Imagery in Short Stories
Browse our curated collection of short stories featuring imagery with literary analysis and discussion guides.
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.
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Peyton Farquhar, a Confederate sympathizer, stands on the Owl Creek bridge about to be hanged by Union soldiers. A flashback reveals he was tricked by a disguised Federal scout into attempting to burn the bridge. At the moment of execution, Farquhar appears to escape: the rope breaks, he plunges into the creek, evades gunfire, and treks through the wilderness toward home. Just as he reaches his wife, the narrative reveals the entire escape was a dying hallucination — Farquhar hangs dead from the bridge, his neck broken.
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.
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
The narrator visits a mining camp to ask about a man named Smiley and is cornered by Simon Wheeler, who launches into a long, winding tale about Jim Smiley — a compulsive gambler who trained a frog named Dan'l Webster to out-jump any competitor. When a cunning stranger fills the frog with quail shot, Smiley loses his prized bet, and the narrator barely escapes Wheeler's endless storytelling.
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.
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.
The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky
Marshal Jack Potter of Yellow Sky, Texas, rides home on the train with his new bride, sheepish and anxious about how the town will take a marriage he told no one about. Meanwhile, back in Yellow Sky, the drunken gunfighter Scratchy Wilson goes on a rampage, shooting up the empty streets and hunting his old adversary Potter for a fight. The two men come face to face outside Potter's house - Scratchy armed and spoiling for a duel, Potter unarmed and standing beside his wife. When Potter explains that he is married, Scratchy is utterly disarmed: marriage is outside the code of the Old West he lives by. He lowers his gun and walks away, and an era ends without a shot.