghost town made up of abandoned pioneer homesteads and other once-occupied buildings. In time, Brandy senses that the former inhabitants of these places haven’t fully departed. He detects “a cold draft, a murmur, a sharp change in the air like nuggets being dropped on metal scales.”
During the after-hours at the ghost town, Brandy might be taken for a spectre himself given his solitary existence in the emptied-out tourist site. Eventually, though, something makes him feel far less alone: an encounter with the only spirit who manifests to him in human form–the ghost of a woman who, he later learns, once taught at the ghost town’s school house. Though she never speaks to him, she becomes his regular companion, with “penetrating eyes that force him to care. They tie him to that place, those eyes, feed him and keep him steady.”
Here and in other stories, Masih writes so vividly and perceptively about the spiritual realm, and about the space between it and the material world, that these things seem as real as anything in the physical world. And in a refreshing break with many tales of the supernatural, Brandy is haunted in ways that seem more comforting than disquieting.
The story “Bird Man” explores the consequences of willing something to disappear–in this case, the truth.
During a vacation in the Netherlands, the protagonist, Amy, travels to the Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery and Memorial in Belgium, where she’d heard her father–a major in the 101st Airborne Division during World War II–had been buried after his plane crashed. Her mother, who’d fallen into a deep depression after this tragedy, never acknowledged his death to Amy and her brother, or possibly even to herself. At one point, Amy reflects:
This lie distanced Amy from her mother and brother and left her grappling with the pain of these troubled relationships, and with the unacknowledged absence of her father, whom she’d never got to know.
But her visit to Henri-Chapelle ends up setting Amy on a path toward a new perspective on her loss. When she finds a holly wreath decorating her father’s grave, a cemetery employee tells her that the grave had been adopted by a woman named Coleta De Pre, and Amy heads off to visit her.
Coleta is warm and welcoming, and she seems to have been expecting Amy. She walks her down the road and points out a treeline several fields in the distance. “That is where your father’s plane went down.”
In time, it’s revealed that Coleta has suffered considerable losses of her own. Her young husband died in the Battle of the Bulge, on the same day Amy’s father perished. And the Nazi’s held Coleta’s father and others hostage at a railway, so that they could transport their ammunition and soldiers safely. He’d never returned.
In a sharp contrast with Amy’s mother’s denial of death, Coleta has kept newspaper clippings about what happened to Amy’s dad and her own father. And she seems to show Amy how such losses can be confronted and lived with, even though the pain never fully recedes. This new perspective affects Amy deeply, and Masih’s writing about it is transcendent.
The romantic, sharply observed story “Those Who Have Gone” is a sort of adventure tale, the kind that should appeal to anyone who has had doubts about the direction of their life (in other words, probably everyone). It dangles the intriguing possibility of disappearing from one’s old, accustomed life and forging a new existence in a way that feels both unexpected and completely right.
The main character, Elizabeth, has traveled from New York to Phoenix, Arizona, for a job interview. While she’s making her way through a meal and a beer at a bar, a man resembling her ex-husband enters, startling her. Equally surprising, he heads right for her and greets her, rightly identifying her as a tourist. When he explains why he approached her, his words are eerily perceptive:
This stranger, named Blaze, is right that Elizabeth has left something of a mess behind. A couple of years before, she’d divorced her husband after an unhappy marriage, and she seems to have grown tired of New York, where she works as a magazine editor.
Yet Blaze, who turns out to be about as different from Elizabeth’s ex as possible (he’s an avid hunter, for one thing, and a former navy man), is far from “somebody simple.” Even as he draws Elizabeth closer, he warns her about the hazards of making a new life in Phoenix (the summers are “horrible”), and she seems to be taken by his honesty and his tenderness. Later on, after she returns with him to his cottage, she has reservations about becoming intimate with him. But a “new instinct … told her it was time to let go.”
This story perfectly captures what can make us fall in love with someone–in this case, the feeling that we are being seen and understood in a way that can steal our breath. At another point in the story, Blaze says to Elizabeth:
His words echo Elizabeth’s uncertainty about where she’s headed. Whether Blaze will have a place in her future is also uncertain. But the lovely final lines of “Those Who Have Gone” hold out so much possibility and hope for Elizabeth that they had me wanting to follow her story beyond these pages.
How We Disappear ends with a powerful and moving novella, “An Aura Surrounds That Night.” Like “Fleeing Gravity,” this story conveys the consequences, for good and ill, of being in touch with the spirit world. It also explores the burden of troubling memories and what might be gained by confronting them.
For the main character of the novella, Mercy McDonald, her darkest memory is of the disappearance of her sister, Melody, at a local fair. Something that made the incident especially disturbing is that Mercy and her parents had practically witnessed Melody’s apparent abduction. As they watched her ride a merry-go-round, she seemed to vanish from the far side of it.
Once Melody disappears, Mercy seems to vanish from her parents’ awareness. And an act of cruelty on her father’s part sends her running to an old friend of her mother’s, Yellow Rose, who ends up seeing Mercy through to adulthood. Long before this, Mercy had felt a special connection to Yellow Rose, a psychic who had sensed, before Melody’s disappearance, that some tragedy was going to befall the McDonald family. Mercy feels that Yellow Rose is the only person, aside from Melody, who has ever “really seen” her, and it turns out that a major reason for this is that Mercy also has psychic powers.
At first, these powers seem like a curse: an unsettling sensation in Mercy’s stomach proves to be a sign that “something bad” is going to happen. But Yellow Rose offers Mercy some advice for changing that curse into something that could help both her and those who might benefit from her powers.
Toward the end of the story, Mercy recalls some additional advice from Yellow Rose, which could provide comfort to anyone who has lost a loved one:
Then, Yellow Rose suggests how Mercy might replace her darkest memory. Following this suggestion, Mercy reconnects with Melody and re-immerses herself in the landscape of rural Long Island, where the sisters had lived and shared a bond for so many years.
The writing here, and in so many other passages of How We Disappear, transported me and made movies in my mind. And there is so much to be admired about this collection: its range, intelligence, and deep immersion in characters’ lives and struggles. Each story is its own richly detailed, mesmerizing world.
Would My Pick be Your Pick?
If you're interested in ________, the answer may be "Yes":￭ Stories with elements of the supernatural
￭ Stories about coping with loss
￭ Disappearances, and the mysteries surrounding them
