All the Names They Used for God

by Anjali Sachdeva

Sadie had often wished she looked like everyone else, but after she met Zachary she stopped wishing it. He drank her in with his eyes as though the very sight of her were delightful.

She peers into windows and watches the inhabitants of the poorer quarters, their cold, cramped lives. Some are happy, even in their squalor, but so many are sick and weary. And everywhere she sees dirt, filth, such a quantity of ugliness that she cannot find a reason for. She used to know how to accept such things as wisdom, but she has grown weary, too, that dirt has found its way into her somehow. Unspoken blasphemies poke against her insides like shards of stone.

“Still nothing for me?” the angel asks. John looks especially tired today, but she can summon nothing more than irritation for his frailty. “What can I say, He will not be pleased.” “I need more time.” “You all say that. It is like one unending echo down here.” “I don’t even know where to start.” “Start with yourself,” she says. “That works for most of you.”

The man working the counter is wearing a black suit and a crisp white shirt and has the haughtiness so common among people who serve the rich for a living, as if they are superior just from being near other people’s money.

When these things have never happened to you, you think, I would rather die. But the truth is that it is not so easy to decide to die. And when, suddenly, you have the option to live again, that is not so easy either.