An ideal short story to me should definitely have a climax that leaves the reader with surprise or makes him think about it for a few minutes. A famous example would be O.Henry’s After Twenty Years.
I discovered this affinity during a class in which we were given a few words and asked to write a story which has all those words. I wrote a story about a small boy who longs for going to a school like his peers. The climax would shatter his expectations when his father takes him to a school not for studying but for constructing the building. I wanted to highlight on child labor in India with this small story. Another small story which I wrote focused on the impact IT/ITES has created on the low income group. Of course being an amateur, I published anonymously or never published them anywhere.
I still like this style of writing. I’ve not yet completed reading all the short stories in Neil Gaiman’s ‘Fragile Things‘. But I’ve developed a liking to his style. Making the reader guess someone is a ghost, the detective story, about dreams… More than all that I liked the way he ends “Time is fluid” and the shoe-box story. In my terms, it’s a circular linked list 
The end implies the entire story is going to happen all over again with someone else taking the narrator’s role and the narrator becomes another character in the story. A good before-sleep reading if you want lion, ghost, witch and blood in your dreams 
I would definitely want to read more of his books to read more of my ideal short stories? What is my ideal short story? An ideal short story to me should definitely…
