"The Near Departed" is a short short story, written by legendary horror and science-fiction writer Richard Matheson. The story is three pages long, and I found it collected along with perhaps his most famous work, "I Am Legend".
The story has two characters: a "plain looking man" who visits a mortician, and mournfully requests mortuary service for his wife, imploring for the best possible treatment, no expenses paid. The mortician agrees, the man walks out, and because this is a story by Richard Matheson, one of The Twilight Zone's most frequent writers, we get a twist at the end. Six words change the entire story.
I was of course waiting for a twist, but thought it would be a different one than what finally happened. But this story brings up a good question: just how short can horror be? Horror depends on setting up suspense, on giving a sense of the eerie or the unusual, and then delivering on that promise. This story does do that, through its
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