A Rose for Emily
William Faulkner
 The story opens with a brief first-person account of the funeral of Emily Grierson, an elderly Southern spinster. It then proceeds in a nonlinear fashion to the narrator's recollections of Emily's archaic and increasingly insane behavior throughout the years. Emily was a member of a family in the antebellum Southern aristocracy; after the Civil War, the family had fallen on hard times. She and her father, the last two of the clan, continued to live as if in the past; neither would consent to a marriage for Emily to a man below their perceived status. Her father died when Emily was about thirty; she refused to accept that he was dead for three days, behavior that was written off by the community as part of her grieving process. After her acceptance of her father's death, Emily revived somewhat; she became friendly with Homer Barron, a Northern laborer who came to the town as a contractor to pave the sidewalks. The connection surprised the rest of the community: the match would have been far below her earlier standards, and Homer had himself claimed that he was "not a marrying man." The town appealed to Emily's distant cousins; they were her closest remaining relatives, but they had been on bad terms with Emily and her father, and had not even been present at her father's funeral. The cousins arrived at Emily's house, but quickly gained a reputation even worse than that of Emily; the sentiment of the town rallied behind Emily in opposition to the cousins. Indeed, during this time, Emily bought arsenic from a shop without giving her reasons for needing it; neighbors believed that she meant to poison herself with it. However, her relationship with Homer appeared to solidify, and there was talk of marriage between the two. Homer left the area for a time, reputedly to give Emily a chance to get rid of her cousins, and returned three days after the cousins left; one person reported seeing Homer walk in the house at night, which was the last contact the neighborhood had with either of them for a long time. Despite these turnabouts in her social status, Emily continued to behave haughtily, as she had before her father died. Her reputation was such that the city council found themselves unable to confront her about a strong smell that had begun to emanate from the house. Instead, they decided to send men to her house under the cover of darkness to sprinkle lime around the house, after which the smell dissipated. The mayor of the town, Colonel Sartoris, made a gentleman's agreement to overlook her taxes as an act of charity, though it was done under a pretense of repayment towards her father to assuage Emily's pride. Years later, when the next generation came to power, Emily insisted on this informal arrangement, flatly refusing that she had owed any taxes; the council declined to press the issue. Emily had become a recluse: she was never seen out of the house, and only rarely accepted people into it; her black servant did all her shopping for her. The community came to view her as a "hereditary obligation" on the town, who must be humored and tolerated. The funeral was a large affair; Emily had become an institution, so her death sparked a great deal of curiosity about her reclusive nature and what remained of her house. After she was buried, a group of townsfolk entered her house to see what remained of her life there. The door to her upstairs bedroom was locked; some of the townsfolk kicked in the door to see what had been hidden for so long. Inside, among the possessions that Emily had bought for their wedding, lay the corpse of Homer Barron on the bed; on the pillow beside him was the indentation of a head, and a single thread of Emily's now-gray hair.