An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

The ticking of a watch, slowed and swollen until each stroke rings like a hammer on an anvil: that is the sound a condemned man hears on a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, a noose at his throat and the water of Owl Creek waiting below. Peyton Farquhar is a planter who meant to burn that bridge for the Confederacy, and Ambrose Bierce, who had fought at Shiloh, hands him the cruellest gift in American fiction when he lets the rope break. What follows is a flight so sensuous it almost hurts: every dewdrop on a blade of grass, the grey eye of a marksman sighting down his rifle, pebbles on the riverbed glittering like jewels, a forest road running on toward home and a woman waiting at the gate. Bierce writes the body's hunger to live with such feverish precision that you run beside Farquhar, believing every step. Then the stars fall into strange constellations, and the road goes on too long. Read it in one sitting, and feel how much a second on that bridge can hold.