An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce (San Francisco Examiner, July 13, 1890) is a story that is presumably familiar to American readers (British ones less so, perhaps), and the only reason I read it was because of a mention in relation to Gene Wolfe’s The Ziggurat (there is more on this below1).
Bierce’s tale takes place during the American Civil War and is set on a bridge across a river. There, a southerner called Peyton Fahrquhar is about to be hanged by Union troops.
After the preparations are complete he is left standing on a plank held in place by the weight of the sergeant on the other end; when the latter steps away, Fahrquhar will fall between the cross ties of the bridge to his death:
His face had not been covered nor his eyes bandaged. He looked a moment at his “unsteadfast footing,” then let his gaze wander to the swirling water of the stream racing madly beneath his feet. A piece of dancing driftwood caught his attention and his eyes followed it down the current. How slowly it appeared to move! What a sluggish stream!
He closed his eyes in order to fix his last thoughts upon his wife and children. The water, touched to gold by the early sun, the brooding mists under the banks at some distance down the stream, the fort, the soldiers, the piece of drift—all had distracted him. And now he became conscious of a new disturbance.
Striking through the thought of his dear ones was a sound which he could neither ignore nor understand, a sharp, distinct, metallic percussion like the stroke of a blacksmith’s hammer upon the anvil; it had the same ringing quality. He wondered what it was, and whether immeasurably distant or near by—it seemed both. Its recurrence was regular, but as slow as the tolling of a death knell. He awaited each new stroke with impatience and—he knew not why—apprehension. The intervals of silence grew progressively longer; the delays became maddening. With their greater infrequency the sounds increased in strength and sharpness. They hurt his ear like the trust of a knife; he feared he would shriek. What he heard was the ticking of his watch.
I like that comparison between the ticking of a watch and the tolling of a death knell.
Fahrquhar then thinks about how, if his hands were free, he could remove the noose and dive into the river, and escape back through the front line to his family. But then the sergeant steps off the plank, and Fahrquhar starts the long drop.
The second chapter is a brief passage which shows how Fahrquhar came to be in this situation, which was by making the mistake of suggesting sabotage to a passing horseman (who turns out to be a Union scout).
The third chapter sees Fahrquhar fall to what should be his death but ends up with him partially strangled in the water below. The rope has apparently broken, and the exciting narrative that follows tells of how he manages to release his hands and swim away from the Union troops (and the resultant rifle and cannon fire). Eventually, he manages to get far enough downstream that he is out of immediate danger, and pulls himself onshore and begins to make his way through the forest to his home.
Then (spoiler), when he arrives at his house the next morning, he sees his wife standing at the bottom of the steps waiting to greet him; he reaches for her but then feels a “stunning blow upon the back of his neck.” The rope did not break, and his escape was a momentary fantasy.
I liked the evocative description in this piece and, even if the twist-ending of the story is a variant of the “and then I woke up and found it was all a dream” sub-genre, I thought it pretty good. At a stretch you could probably call this a fantasy story.
***+ (Good to very good). 3,750 words.
1. The reason I read this is because it was mentioned in an essay by Marc Aramini on Gene Wolfe’s The Ziggurat. Aramini states, “If we accept that Wolfe might occasionally present delusion as objective narrative fact (as Ambrose Bierce does when detailing his main character’s dying fantasy in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”), then some aspects of “The Ziggurat” become easier to contextualize.”
I wanted to get a better idea of what he meant and, having now read the story, I’d say that Bierce’s use of this narrative device is transparent; Wolfe’s, not so much, if at all.