Reviewed by K.C. Mead-Brewer
Some things you’ll want to know right away: Diana Oropeza’s debut collection An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance [Future Tense Books 2024] will fit with seductive slightness in your hand, like petting a cat who’s already slinking away. This book will beguile you with its seamless braiding of flash fiction and creative nonfiction into a single creature (luring me to do likewise here, braiding review and essay together). Oropeza’s writing will tell you stories about things vanishing, fragile, missing, stolen, and blinking.
This book will find you at a different time than it found me.
I began reading Oropeza’s collection around the first Christmas after losing a beloved father figure in my life. Cancer funneled him away in the span of only six days, disappearing him before my astonished gaze and taking pieces of me with him. I felt an immediate kinship with—and itchy wariness of—the opening story of Oropeza’s collection, by which I mean the title itself: An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance. For several days I lingered with the tender, pinching sensation inspired by this five-word story. Before I’d even cracked the collection’s spine, Oropeza made me think of all I’ve tried (and failed) to write about Dad since his passing. Packing up his belongings. Creating invitations for his funeral. The cost of burying him beside his wife.
All of it, forever: an incomplete catalog of disappearance.
An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance is a colorful prickling of stories who all intimately understand the humor, strangeness, pervasiveness, and seeming randomness of grief. Oropeza’s sense of humor feels precise and sharp as ice cracking in your drink, or perhaps between a dangerous woman’s teeth. Her writing makes you both flinch and feel less alone.
She opens her collection with a story called “URGENT,” but before you can sniff at being hurried, Oropeza immediately delights with her puckishly confident voice and style. (Though the story is urgent indeed, I will not go into detail here. It’s an alert you must check on your own.) You might think a book opening with “URGENT” would feel like a roller coaster, something alarming and anxious and nonstop, but what Oropeza offers instead is an urgency of caring. A painful, pressing desire not to forget or let anything slip further away. (You can just imagine how I felt upon reaching stories like “Bazaar,” about the unique disappearances between a parent and child, or “Nowak,” which whispers that “Sometimes a mother is a distant planet and a father is only his word.”)
As you become lost in these stories—an especially apt turn-of-phrase for this book—you may find your thoughts flexing into shapes like: I bet Leonora Carrington would’ve loved this book. And, What would Oropeza say about Saturn’s fading rings? And, No wonder I can’t forget about the flames eating Notre-Dame. And, What happens when all my favorite movies “aren’t censored” by streaming platforms – they’re simply, suddenly, wretchedly not themselves anymore? And, The man I called Dad is dead now. And, Bramble Cay. And, Palestine. And, That beautiful gay bar that just closed. Then Oropeza’s prose will blessedly interrupt:
“And what if we suddenly found those who were lost in December, if they became unburied like avalanches in reverse, would that be spring?”
You will be unable to stop thinking of the milk spoiling in Oropeza’s “Patz,” or of the Wandering Lake in “Peng,” or of the hot air balloon “thrashed around like a coin in a blender” in the storm of “Balloon Boy.” When next you see flecks of snow pressing desperately against your window, you will no doubt think of “the air polluted with confetti” in “Challenger.” (How did I ever find snow celebratory when its landing is always “too violent to survive”? How did I ever fool myself into thinking a space shuttle couldn’t break apart in only seventy-three seconds? That a father couldn’t be gone in less than a week?)
“When we pretended to be astronauts as children,” Oropeza gently reminds, “we did not simulate this disaster even though we knew about it. Instead, we put fish bowls over our heads and pretended our mission landed safely.” We pretended we would always come home to our children. We pretended our home would always be there to welcome us back.
Oropeza’s decision to leave her stories without a final punctuation mark gives each piece a feeling of being whisked away right before your eyes. Letters lost in the mail. Housekeepers vacuuming up their own footprints. The tide washing all of us out to sea.
The book’s many ephemeral qualities are met and knotted with the powerful weight of Oropeza’s prose. Prose that will not let itself be denied or forgotten. Prose that is nimble and spare as the fluttering bat in “Deprong Mori.” Prose that is shocking and brutal as the museum lead now encasing the tiny creature. Oropeza’s prose is poetry, prayer, and kōan together.
An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance is weighted by the muscle of Oropeza’s craft and artistry, yes, but more viscerally still: her book is weighted by a sense of loss so profound, you will need time to sit quietly and compose yourself in its wake. You will understand what Oropeza warns you of in her opening story: “THIS BOX IS HEAVY BECAUSE IT IS FULL OF HOLES.”
It’s no wonder Oropeza’s collection is sans any table of contents: like fathers and mothers and monuments and civilizations, there can be no guarantee these stories will be here when you return, let alone in which order. Best you read them now, while you have the chance.
Diana Oropeza’s debut book An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearances is available from Future Tense Books via Ingram and Asterism Books Distribution.
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K.C. Mead-Brewer is an author living in beautiful Baltimore, MD. Her fiction appears in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Strange Horizons, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. For more info, check out: kcmeadbrewer.com
