"But the letters ended, finite as a book or a life" (Animal 300).
"The flowers were beaten down, their bent-over heads bejeweled with diamond droplets like earrings
on sad, rich widows" (Animal 272)."In the past, the two-week delay of her letters had caused me to keep a distrustful eye on Hallie, like a star so many light years away it could have exploded long ago while we still watched its false shine" (Animal 270).
"I walked downtown among strangers, smiling, anonymous as a goldfish" (Animal 200).
"My life is a pitiful, mechanical thing without a past, like a little wind-up car, ready to run in any direction somebody points me" (Animal 199).
"Bugs swirled in the headlights like planets cut loose from their orbits, doomed to chaos" (Animal 191).
"He looked at me, his eyes searching back and forth between my two pupils as if he were trying to decide which door concealed the prize" (Animal 183).
"Leaves and aborted fruits fell in thick, brittle handfuls like the hair of a cancer patient" (Animal 173).
"The picture slowly gives up its soul to him as it lies in the pan, like someone drowned at the bottom of the pool" (Animal 142).
"I kept turning my mind away from the one thought that kept coming back to me, persistent as an unwanted lover's hand, that I'd saved a life" (Animal 117).
"I know that a woman's ambitions aren't supposed to fall and rise and veer off course this way, like some poor bird caught in a storm" (Animal 107).
"The end was always curled up between us, like a sleeping cat, present even in our love-making" (Animal 105).
"Her eyes were pale as marbles" (Animal 105).
"Kissing Loyd was delicious, like some drug I wanted more of in spite of the Surgeon General's warning" (Animal 105).
"His family is a web of women dead and alive, with himself at the center like a spider, driven by different instincts. He lies mute, hearing only in the tactile way that a spider hears, touching the threads of the web with long extended fingertips and listening. Listening for trapped life" (Animal 98).
"The mother had been tortured and her eyes offered out that flatness, like a zoo animal" (Animal 93).
"I went home to read it, like a rat scurrying back to its hole with some edible prize" (Animal 86).
"Slowly it grew to a force as strong and untouchable as thunder" (51).
"Hallie thrived anyway--the blossom of our family, like the one of those miraculous fruit trees that taps into an invisible vein of nurture and bears radiant bushels of plums while the trees around it merely go on living" (Animal 49).
"I
stood still for a minute, giving Hallie's and my thoughts their last chance to run quietly over the wires, touching each other in secret signal as they passed, like a column of ants" (Animal 34)."I could see just how we'd look to somebody, hanging on to each other by the elbows: like two swimmers in trouble, both of us equally likely to drown" (Animal 31).
"His brain gets jostled and things move around inside his head like olives in a jar of brine" (Animal 20).
"Acacias lean into the river with their branches waving wildly in the current, like mothers reaching in for lost babies" (Animal 19).
"I tended to drift, like a well-meaning visitor to this planet awaiting instructions" (Animal 10).
"Hallie and I were so attached, like keenly mismatched Siamese twins conjoined at the back of the mind. We parted again and again and still each time it felt like a medical risk, as if we
were being liberated at some terrible cost: the price of a shared organ. We never stopped feeling that knife” (Animal 8).“His two girls are curled together like animals whose habit is to sleep underground, in the smallest space possible” (Animal 3)
~Father Nature, Editor
Those are some nice ones. I especially like,
ReplyDelete"His brain gets jostled and things move around inside his head like olives in a jar of brine" (Animal 20).
and
"Leaves and aborted fruits fell in thick, brittle handfuls like the hair of a cancer patient" (Animal 173).