Unattached Metaphors
by Romie Stott
BOTTLE
Death in a green bottle.
BRAIN
For speed, electricity. For precision, chemicals. Complex patterns from simple switches. Electrical reflex kicks in before chemical emotion — the do before the thought. Actions a second in advance of their motive.
BURNING
Each idea would conflagrate the next. Left too long, too hot, his brain could run out of paper. But to exterminate the flame entirely would end thought. He often ran fevers. At other times, his head ached from the heaviness of ash.
CAT
The cat was perhaps a training program.
CIGARETTE
The teenage dream of flicking a cigarette at someone’s chest so hard they fall over from the force of it.
CLICHE
In this way, “know you from Adam” became “atom” – down to the molecule. “Come down off your pedestal” becomes “peddle stool,” a platform for selling. “Take it for granted” was granite, firm and unmovable.
HOMONYMS
His name is Michael Barrister, but his friends call him Mike, except for El, who calls him Shelby. Michael Barrister -> Michel B. -> Shelby, a pun more elaborate than it is interesting. El is extremely amused by this kind of wordplay, and will happily spend hours free associating. Whenever possible, she uses homophones in her speech so that when the context would suggest she means “sore,” she knows she is secretly saying “soar.” This should make no material difference, but irritates all of us.
HOSIERY
The foot is swathed in a stocking, but toenails are visible through the hosiery. Although the overlay necessarily changes the color which reaches the eye, the brain subtracts the interference to give an unfiltered impression of the nail polish.
INNOCENCE
There is such a thing as a guilty bystander.
LOOPS
Not a downward spiral, but a series of loops. More like hanging than drowning.
NAKED
She is naked from the waist down, but she wears a soft white sweater.
PICCOLO
I could make a noise gun – a piccolo, as they call them.
PLAY-DOH
It reminds me of play-doh, how in the ads they always combined colors because of course! Of course! That’s the first thing you want to do, is to put the colors next to each other – to blend them, or to layer them in a way that will emphasize key points in the structure. But this you must not do, despite the commercials, despite your natural urges.
SMART PEOPLE
We’ve known so many people whose ideas were crazy but which worked. We’ve studied how weird the world is. We’ve taken leaps of faith. We’ve trusted specialists. Yet ice is ice.
TYPING
He mistook the sound of typing for shuffling tarot cards.
WALLPAPER
The small wrinkles in the wallpaper which we allow ourselves not to see – bumpy seams, pattern mismatches, tiny bubbles where the wall is imperfect. Water spots where the paper has stretched and puckered – reminders that this surface is paper, that this surface has been papered over.
Romie Stott‘s genre-bending short fiction and poetry have appeared in magazines including Farrago’s Wainscot, Arc, Strange Horizons, LIT, and inkscrawl. A narrative filmmaker, she has been a guest artist at the ICA Boston, London’s National Gallery, and the Dallas Museum of Art. For the last year, she has released daily copyright-free SF nanofiction at postorbital.tumblr.com.
What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Unattached Metaphors”? I was in line at a drugstore, a line which snaked down the aisle for kids’ toys and left me standing next to some unopened Play-Doh. I used the opportunity to reflect bitterly on the fatal error of trying to play with two colors at a time, and the way the advertising wants you to make this fatal error and thus have to replace your Play-Doh. I thought, “that has to be a metaphor for something,” but realized immediately it could instead be a metaphoric free agent. I thought it would be a funny idea to sell a book of unattached metaphors which could be dropped decoratively into anyone’s writing, like clip art. I spent the next month jotting more down when they occurred to me, which could be challenging because the first thing you do (or the first thing I do) when you try to invent a no-context metaphor is come up with a simile instead. When it seemed I might be starting to repeat myself, I entered what I had into a Word doc, sorted alphabetically by topic, as one does with a helpful encyclopedic reference. Then I put the whole thing aside so I could shoot a short film that required a lot of 12 and 14 hour days of not inventing verbal metaphors. I didn’t look at it again for about 6 years. When I did reopen the file to see whether the project was worth continuing, I was as surprised as anyone to realize it was already finished and had a narrative thrust. It’s possible that 6 years ago, I tricked myself into playing a solitaire version of Exquisite Corpse.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
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Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again March 15, 2025. Submit here.
Upcoming
01/13 • Edward Thomas-Herrera
01/20 • Zero Laforga
01/27 • Jack Bedell
02/03 • TBD
02/10 • Gaurav Bhalla
02/17 • Callie Dean
02/24 • TBD