The violence of breaking down the door seemed to fill this room with pervading dust.
A thin, acrid pall as of the tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon this room decked and furnished as for a bridal: upon the valance curtains of faded rose colour. Upon the rose-shaded lights, upon the dressing table. Upon the delicate array of crystal and the man's toilet things backed with tarnished silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured. Among them lay collar and tie, as if they had just been removed, which, lifted, left upon the surface a pale crescent in the dust. Upon a chair hung the suit, carefully folded; beneath it the two mute shoes and the discarded socks.

The man himself lay in the bed.

For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust.

Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-grey hair. ("A Rose for Emily")

Basic set up:

This is the end of Faulkner's famous story. A bunch of townspeople go into Ms. Emily's house after her death, only to find (gasp!) the corpse of the fiancé who had jilted her years before.

Talk about grotesque. What's so shocking about the end of this story isn't that there's a corpse there, or what's left of a corpse—though that's quite a shocker in and of itself.

What's truly grotesque is that Ms. Emily has been sleeping with this dead guy in her bed for decades. She killed him because she couldn't let him go. And then she just… shared the same bed with him, even as he rotted away. That's nasty, Ms. Emily. That's just plain nasty.

Look at how the sense of grotesque is heightened through detail in this passage. The collar and tie, "lifted, left upon the surface a pale crescent in the dust." Or how about the "two mute shoes and the discarded socks"—can't you just picture that?

Some of the most powerful details of all come toward the end of the passage: "One of us lifted something from [the pillow], and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-grey hair."

Now, it's true that the narrator never straight up tells us that Ms. Emily has slept in the same bed as the corpse for years, but just by giving us that detail about the "long strand" of hair, we understand immediately. And we're totally grossed out.