My father claims that he knew I’d be a writer when I wrote in a school assignment that after my grandfather died, I could “see his absence at the top of the stairs” where he used to wait for me when I came to visit. “You don’t ‘see’ absences,” my father likes to explain, and only someone with a writerly bent would claim otherwise. And as a writer, I have to agree that there is plenty of inspiration to be found in the absence of…well, anything. Absences are uncanny, one of my favorite qualities in a piece of fiction. The mere fact that we have a word for when something is not there seems paradoxical. Absences can be as mundane as kid staying home sick from school, or as terrifying as a kid who leaves for school in the morning and never arrives. Words are how we map these disappearances, filling in the negative space in order to figure out what has been lost and how we feel about that loss.

I must have been thinking a lot about absences and disappearances during my first season reading for The Citron Review, because a theme emerged from the talented writers I helped select.

In “Schmidt,” Jeff Friedman describes the titular character’s disappearance by describing all the things he left behind. He notes everything from the battered dictionary on Schmidt’s desk at work to the reflections he once used to generate in shop windows. In so doing, the loss of Schmidt becomes heartbreaking and mythic.

In “Fall Colors,” Stephen Tuttle investigates the fear of absence, of a disappearance that, like Schmidt’s, is abrupt and senseless, as a child jumps into a pile of leaves and can’t be found. As the sensible, raking neighbor becomes convinced this isn’t just a prank, they find they are at a loss for how to help the frantic children left behind.

In “Idaho,” Carolyn Russell takes on the voice of two teens who are about to go missing from their old lives, actively making a choice to venture into the unknown. The teens are scared but determined; the reader rendered as scared and useless as the narrator of “Fall Colors.”

In “The Day After,” Melissa Witcher uses the absence of catcalls to explore how a woman’s perception of herself has been shaped by the rest of the world, and is now shifting once again. No woman is an island, except maybe she becomes one as she ages.

In “The Rivers Between Us,” Jane Garrett spins a fairy tale epic in just a few pages, showing how disappearances are always more like unveilings, or perhaps transformations. An ogre becomes a lioness becomes a powerful mare becomes a jellyfish. In all forms she is beloved by her human husband.

When you finish reading, I hope you find, like I did, that the absence of physical words on a page is in fact the lasting presence of them in your mind.

Carolyn Abram
Guest Flash Fiction Editor
The Citron Review