“They are beautiful and composed, like a house where no one lives, but which a staff cleans daily.”
– Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone
The Simile Museum
Tag: Fiction
May 13, 2023
“Maria sits on the pallet, hands in her lap like broken sparrows.”
-Anthony Doerr
April 2, 2023
“And here, the baptismal gowns of lost children, like limp little ghosts.”
-Kirstin Valdez Quade
March 18, 2023
“I drove home, weeping out of helplessness. My hands were shaking, and now I knew this would end badly. With a sigh of relief, the Samurai stopped outside the house, as if it were on my side in everything, I pressed my face against the steering wheel. The horn responded sadly, like a summons. Like a cry of mourning.”
-Olga Tokarczuk
February 12, 2023
“She looked to be in her midthirties, about fifteen or so years behind him, and rather tall, with long straight hair parted to the right and rounded eyes like the portholes on a ship.”
-Pitchaya Sudbanthad
January 27, 2023
“What mattered was the breeze. The mournful sigh of the Atlantic washing over her, only ever heard in branch rattle and casuarina shivers. And she could hear them. Each green strand swept up in 1,000 breaths of wind and all its loosest fruit dropping from the sky like an emptied nest of sea urchins. She was careful never to walk barefoot under casuarina trees. The unwary shock of their fruit under heel could feel like glass thrust into bone … like lionfish barbs … the thorns of a blowfish … stepping on the fangs of a reef — the wind! Remember the wind! She can’t afford to drown herself in similes.”
-Ada M. Patterson
January 14, 2023
“Suddenly Wally stooped, reached down, and heaved Sir Arthur out in a fireman’s lift. He flung him over his shoulder like an old bag of oats.”
-Samuel Steward
January 5, 2023
“She, Laura, likes to imagine (it’s one of her most closely held secrets) that she has a touch of brilliance herself, just a hint of it, though she knows most people probably walk around with similar hopeful suspicions curled up like tiny fists inside them, never divulged.”
-Michael Cunningham
December 19, 2022
“She helped her friend Timo gut his house, ripping pipes and wires out of the walls, like popping the bones out of a corpse. They’d pried out windows like scooping eyeballs, leaving the house staring blindly across the street at equally eyeless homes, and she’d written up the experience — a family home of three generations made valueless because the suburb’s water had gone dry and Phoenix wouldn’t allow a hookup.”
-Paolo Bacigalupi
October 27, 2022
“I looked down the length of the Vine. It was a long, narrow place, like a train car that wasn’t going anywhere.”
-Denis Johnson
The Simile Museum 