Memory, the passage of time, and the inextricable hold that the past has on the present are all essential elements of narrative art. Fiction, unlike other artistic media, can seamlessly manipulate time—whether keeping the reader firmly in the grasp of the present, enfolding different time periods into one scene, or leaping forward twenty years with a single paragraph break. These stories demonstrate how language can transport us through time. As always, all are free to download.
A woman meets her ex-husband on the steps of a library and remembers the life she shared with him. Paley turns a single scene into a container for decades of regret and tenderness, her sentences conveying the breathless passage of years: “First, my father was sick that Friday, then the children were born, then I had those Tuesday-night meetings, then the war began.”
“What Do You Want to Know For?” by Alice Munro
The Nobel Prize winner is famous for her obsession with the past and how it shapes us. In Munro’s story, a woman, who discovers a lump in her breast, avoids her health anxieties by fixating on a crypt in the countryside and learning about the history of southern Ontario. Her own mortality seems insignificant against the languorous pace of geologic time. Look for Munro’s use of section breaks to move the reader seamlessly forward in time—skipping ten days, two weeks, a year.
“The World by Night” by Anjali Sachdeva
Anjali Sachdeva’s story opens with sixteen-year-old Sadie helping the gravedigger bury her parents. The story then jumps forward to Sadie at twenty, married, but with her husband gone indefinitely on a long trip. Missing her husband, she becomes obsessed with exploring a cave on the outskirts of her homestead. The story’s shifts in time are seamless and elegant, and the central image of the cave becomes a haunting metaphor for grief.
“First Day” by Edward P. Jones
We meet Daisy on her first day of school. Here, instead of folding one moment into the next, Jones gives us the slow, sensuous experience of a day that becomes forever preserved in a child’s memory—her mother plaiting her hair extra carefully, the smell of her new pencils, and the click of her mother’s shoes as she leaves Daisy at school. When Daisy encounters disappointments she can’t yet comprehend, we know her adult self will one day grasp their significance.
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“Miss Smith” by William Trevor
William Trevor’s short story recounts the course of a strange relationship—between a bully and her victim, a teacher named Miss Smith and her student, James. James is obsessed: why is Miss Smith so intent on mocking him at every turn, even after she retires from teaching to marry and have a child? The third-person narration gives us the answer, tied as it is to our fears about enduring the passage of time: “Miss Smith recognised in [her son] some trait she disliked and knew that she would be obliged to watch it develop, powerless to intervene.” In time, James gets his revenge.
In Kincaid’s surreal parable, a strange skeleton of a man named Ovando comes to the door, and the narrator allows him into her house. We feel immediate tension from his presence, and the narration repeatedly jumps forward in time, revealing the narrator’s regrets about having let this humanoid creature inside. Their relationship evolves over immense swaths of time—enough for Ovando to colonize the narrator’s world entirely. Of all the selected stories, “Ovando” is the strangest and most abstract in its manipulation of time.
