Time by Dress Size

"When we next saw Miss Emily, she had grown fat and her hair was turning gray. During the next few years it grew grayer and grayer until it attained an even pepper and salt iron gray, when it ceased turning. Up to the day of her death at seventy-four it was still that vigorous iron gray like the hair of an active man" -pg 288

First off, A Rose for Emily is a weird, twisted, and creeptastic short story. Miss Emily is a woman who suffers great loses in life with the death of her father, then the almost-desertion of her love. Being a recluse and a lunatic, Emily did the only thing that made sense: she killed her lover and kept him in her bedroom so she could lie down next to him and pretend that she had him in life as well as death. Since the story is fairly straightforward, one might think that this ending is not spooky because it is so predictable. However, the climax of the plot where the contents of Miss Emily's house is revealed is not expected the story is not organized like most stories. Emily's life is revealed not in dates, but in by years relative to events. Everything is described as "five years since her father's death" or "twenty years since she had left the house" or "six years before the smell". And since the story isn't in exactly chronological order, this can get quite confusing. What helps the reader not only mark the passage and specific points of time, but also how Miss Emily is doing at that particular time, is the physical description of Emily herself.

When we first meet her, she is skinny and attractive. As the story moves on, she is either varying degrees of fat or skinny, depending on how old she is. Since the author almost always not the size of Miss Emily during specific events in the plot, her dress size can be a more helpful way to mark the passage of time, than time itself. The older, fatter, and more senile Emily gets, the closer the gruesome climax is.