Karen looks at the bicycle, at its glinting spokes and chains and its two black wheels, and knows that her mother is dead. Her mother did not die for another three weeks, but it was the same thing, because sometimes (thinks Charis) there is a fold in time, like the way you fold the top bedsheet down to make a border, and if you stick a pin through at any spot, then the two pinholes are aligned, and that’s the way it is when you foresee the future. There’s nothing mysterious about it, any more than there is with a backwash in a lake or with harmony in music, two melodies going on at the same time. Memory is the same overlap, the same kind of pleat, only backwards. Or maybe the fold is not in time itself but in the mind of the person watching.

Excerpt From Atwood, Margaret. “The Robber Bride.”