“Now I heard a funny noise, like water squeaking at high pressures from the insides of a cat.”
– Rajesh Parameswaran
The Simile Museum
Tag: Fiction
October 22, 2015
“Nothing seemed to belong to them organically, to be stamped with their own identity, but no one seemed to expect that. Even the painters and writers wore disguises which outdid Venetian masked balls. The beards of men shipwrecked for years on desert islands, the unmatched clothes from thrift shops, the girls with hair uncombed, and black cotton stockings, and eyes painted a tubercular violet. In this costume they meant to convey a break with conventions, with the stylish mannequins in Beverly Hills shop windows, but it created the impression of merely another uniform, which they bore self-consciously, and it did not portray freedom, nonchalance. They wore them stiffly, as if on display, like extras for a Bohemian scene, proclaiming: Look at me.”
– Anaïs Nin
September 13, 2015
“Later, when I got home, I went into the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror for a while. It was the same mirror Katie and I used to stare at in the pitch black while chanting ‘Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary’ over and over until we hallucinated the beheaded head of Mary Queen of Scots emerging in reflection, dripping like a porterhouse steak.”
-Stacey Richter
May 12, 2015
“The back porch was bathed in moonlight, and the shadow, crisp as toast, moved across the porch towards Jem.”
-Harper Lee
April 22, 2015
“The mist has flopped over onto the embankment like a sailing ship.”
-Michael Ondaatje
April 17, 2015
“None of them could bear to imagine that child, their own flesh and blood, raised by birds, essentially a bird slowly converted to human by lab scientists. He appeared in the prayers of this scattered cult once in a while, but even then they, with their own troubles, eventually let the horror of him fade, like an old bad dream.”
-Porochista Khakpour
April 6, 2015
“The Bulge, for example, was not a place, but a description: it is the description of the line of battle–the MLR, or Main Line of Resistance. Eventually, everything comes down to geometry, to volume and to mass. First there was a line, then there was an attack, and the line bulged, like my wife’s belly while she was carrying our son. A sleek and tender curve, gravid with hope and risk.”
-T.M. McNally
March 19, 2015
“The citronade of the pale morning sun shimmered like a multitude of violins…”
-Angela Carter
March 13, 2015
“Peter was not quite like other boys; but he was afraid at last. A tremour ran through him, like a shudder passing over the sea; but on the sea one shudder follows another till there are hundreds of them, and Peter felt just the one.”
-James Matthew Barrie
The Simile Museum 