Veins an atlas
The novella opens up with the description of light as a menacing force that grows mold inside the protagonist’s body. She describes not being able to find walls within her own home, and pausing in the light for hours, seeing her veins on her skin. “In the light my skin was see-through-my veins an atlas spanned in tissue.”
Sitting outside a burning building
In her description of the decaying world and expression of loneliness, the protagonist makes a metaphor of sitting outside a burning building to compare it to being impartial to other’s suffering. “[It’s impolite to sit outside a burning building…”
The spilled grief
The protagonist describes her mother’s last hours and her belief that they were protected from the “yawning”. Her mother believed that all her sacrifice, donations to unknown sources and grief she spilled into her father made them rich, rich in their “becoming”. The protagonist metaphorically reveals that her mother newly found excuses for all the grief she caused to her family, as a necessary sacrifice for salvation.
Squeeze our faces into one another
The section of the novella where the protagonist visually describes the mashing and merging of people with their limbs, faces and languages can be viewed as a metaphor of claustrophobia caused by the lack of personal space. “…squeeze our faces into one another-till we were housed all in the same…”
