“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
“I feel an invisibility / like a neutron in a cloud chamber buried in a mile-long / accelerator, where what cannot / be seen is inferred by what the visible / does.”
-Sharon Olds
“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
“Her hands are neatly folded, like two birds, in the shallow dip of her lap.”
-Julie Otsuka
“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
“When I woke, my joints had tightened like screws.”
-Tessa Yang
“Patches of overgrown grass resembled a comb-over on the head of a bald person who didn’t want to see reality.”
-Elif Batuman
“He felt the mystery of his own unconscious like a whale looming invisibly beneath a tiny swimmer. If he couldn’t search or retrieve or view his own past, then it wasn’t his. It was lost.”
-Jennifer Egan
“She came into his eyes sudden and permanent as a photograph.”
-Tracy O’Neill
“I trailed spiderwebs like finish-line ribbons as I walked between saplings.”
-Molly Dektar
The Simile Museum 