In “An Aura Surrounds That Night,” the novella that closes Tara Lynn Masih’s haunting new collection How We Disappear, Yellow Rose, a psychic, becomes a mentor to a grief-stricken girl named Mercy whom she suspects of having mystical gifts of her own. “You’ll never be able to look at this world the same way again, after this day,” Yellow Rose says; and as Mercy continues, we see that Yellow Rose is right. Mercy learns that there is more to the world than meets the eye. “There is energy that does not dissipate. It continues,” she says. “Einstein knew this. Psychics know it.”

In addition to the novella, How We Disappear includes twelve short stories; all explore the theme of disappearance in unique and compelling ways. Although the stories involve a wide array of characters, settings, and narrative styles, each centers on a deep loss that must be faced. The “energy that does not dissipate” points to a central idea for Masih: nothing and no one is ever truly gone. Like Yellow Rose, Masih invites us to see the world differently by showing how everything that disappears continues to exist within her characters and landscapes. Through elegant prose, complex characters, and breathtaking images, Masih has crafted a collection that is not only a joy to read but also incredibly cathartic.

In the first story, “What You Can’t See in the Picture,” Masih shows how disappearance can take many different forms. The story follows a woman who works for the police as a “super recognizer,” meaning she has an uncanny ability to recognize faces in CCTV footage and lineups. One illustration of disappearance is quite literal: the police must find a girl who got abducted and return her safely home. But Masih also introduces the idea that every moment we experience vanishes as soon as it occurs. All the faces this woman has ever seen remains seared in her brain as vivid memories she refers to as “ghosts,” and she must go “deep into [her] mind’s files” to identify the perpetrator: “I pull up the ghost images of the past. Breathe in and out. In and out.” We may not all be superhuman recognizers, but we all have files of disappeared moments buried deep inside our minds — and the ability to make them reappear within.

In Masih’s stories, the lost also resurface externally as ghosts, graves, little voices, talking snakes, discovered letters, and in nature. Some of Masih’s most poetic passages depict souls lost in the wilderness. In “If You Had Stopped,” for example, the narrator describes how the Parrita River has ravaged Costa Rican villages:

Imagine there are whole villages somewhere out there, down where the sunlight ripples, maybe even our people. Some of us get washed away, swept off our feet or still in rusty cars. Your grandfather is driving eternally, my grandmother told me as one of my bedtime stories, in his old battered Land Rover, trying to find us. Can you hear his horn in your sleep?

The relationship between people and their environment is heavily underscored throughout much of the collection; many of the unique settings are described like characters themselves, embodying the tone and essence of their histories. The result is a heightened sense of oneness with the world, as well as an awareness that all that once existed still remains. In “Those Who Have Gone,” Elizabeth, recently divorced, visits the Arizona desert to escape an unfulfilling life in New York. Searching for herself as she looks to the desert, she finds that her existence is part of something larger:

Elizabeth felt small, innocuous, her place one brief millisecond in the center of the past looming around her. She saw caves in the rocks and wondered if they had ever provided shelter for anyone, if they still did. She imagined hiding out in one, surrounded by rock and sand, a canopy of bats and lizards. She imagined being accepted by the cave, rather than claiming it.

I cannot quite express the emotional release I experienced reading How We Disappear. Like most collections, the whole is uneven in a narrow sense: there are certain standouts that make the other stories seem less poignant in comparison. But Masih’s arrangement of her materials is what makes the collection so special; the variety of narrative styles and structures add another layer of insight to their respective stories. The journeys through diverse settings, cultures, and circumstances convey the breadth and universality of loss in a way that a single story cannot. This collection ultimately illustrates how disappearance connects us all – through both the experience of loss itself, and the ever-present “energy that does not dissipate.” And it just might change your perspective of the world.

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Tara Lynn Masih is a National Jewish Book Award Finalist and winner of the Julia Ward Howe Award for Young Readers for her debut novel My Real Name Is Hanna (2018). She is the editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction and The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays, and founding editor of the annual Best Small Fictions.

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Hannah Ovadia has an MA in psychology and currently works as a research coordinator at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. This is her first published review.