“His presence is like an alarm clock that never stops ringing.”
-Nell Zink
The Simile Museum
Tag: Fiction
December 16, 2017
“The house felt almost as much like a ship as a house. Placed there to ride out storms, it was built into the island as though it were part of it; but you saw the sea from all the windows and there was good cross ventilation so that you slept cool on the hottest nights. The house was painted white to be cool in the summer and it could be seen from a long way out in the Gulf Stream.”
-Ernest Hemingway
October 23, 2017
“This too wild and fast to be love. But it is. Like in the movies, only for real. These things happen, I telling you. Not always with songs playing, except for the one singing in your own skin. People can need each other like water. It can be wonderful.
Waiting in the dark apartment, Eeona voice slice like a machete. ‘You are late, Mrs. Smalls.’ But I ain Mrs. Smalls no more.”
-Tiphanie Yanique
October 9, 2017
“Below, Saul busied himself with the grounds and organizing the toolshed, which had become a mess. More than one hiker wandering through had seemed surprised to find a lighthouse keeper walking the grounds around the tower as if he were a hermit crab without its shell, but in fact there was a lot of maintenance required due to the way storms and salt air could wear down everything if he wasn’t vigilant. In the summer it was harder with the heat and the biting flies.”
-Jeff VanderMeer
August 21, 2017
“When he speaks to her he imagines quite clearly the life they would have had, the life they would be sharing now. It is like walking past a house you used to live in: the fact that it still exists, so concrete, makes everything that has happened since seem somehow insubstantial. Without structure, events are unreal: the reality of his wife, like the reality of the house, was structural, determinative.”
– Rachel Cusk
August 15, 2017
“L’Ouverture became like a ghost haunting my every waking thought. I took a nap upon coming home from the barbershop, and he even entered my dreams. In my nightmare he was a barber mangling my head.”
– Rion Amilar Scott
August 9, 2017
“Working alone over Thanksgiving break, it seemed to Roman that he heard a man and a woman speaking in his mind. Listening to them felt intimate and strange, like eavesdropping on conversation between a couple lying in the dark.”
-Lan Samantha Chang
July 29, 2017
“At sundown they camped at the base of a mesa that rose from the earth like a fist looking out over the plains that glowed golden as the sun disappeared beyond the Organs.”
-Robert James Russell
July 23, 2017
“Men rode the Tallapoosa River almost three hundred miles from Georgia to Alabama. Then just above the the Tallassee, thirty miles upriver, they built a dam in Montgomery. They come for the water’s strength–the waterfalls. They could power a mill with ’em, wet a town. They carved up Tallassee like cuts of meat. Sold her with the promise she was theirs.”
-Natashia Deón
July 9, 2017
“This was the process by which two lives were disentangled, eventually the dread and discomfort would fade and be replaced by unbroken indifference, I would see him on the street by chance, and it would be like seeing an old photograph of yourself: you recognize this image but are unable to remember quite what it was to be that person.”
-Katie Kitamura
The Simile Museum 