metaphor

In the last week I felt her withdrawing. What was once everywhere, an ocean I imagined myself to be drowning in, was now barely deep enough to bathe in. I saw her warmth draining away and I couldn't stop it.

Sand was dribbling out of the bag of her attention, faster and faster.

Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue

I saw a doctor. I went in case there were any remnants of the summer inside me__ticky, slender fish bones that needed to be scraped into the bin. He was dismissive of my concerns and said my body would have let me know by now. Did I have what was known as female intuition? I said I'd had my feminine intuition somewhat scrambled in the past.

He was a priest now, pagan, half-naked in the night, performing obscure rites of interment. Or he was the lead player in his own novel, or in one of those new arcade games William loved, compelled to repeat some totemic motion until he got it right. Only once did he feel, as he had on New Year's Eve, that someone was standing among the trees, watching. Well, let him watch, damn it. Something was being enacted here, as if it had been this deeper mission calling Mercer home all along. And now that he'd completed it, maybe he would be allowed to advance through to the next level, to a world where no one got shot.

It doesn't seem to matter what we think...The prince will come up here and look at us as if we're barrels in a trader's wagon. And if I'm salt pork and he doesn't care for salt pork, then there's nothing I can do.

Only with a leafcan I talk of the forest,

A river of images and thoughts and feelings, dirtied and polluted so that no one could drink from it without gagging.

Despite which, Charlie seems doomed to stumble around in the dark, clutching pieces of a puzzle he still can't see.

... we [can] catch fish and just throw them back... it [doesn't] seem to hurt the fish much past a cut lip. But then... one [may] swallow the hook...[it'd be] a goner, whether we tried to pull it out or just cut the line. Because once you've swallowed the hook, there's no losing it. Me, I've swallowed it big time.

In the morning, when she walked to the consulate, carefully watching her sandals on the pavement, she glanced up and saw a Negro wearing a stack of panama hats. Maybe twelve. She never forgot the bandoeon of brims, the perfect stutter of hat.

Mori looked across and was, briefly, a languageless, inhuman thing rescued from the sea and asked for an impious favour.

But metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me.

What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!

I know the expression love bloomed is metaphorical, but in my heart in this moment, there is one badass flower, captured in time-lapse photography, going from bud to wild radiant blossom in ten seconds flat.

I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I'm drowning in ellipses.

This morning, I see the lead in my glass tumbler. A slim, bright glint, a silverfish. I feel it collecting in my blood, papercutting the lining of my veins.

It would not be fair to say that the fire stole my faith, since in truth it has been slipping away from me all my life, flipping between my fingers like a shiny little minnow--such a far cry from the trophy salmon that dangled from my father's fist.