Foreshadowing in Short Stories
Browse our curated collection of short stories featuring foreshadowing with literary analysis and discussion guides.
The Gift of the Magi
Della and Jim are a young married couple too poor to buy Christmas gifts. Della sells her beautiful long hair to buy a platinum watch chain for Jim. Jim, meanwhile, sells his treasured pocket watch to buy decorative combs for Della's hair. Each sacrifices their most prized possession for the other, only to find their gifts are now useless - yet their love is the true gift.
The Necklace
Mathilde Loisel, a middle-class woman who dreams of wealth and luxury, borrows a diamond necklace from a wealthy friend for an elegant ball. She loses the necklace and, rather than confessing, she and her husband secretly replace it with an identical one, going deeply into debt. After ten years of grueling labor to repay the debt, Mathilde encounters her friend who reveals the original necklace was paste - worth almost nothing.
The Open Window
Framton Nuttel, a nervous man seeking a rest cure in the countryside, visits the Sappleton household with a letter of introduction. While waiting for Mrs. Sappleton, he is entertained by her fifteen-year-old niece Vera, who tells him a tragic tale about Mrs. Sappleton's husband and brothers who went hunting three years ago and never returned - their bodies never found. She claims Mrs. Sappleton keeps the window open in hope of their return. When Mrs. Sappleton arrives and mentions her husband will be back from shooting soon, Nuttel is horrified. When three figures approach across the lawn carrying guns, he flees in terror. Vera calmly explains his departure with yet another invented story.
The Cask of Amontillado
Montresor, nursing a grudge over an unspecified insult, lures his acquaintance Fortunato deep into underground catacombs during carnival season under the pretense of evaluating a rare cask of Amontillado sherry. Exploiting Fortunato's pride as a wine connoisseur and his drunken state, Montresor chains him inside a narrow recess and methodically walls him in with stone and mortar, entombing him alive. Fifty years later, Montresor recounts the crime, and the remains have never been found.
The Monkey's Paw
Mr. and Mrs. White acquire a magical monkey's paw from Sergeant-Major Morris, who warns them that its wishes come with devastating consequences. Their first wish for two hundred pounds is fulfilled when their son Herbert is killed in a factory accident and the company pays that exact sum in compensation. Grief-stricken, Mrs. White insists on using the second wish to bring Herbert back. When a terrible knocking begins at the door, Mr. White realizes what horrors may await and uses the third wish to undo the second before his wife can open the door.
To Build a Fire
A newcomer to the Yukon sets out alone on a brutally cold day despite warnings from an experienced old-timer. Accompanied only by a husky dog whose instincts sense the danger the man ignores, he presses forward through seventy-five-below temperatures. When he breaks through hidden ice and soaks his feet, his attempts to build a life-saving fire fail — first smothered by snow from a tree, then lost when his frozen hands drop the last matches. Unable to run to safety, the man succumbs to the cold, while the dog, guided by instinct rather than arrogance, trots on toward camp and warmth.
Désirée's Baby
Désirée, a foundling of unknown parentage raised by the Valmondés, marries the proud Louisiana planter Armand Aubigny, who loves her despite her obscure origins. Months after their son is born, Armand grows cold; Désirée realizes with horror that the child's skin reveals mixed race. Armand blames and rejects her, and she walks with the baby into the bayou, never to return. Burning her letters afterward, Armand finds among his own mother's papers a note revealing that it was his mother - not Désirée - who belonged to 'the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery.'
Young Goodman Brown
In Puritan Salem, Goodman Brown leaves his young wife, Faith, at nightfall to keep a mysterious appointment in the forest. There a devilish traveler leads him toward a witches' sabbath, where he is horrified to see the pious figures of his community - his minister, the catechism teacher, and finally Faith herself - gathered to be received into the devil's communion. Whether he dreams it or not, Brown returns to the village a changed man: he can no longer trust in anyone's goodness, and he lives out his days in gloom and suspicion.
The Last Leaf
In Greenwich Village, a young painter named Johnsy lies gravely ill with pneumonia and decides she will die when the last leaf falls from the ivy vine outside her window. Her friend Sue and their gruff old neighbor Behrman, a failed painter forever talking of the masterpiece he will someday paint, try to lift her spirits. Through a night of freezing storm one last leaf clings impossibly to the vine, and Johnsy, shamed by its persistence, resolves to live. Only afterward do they learn that Behrman went out in the storm to paint that leaf on the wall - his masterpiece - and caught the pneumonia that killed him.
The Boarded Window
On the frontier near early Cincinnati, a hermit named Murlock lives in a cabin with one permanently boarded window. Years before, his young wife fell ill with fever and, when she stopped breathing, he believed her dead and numbly prepared her body for burial. Sitting his vigil beside her in the dark, he dozed, then woke to a scream and the sound of a heavy body dragging his wife's corpse. He fired his rifle blindly into the black room. In the morning he found the body moved and torn - and clenched between his wife's teeth a fragment of a panther's ear: she had not been dead, but had revived in terror during the animal's attack.
Sredni Vashtar
Conradin, a sickly ten-year-old, lives under the joyless authority of his guardian and cousin, Mrs. De Ropp, whom he quietly hates. In a disused shed he keeps two secrets: a hen and a polecat-ferret he has made into a private, vengeful god named Sredni Vashtar, to whom he offers ritual worship. When 'the Woman' notices his visits and goes to the shed to clear it out, Conradin watches from the house and prays his terrible prayer. She does not come back; at last the ferret emerges with dark stains at its jaws and throat. As the household discovers her mauled body, Conradin calmly makes himself another piece of toast.
The Cop and the Anthem
With winter closing in, Soapy, a homeless man in New York, hatches his annual plan: to get himself arrested so he can spend three warm, fed months in the Blackwell's Island jail. He tries again and again to be caught - dining without paying, smashing a shop window, harassing a woman, stealing an umbrella, disturbing the peace - but every scheme comically fails to interest the police. Defeated, he pauses outside a church where an organ anthem stirs a sudden resolve to reform his life and find honest work. At that very moment a policeman arrests him for loitering, and the magistrate sentences him to exactly the three months on the Island he had wanted all along.
A Piece of String
On market-day in a Norman town, the thrifty peasant Maitre Hauchecorne stoops to pick up a bit of string from the road - and, spotting his enemy the harness-maker Malandain watching, hides it out of embarrassment. When a lost wallet is announced, Malandain reports that he saw Hauchecorne pick something up, and the old man is accused of the theft. Though the wallet is soon found and returned by someone else, no one will believe Hauchecorne's story: they decide he had an accomplice. He wastes away obsessively repeating his innocence to anyone who will listen, and dies still protesting, his last words about a little piece of string.
The Interlopers
Ulrich von Gradwitz and Georg Znaeym are lifelong enemies, their families locked for generations in a bitter feud over a strip of forest. On a stormy night each patrols the woods hoping to catch and kill the other. They meet face to face - but before either can fire, a great beech tree crashes down and pins them both to the ground, side by side and helpless. Trapped together through the cold night, the two men slowly soften, forgive, and swear to end the feud and become friends. They shout together for help, and at last figures come running through the trees toward them. Ulrich looks, and names what is really approaching: wolves.
A White Heron
Sylvia, a shy nine-year-old who has blossomed since leaving the crowded town to live with her grandmother in the Maine woods, meets a friendly young ornithologist. He is hunting a rare white heron and offers ten dollars - a fortune to them - to anyone who will show him its hidden nest. Drawn to the young man and tempted by the money, Sylvia rises before dawn and climbs a towering pine, from whose top she at last sees the heron rise from its nest by the sea. But when the moment comes to tell, she cannot betray the bird. She keeps silent, choosing the wild creature and the woods over money and the stranger's approval.
God Sees the Truth, But Waits
The young merchant Aksionov is wrongly convicted of a murder and robbery committed by another man and is sent to hard labor in Siberia, where he spends twenty-six years growing quiet, prayerful, and respected. One day a new convict, Makar Semyonich, arrives - and Aksionov slowly realizes that this is the very man whose crime destroyed his life. When Aksionov discovers Makar secretly digging an escape tunnel, the guards question him, but he refuses to betray the man who ruined him. Shaken by such mercy, Makar confesses the old murder in the night and begs forgiveness. Aksionov forgives him and feels his heart grow light - and when at last an order for his release arrives, he has already died.