What I like about short story collections is the variety they offer. It may be the writing techniques, the structures of the narratives. Or the themes—law, physics, architecture, computer, diving, fishing. Or the characters—you have time just enough to fall in love with them, sympathize or empathize with them, or even hate them, loathe them, kill them but not more than enough as to lose interest in them.
Daryll Delgado has and does all of these in “after the body displaces water”. She’s the Wonder Woman of the Creative Fiction League.
Every single one of her stories is well researched and artfully narrated, but I love “open angle” the most. I love how it leaves me choosing between death and disappearance—depending perhaps on how I liked the characters?
Delgado too has an extraordinary ability to inspire imagination to summon a concrete representation of an abstract concept. I imagine a tiny crack of time-space dimension when the daughter says: “The only light that was on was the one over the staircase. The smooth granite floors were softly illuminated. The winding staircase looked like it was floating in a gleaming sea of darkness.”
Dear Elizabeth 