The Disappeared by Andrew Porter, 2023
The magic trick:
Using the story of a missing friend to highlight a lost narrator
Yesterday’s SSMT feature was “Hole” by Andrew Porter, and we noted that it and today’s story, “Disappeared,” both begin with first-person narrators telling the reader about the last time they ever saw their best friend.
Whereas “Hole” wrestled with memory and grief, “The Disappeared” is a little less direct. It’s a slippery kind of story that leaves the reader feeling further from solving the mystery at the end than we were at the start. And that’s really what the story is doing. The missing friend at the beginning turns out to be more story accelerator than the story itself. Our narrator, though sad and shocked, isn’t focused on where his friend might be or what may have happened to him. The tragedy seems to have left him lost, taking stock of his own life, especially his marriage.
So in the end the story surprises the reader. It’s not about what happened to the missing friend but instead is about what happened to our narrator.
And that’s quite a trick on Porter’s part.
The selection:
Antoinette looked away then. I was trying to be supportive, understanding, but a part of me still resented her for not telling me sooner, and I could tell that she could sense this. Antoinette was from France originally and she’d been living in the States for almost three years, but I had no idea whether she’d been living here legally or not. I knew that she didn’t work, and I knew that she wasn’t in school for anything. From what I could tell she had met Daniel at a party a few years back and had been living with him ever since. Daniel rarely talked about her when we met up, which made me think they weren’t that serious, and when I’d asked him once if they were going to get married, he’d just laughed and said maybe, maybe not. Then he’d laughed again. “Antoinette,” he said. “She’s a piece of work, my friend. I love her to death, but she’s a piece of work.” That’s all he’d said, and again I’d taken this to mean they weren’t that close, but now it looked like Antoinette had basically assumed the role of his common-law wife. I would have assumed that she was in this partly for his money, that she hoped to be included in his will, or in the settlement of his estate, but according to her, Daniel had left almost everything in his will to his family—to his brothers and sisters, his parents. She didn’t seem bitter about this or disappointed at all, which made me think that she might have genuinely loved him.
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Short Story Magic Tricks 
Nice post 🌹🌹