“He looked awful, as moist and pale as certain veined cheeses.”
-Sam Lipsyte, “Final Boy”
The Simile Museum
Tag: Short Story
July 15, 2025
“Overcoming the reticence at the heart of her shyness was like scaling a cliff only to discover another view of the real summit farther off.”
-Jim Shepard, “The Queen of Bad Influences”
January 27, 2024
“He closed his eyes. His head felt refreshed from the freezer still, his thoughts moving in an orderly fashion, like children in a snaking line, holding hands and following their teacher out of a building where some dangerous event was commencing. Like little children, his thoughts, innocent, trusting, and afraid. But who was this teacher? She was new to him. He was a transfer. This was his first day.”
-Joy Williams, “The Beach House”
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
August 11, 2022
“But I couldn’t hear what he was saying, and I still couldn’t make out the words when smoke rose around him and he stood holding a giant seashell the size of a baseball glove filled with tobacco and this long, thick, bushy thing I’d later learn was sage that burned and smelled calm, like salt water.”
-Morgan Talty
July 31, 2022
“The rain lightened, and then turned to gravelly pellets of ice. It began to patter his windshield like the taps of someone trying to get his attention.”
-Rachel Kushner
July 6, 2022
“Hazel’s mom has a cloud of pale hair that she burns dry every morning. Whenever Hazel meets her focus, her frown springs into a grin. The grin is toothy and tight, like a sad shark that smiles only because of its anatomy.”
-Lydia Conklin
June 8, 2022
“When I woke, my joints had tightened like screws.”
-Tessa Yang
January 31, 2022
“Uncle Sean was as blandly ugly as a big toenail.”
-Karen Russell
November 2, 2021
“Over time, many small infatuations rippled the surface of her mind, like the spring breeze that makes new leaves tremble without changing their life’s course.”
-Tove Ditlevsen
The Simile Museum 