October 28, 2024 by Ava Tatum (‘25)
“You, Disappearing” by Alexandra Kleeman is a short story about a woman grappling with an apocalypse. This eerie and somber story discusses themes of mortality and the inevitability of death. Unlike the typical apocalypse you might see in “The Walking Dead” or “I Am Legend”, there is nothing to prepare for, because this apocalypse is not caused by zombies or a disease outbreak, it’s called the “disapocalypse”, because things start suddenly disappearing. Whether it’s people, pets, objects, or even memories, anything is fair game and will eventually cease to exist.
If you do decide to read the short story, I suggest listening to the playlist I created to go along with it, then when you’ve finished, you can come back to this article and read my analysis and explanation.
The first thing you may notice about this story is that it’s written from the second person point of view, this means that the narrator is talking to the reader directly using pronouns like “you”. We come to find out that “you”, the reader, is the narrator’s long term significant other. The narrator starts the story with a call to their significant other, she talks about how their cat, Cookie, has gone missing. The significant other then says that she should report it to the Bureau of Disappearances.
As the story progresses, we find out that the narrator decided to leave the house her and her partner shared in New York to live with her brother in Chicago. She says that it was too hard to think about the fact that they would forget each other at some point, and so when the “disapocalypse” started, she chose to leave. Whenever she calls her significant other, which is often, she grieves him even though he answers the phone every time.
The narrator explains that most people thought of an apocalypse as something to get ready for, stocking up, getting in a bunker, creating a ragtag team of misfits to save the day. But this apocalypse wasn’t like that, the “disapocalypse” is actually described as something with emotions, at times she says it could be graceful, or that it even had a sense of humor.
For a large part of the story, the narrator talks about living with her significant other and how difficult it was to be a person who couldn’t go on with normal life. Her partner wanted to keep working as an architect because it made him happy that he could add something to the world headed for total subtraction. The narrator wants to forget normalcy, create a new normal, travel, be observant, realizing that the things she might pass everyday could suddenly disappear.
Towards the end of the story, the narrator calls her significant other one last time, she is left with no response. She dials the Bureau of Disappearances, then she starts to fall asleep. It is left up to the reader’s interpretation to decide whether she is just falling asleep, if she has vanished, or if the entire world itself has ended.
At the very end of the story, there is a blurb about a woman who is allegedly able to talk to the people who have disappeared, essentially a psychic or medium. This brings up questions about the exploitative nature of people who claim to speak to those who have passed on. Some might say that if it truly brings you joy to think about the other side and your loved ones waiting for you, then it’s worth it.
Some of the eeriest parts of this story are the descriptions of real places. Kleeman uses the imagery of New York and Chicago to truly immerse the reader into the story, it makes the audience feel as if they could be affected by the “disapocalypse” at any point in time. In my opinion, this story is much scarier than any Edgar Allen Poe or Stephen King, because of the true hopelessness and immersive nature of it. The reader is left to wonder: which coping mechanism is better? Is it more helpful to carry on with monotonous tasks, trying to keep some sort of routine and normal life alive? Or would you rather see the world before it ends?