“Then something inside me feels like dying. I turn my head and cough. Two teeth skip from my mouth and scatter across the deck like dice.”
-Ottessa Moshfegh
The Simile Museum
Tag: Fiction
October 27, 2023
“‘I sometimes wonder what I’d see if I could hold your heart in my hands,’ I told him. ‘I imagine it fitting perfectly in my palms, soft and slippery, like gelatin that hasn’t quite set. It might wobble at the slightest touch, but I sense I’d need to hold it carefully, so it wouldn’t slip through my fingers. I also imagine the warmth of the thing. It’s usually hidden deep inside, so it’s much warmer than the rest of me. I close my eyes and sink into that warmth, and when I do, the sensations of all the things that have disappeared come back to me. I can feel all the things you remember there in my hands. Doesn’t that sound marvelous?'”
-Yoko Ogawa
October 4, 2023
“I watch my reflection in the darkening gleam of the window pane. My reflection is tall, perhaps rather like an arrow, my blond hair gleams. My face is like a face you have seen many times. My ancestors conquered a continent, pushing across death-laden plains, until they came to an ocean which faced away from Europe into a darker past.”
-James Baldwin
August 28, 2023
“But the young woman hasn’t exactly entered, she’s drifted down like a dead leaf, and the lowest depth is behind the door that has Ladies on it, the large, tiled room, with four doors to the right and four doors to the left.”
-Jenny Erpenbeck
June 25, 2023
“The nuns working in the garden rise up like a family of pine martens to watch her drawing near.”
-Lauren Groff
May 22, 2023
“They are beautiful and composed, like a house where no one lives, but which a staff cleans daily.”
– Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone
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
The Simile Museum 