The Little List of Boys and Men Who Vanished by Claudia Monpere
Claudia Monpere’s flash “The Little List of Boys and Men Who Vanished” is an exercise in the elasticity of the sentence. Consisting of just three sentences, the essay details Monpere’s relationship to men she has loved throughout her life who have died or disappeared. Though each sentence tapers to its preordained conclusion, each is comprised of stark images, shifting the reader’s attention to new and interesting places: from a Sadie Hawkins dance to the floor of a Santana concert to Monpere’s wedding and finally, the bottom of the ocean. Each sentence closes with the spark of an unexpected word: a boy dying at the age of “fifteen,” the irony of the name “Cliff,” the “tiny skeletons of phytoplankton” deep beneath the Bay Bridge. The essay is attuned to the creative possibilities of the cumulative sentence, in which the independent clause is provided from the outset and is followed by a series of clauses and phrases that build on the initial clause, stretching beyond its scope while coloring in its details. Each sentence ends with a death, adding a sense of finality to a sentence structure that is often employed for the accumulation of details rather than building to a decisive close.
Monpere’s structure allows her to have it both ways. “In leaping through so many decades of my life, I knew I needed a container,” she writes in her author’s note. “So I decided on the segmented form in an early draft. But it was only later that I realized each segment needed the intensity of one rushed sentence. I needed both breathlessness and the container.” The result is an essay that is tragic and beautiful, that reads with the rush of run-on prose but delivers the abrupt emotional force of a tightly packed work of flash nonfiction. —CRAFT
Number one had cerulean blue eyes and haloed heat as we danced at Sadie Hawkins in our matching flannel shirts and he wandered night stairs and stars almost as stoned as his mother and strummed “Dust in the Wind” and “Right Here Waiting” and wrote me letters from juvie calling me Sweetest and one night passed out from drugs and choked on his own vomit dying at fifteen.
Number two read the Bible and was upset I wouldn’t gift him my virginity but did persuade me to miss the statewide speech tournament where I was supposed to represent my high school and instead attend a Santana concert with him and while I was in the bathroom he gave his class ring to another girl he decided he loved more than me and I crawled around on the concert floor searching for the ring he claimed he lost and five years later he slipped at Yosemite’s Glacier Point and fell off a cliff and died and his name—this is true—was Cliff.
Number three vanished eighty-seven days after I met him at the supermarket, the ambient music still going strong at 11:00 p.m. while my kleptomaniac roommate and I searched for a cure for an emergency plumbing problem and found it in aisle three with the Sir Galahad clerk who made repairs and then moved in with us and prayed on his knees each night and asked me to teach him poetry and swung me breathless into Santa Cruz waves and disappeared for three days when he went to buy cigarettes returning with a tale of being kidnapped by his minister who shamed him about leaving his wife and he was sorry he never told me he was married and we went back to living in my tiny apartment where my roommate was trying to stop stealing my things and when he finally left to finalize the divorce and then come home to me he sent one postcard and never returned not even years later when I imagined him showing up at St. Theresa’s Church to protest as I walked down the aisle to marry number four who wrote me love sonnets and called me Claudette and raged so intensely spit flew from his mouth and who jumped off the Bay Bridge after nineteen years of marriage his body never found his bones sinking into the seabed buried by sand and clay and mud and the tiny skeletons of phytoplankton.
CLAUDIA MONPERE lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and teaches at Santa Clara University. Her flash appears in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Forge, Atlas + Alice, trampset, Fictive Dream, Atticus Review, and elsewhere. Her short stories, poems, and creative nonfiction appear in many anthologies and in such journals as The Kenyon Review, The Cincinnati Review, River Teeth, Prairie Schooner, New Ohio Review, and Hunger Mountain. She received the 2023 SmokeLong Workshop Award and has been nominated multiple times for Pushcart Prizes, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. Find her on Twitter @ClaudiaMonpere.
Featured image by Ravi Pinisetti, courtesy of Unsplash.
