Mosquito Words (“Total Cave Darkness”)
“Words like irresponsible and thoughtless buzz around Martha’s head like mosquitoes.”
Martha has run away with Reverend Dave in a hastily considered plan to take a road trip across the country in an attempt to stop her drinking addiction. In this sentence, Martha is imagining what her mother and others are probably saying about her, and these labels pester her like irritatingly persistent mosquitoes, emphasizing both how frustrating the judgments are for her and their inability to stop her from doing it anyway.
The Vodka Baby (“Total Cave Darkness”)
“For Martha, her favorite part of the day was quarter of five, watching the clock make its slow movement toward her first vodka, filling the glass with ice, then tonic, holding the bottle of vodka in her arms like a baby.”
Martha is an alcoholic, and she really enjoys drinking alcohol. This simile, depicting her holding a bottle of vodka like a baby, accentuates how much she loves it: equating anything to a mother holding her baby implies an incredibly strong affection and devotion. Alcohol has essentially replaced a baby in Martha’s childless life.
Résumé Snow (“The Rightness of Things”)
“Her résumé flutters to the floor. Like snow, she thinks. Like fallout. Like the stuffing from that old sofa in Paris. Is it an omen?”
This sentence comes as Rachel is having sex with Harry in her kitchen, a hasty move considering her very short acquaintance with him. This simile, comparing the falling sheets of her resume to the whirling pieces of stuffing from the sofa in Paris from her time sleeping with her husband, draws a parallel between the two events, which could have both positive and negative implications: she really loved her husband and had fun with him, but the relationship ended quite badly, with him deserting her for another woman.
A Shadow Like a Bridge (“The Language of Sorrow”)
“Before Dora could think what to say, he was walking ahead of her, his shadow stretching between them like a bridge.”
There is a gap between Peter, a young, rebellious teenager, and Dora, his older grandmother. Peter dismisses his grandmother as just an old woman at first, and this simile emphasizes that fact. Dora, however, sees this as a gap to be crossed, and she does so by the end of the story. The simile turning Peter’s shadow into a bridge is a perfect image of this gap.
Words like Gunfire (“Joelle’s Mother”)
“They were the first words she’d spoken all day, and they flew out of her mouth like gunfire.”
Joelle has just told her three half-sisters to “Shut up!” after being hostilely silent all day as they badgered her to visit the beach with them, or even talk to them a little. This simile emphasizes Joelle’s intense dislike of these girls, as well as her harsh, judgmental, bellicose nature. Her words might as well have been gunfire to the girls, who idolized her and just wanted to have fun with her, as they were accustomed to having with their family.
