Scenes From The Life Of A Double Monster by Vladimir Nabokov, 1958
The magic trick:
Portraying a tragic fate by not isolating the tragic fate itself but instead highlighting the moment when that tragic fate was sealed
The notion of a double monster in the title makes this seem like a perfect choice for the SSMT October scary stories series. The double monster in question, though, is the victim here. The monster is the nasty, hateful, selfish nature of humanity.
The narrator – one of two conjoined twins, in case you were wondering – highlights one memory in particular that seems to have sealed his fate. He remembers every detail of the day 20 years prior when he and his brother nearly escaped but instead found a new and worse life.
And that’s quite a trick on Nabokov’s part.
The selection:
Twenty years have passed since that gray spring morning, but it is much better preserved in my mind than many a later event. Again and again I run it before my eyes like a strip of cinematic film, as I have seen great jugglers do when reviewing their acts. So I review all the stages and circumstances and incidental details of our abortive flight – the initial shiver, the gate, the lamb, the slippery slope under our clumsy feet.
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Short Story Magic Tricks 
Reading Nabakov is slaking your thirst with prose from mountain streams.