‘The Rotifer’ is a beautiful, melancholic reflection about the passing of time, and about the ways that other lives can touch our own and how we sometimes become intensely invested in those other lives. I’ve never read anything else quite like it.
It’s essentially three linked stories. We meet the narrator first as a student, anxiously watching a minute organism (the eponymous rotifer) as it wriggles in distress under the lens of her microscope. The rotifer is ensnared in a piece of algae, but the narrator’s attempts to help it only result in chaos – her huge, clumsy body exists on a different scale to its tiny world. The story then pans out to events in other times and places that obliquely echo this first incident and culminates in a casually devastating last line.
Mary Ladd Gavell’s fiction was only discovered after she died at the age of 47, and it was not until 2002 (35 years after her death) that her first and only story collection was published and gained significant acclaim. You read her work differently, I think, when you know this. I imagine her in the neatly coiffured world of mid-century America, busily writing while her children slept and stashing her stories away, unaware of what the future held. Which, of course, is itself a haunting story about the passage of time and the quiet tragedy of other lives.
First published in Best American Short Stories of 1968, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1968, and included in Best American Short Stories of the Century, Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Collected in I Cannot Tell a Lie, Exactly and other stories, Random House, 2002
A Personal Anthology 