Small Perfectly Balanced Story Containers

For the last few months, because of the Picture Book Intensive, I’ve posted mainly about that small, perfectly balanced story container, its blend of images and words served up for the youngest of readers. The short story is another small container whose compactness calls for distilling the essence of a story.

That’s the quality I found captivating in Anjali Sachdeva’s luminous collection, All the Names They Used for God. One story in particular, “Robert Greenman and the Mermaid,” is about being captivated, bewitched, drawn into the net of the strangest of love triangles.

Love arrives unpredictably for Robert. The story shines light on the mysterious object of his fascination, dimming his ordinary life. But it’s Sachdeva’s prose that draws a reader into the ache of touching the impossible:

He would have said her hair was tangled except that it did not look as if it should be otherwise; he felt that combing it out would be like trying to comb a person‘s limbs. Each indigo strand was as thick as a twig and had the moist look of an anemone.

You could drown in this story and be happy for it.