TRACY: So where are you going with this? I can't tell if you like [Tom Robbins] or if you're mocking me. :-) Not that I'm going to be upset, just curious. :-)

ALEX: I'm just putting it out there.  They're humorous whether you find them clever or desperate.

TRACY: That's a nice, safe answer.

ALEX: Well, I'd like to think he was imitating bad writing as a joke, but then again, this is a guy who has a talking can of beans as a major character.

TRACY: Interesting.  I've always loved his writing specifically for his similes/metaphors.

ALEX: Jitterbug Perfume has more concise similes and more metaphors.  Lengthy similes make it look like the author is reaching for a comparison by description because he can't find the words.  When you end up with a simile like "There was a Spoon-rattling crash of thunder, and the rain began to leave the sky like refugees fleeing a revolution, arriving with nothing but the clothes on their backs and whatever skills they might have acquired in their dark villages," it reads like he's trying to reach a word count his editor dictated as the minimum requirement for his manuscript, else he'll be left out in the rain as a washed-out hack and soon-to-be starving artist who substituted quantity for quality and cobbled-together form for any semblance of true literary substance.

TRACY: Apparently imitation is also the sincerest form of disdain. Your point of view is noted, if not shared. The prosecution may rest, counselor.

Again, I left out all the similes that were literal or very nearly so.  For example, "...were he not panting like a Saint Bernard on avalanche patrol. His face was as red as a Christmas sock, and his heart was pounding so hard that his bow tie was bouncing."

• Of course, there are white beets, beets that ooze sugar water instead of blood, but it is the red beet with which we are concerned; the variety that blushes and swells like a hemorrhoid, a hemorrhoid for which there is no cure.

• Every toilet bowl gurgled like an Italian tenor with a mouthful of Lavoris, and the refrigerators made noises at night like buffalo grazing.

• It smelled of chemicals—less mephitic than sweet—and it was that smell that leaped to greet her, like a cooped-up pooch, when she let herself in on a weary midnight.

• Inside her hose, her feet were as red as newborn mice.

• She was as pallid as a Q-tip and as ready to unravel.

• When Madame Devalier raised her voice, it was like Diamond Jim raising a poker pot. Even the termites in the foundation paid attention.

• He pulled the mask over his head and moaned as a whale might moan were it about to upchuck some ambergris.

• When they breathed, it sounded as if they were testing the air for dragon smoke.

• Although the day was rather balmy, he pulled up the hood of his rough linen cloak and, blushing like blood's rich uncle,

• As Wren blinked her bituminous lashes at his queer behavior, Alobar stood, disrobed, and turned slowly around and around before her like prime merchandise at a slave market.

• In an attempt to prove his stamina, the king set upon his harem like a starving rat let loose in a peach barrel.

• The spring bubbled in a little glade, a clearing lit like an altar by the ever-ceremonious moon.

• His heart swung off its pendulum, and his blue eyes stiffened like the ponds of December in a bowel-loosening, knee-locking, cider-evaporating attack of deja vu.

• Inside the hut there was a laugh, or the ancient animal ancestor of a laugh; a cackle wound like prickly yarn around the wild spindle in the throat of a fox.

• Alobar shook him until his various necklaces of various teeth chattered like a flock of enamel jays.

• The shaman grinned like a weasel running errands for the moon.

• While his host hunkered over the diminutive adobe hearth, Alobar sniffed at the various braids of dried vegetable matter that hung against the walls, each broadcasting a different version of internal conditions within the plant kingdom, and he fingered the bones, fangs, and snail shells that, like chimes to be rung by the shaman's heavy breathing, dangled from the ceiling.

• The sky was a velvety black paw pressing on the white landscape with a feline delicacy, stars flying like sparks from its fur.  The cry of an owl, brooding over its ruby appetites, cut through the frigid air like a vibrating pin. Then, all was silent except for the soft crunch, like ants chewing wax, of his boats upon the snow.

• Thud! Down he went like a sack of meteorites addressed special delivery to gravity.

• A breeze suddenly raked the landscape, drawing from the grasses a dark murmuring, and setting the thistle bushes to chattering like thin teeth.

• Or, to be precise, human above save for a pair of stubby horns thrusting like bronze-tipped beet-diggers in the bright mountain air.

• When he glanced about him in the pale twilight, however, he saw everywhere evidence of his participation: dried semen frosted the thighs of napping nymphs, clots of it floated in the shadowy waters like weavings wrenched loose from the looms of the trout, and upon the tips of bracken there glistened drops too milky to be dew.

• For a change, she'd pinked her Cupid's bow mouth—tiny in comparison to Ricki's full Latino lips—and brushed on enough purple eye shadow to make Bela Lugosi look like a lifeguard.

• She made a face that caused the faint handlebar of hairs above her lip to bristle like the fuzz on an ostrich's cheek.

• There was an odor in the hallway more funky than a cabbage pot, and on her doorsill there sat in certain firepluggian splendor, like a dropping from the eclipse, like a disembodied bulb that had been beamed to Earth from Starship Eros, another beet.

• LOUISIANA IN SEPTEMBER was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air—moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh—felt as if it were being exhaled into one's face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing.

• Hips swaying like mandolins on a gypsy wagon wall, V'lu climbed the narrow stairs, leaving her employer to fend off with her fan the lewd breath of Louisiana, as she awaited the seven o'clock news and yet another ominous view of the blacking out of Paris.

• A silver glow, like a blaze of molten escargot tongs, erupted from behind the ebony corona, and Claude felt himself trembling with a sort of euphoria.

• Like those pious citizens who attend church every Sunday, then cheat and lie their way through the week, Marcel visited a brothel religiously on Saturday nights, then seemed to forget sex entirely for the next six days.

• The LeFever twins had been small boys during the Nazi occupation of Paris, but they recalled it as an adult recalls the breaking of a bone in childhood: the sickening crack, the fear, the pain, the sadness, the sudden ooze of blood that shows itself like the black blush of fairy-tale witches.

• The dead man looked comfortable enough, all things considered (it bothered Alobar, philosophically, that the dead invariably seemed more self-possessed than the living), but obviously it only would be a matter of minutes before he began to char like one of those loaves the forgetful Frol was forever leaving too long on the hearth, an image that further hastened Alobar's departure.

• It was with calm resignation, if not dim intelligence, that she at first regarded the flames that darted among the boughs like finches from hell, but when the heat grew more intense and she felt the early bites of pain, she cried out sharply and sat upright in her intended tomb.

• Her eyelids, like Wren's, were as thick and languid as the peel of some pulpy fruit; ghe had the same chin dimple: a wormhole in a pear; the same occupied codpiece for a nose. As did Wren's, her lips parted reluctantly, like waters protecting an oyster bed, to slowly disclose the aquatic shelf of bright teeth behind them, and in the girl's eyes there fluttered illuminated parchments upon which intelligent things were written, things that Alobar could scarcely hope to read.

• Water is like flesh. Water will not stand still. It is always off to somewhere else; restless, talkative, and curious. Even water in a covered jar will disappear in time. Flesh is water. Stones are like bones. Satisfied. Patient. Dependable. Tell me, then, Alobar, in order to achieve immortality, should you emulate water or stone? Should you trust your flesh or your bones?"

• Chomolungma was what the world looked like when the world stood on tiptoes. Pale from the strain, blue from the lack of oxygen.

• The vegetation had all grown dizzy and slid down her back, snow swirled in perpetual spirals around her skull, she wore a glacier in her crotch like a sanitary napkin.

• Unbound, her breasts bobbed to the surface like jellyfish coming up to feed.

• As she grew older and the incense trade grew alongside her, she began to spend as much time in the business as in the household, and it never occurred to her that a conflict might be sprouting, like one of the ritual barley seeds, in the moist soil of her heart.

• Marriage meant that she must leave her father's home to live with her husband's family, who would treat her like a servant if she was lucky, like monkey shit if she was not.

• His head split like a milk bowl, sending forbidden ambition, mixed with blood and brain, trickling into the public light.

• She tried to drive the smile away with thoughts of her sorrowful experiences, her disgraceful behavior, her insecure situation, but this was one smile that didn't scare easily, it hung in there like a tenant who knows his rights and refuses to be evicted.

• "Kudra." The word swam out through her smile like a blowfish swimming through a crack in a reef.

• The mountains looked like the white picket fence around the cottage of eternity, although Alobar clearly thought about them in another way entirely.

• The sun was starting to sink, and the peaks were pinned with colored clouds, like ribbons designating where each had placed in the contest.

• With his free hand, Alobar scratched his head, a head herringboned with equal parts chestnut and silver, like a cow pie on a frosty morning

• Like a careless animal on the lip of a tar pit, his middle finger slipped and sank quickly from view.

• Irrigated by snow-melt, the recently awakened grass on the slopes glittered like spinach between the teeth of the hard earth.

• Far below them, in deep, narrow gorges, streams worked themselves into a lather, roaring like all the seashells in the world turned inside out; and above, great cold peaks in mineral armor were trying to smash the sky.

• "The Bandaloo-oo-p." The word sailed away on the wind, its vowels banging together and scattering, its consonants tearing the lips of the word like the bit of a runaway horse.

• She had to sit in a drift until the pain subsided, Alobar draped over her like a human tent.

• Almost immediately the wind fell quiet, like a drunk who has passed out in the middle of a rage.

• A bartender's beauty is in his moves. Like a lover's, like a matador's.

• At the mention of "LeFever," a blush actually did seep through V'lu's protective pigmentation, spreading upon her carob complexion like an oil slick on the muddy Mississippi, and even though her nervous system was, by hurricane drops, entertained, she flinched.

• Madame crossed herself, ringed fingers flashing like UFOs over the summits of her mountainous breasts.

• Luc propped his cigar against the rim of an alabaster ashtray. The cigar looked like some kind of vegetable, a root crop, related, perhaps, to the mangel-wurzel. The vegetable was on fire. Arson was suspected.

• Through the plate glass windows, the foggy streets looked like Frankenstein's idea of Club Med.

• Like jugged bees, the funereal orations droned on.

• As he warmed his horns on the sunny riverbank, watching the wind-torn chestnut blossoms drift by like melted nymph flesh on the tide, Pan dismissed Descartes and his prideful ambition to force nature under human control, and thought instead of Alobar and Kudra, how they had come to Arkadia, drunk on eternal knowledge, seeking him out and laughing. . . .

• Alobar believed they should have stayed longer and learned more, and this belief kept surfacing like a lungfish in the hot surf of their seventeenth-century quarrels.

• She embraced him, swabbing his beard with kisses at the same moment that the ship plunged its black, wooden tongue into the murmuring mouth of the outer waters, knocking salt teeth loose in every direction; and as the lash lines shuddered from the recoil of that ancient kiss, as the mast pole tilted its neck like a voyeur for a better view, and the mainsail, with a raucous, swift gesture, shook a skyful of stars out of its folds and creases, Kudra and Alobar were carried off to Greece— uncertain, intrepid, possibly immortal, decidedly in love....

• To witness Kudra then, giggling and barefoot among the poppies, it would have been hard for anyone to picture her on her knees in a Constantinople pantry, weeping and wailing, shaking like the shuttle in an overachiever's loom, begging Shakti, Shiva, Kali, and Krishna to forgive her for rebelling against divine authority.

• So, they advanced in the lavender mountain haze like chatty autograph-seekers closing in on a celebrity's hideaway, but in their secret hearts they wanted something other than your scrawl, Mr. Shaggy; they wanted you to reach into their secret hearts and remove the hard, knobby doggy bone of doubt that their apparent victory over time had buried there.

• His eyes flew open like the hatch covers on an exploding ship, and he commenced to sniff at his extremities, as if he were wildly in love with himself.

• The laughter burst out of Pan like the barking of some obscene dog.

• It was no use. Pan had finished speaking and would say no more. Nor would he sniff at himself again, for, incredibly, his native odor had peeled away the perfume that masked it; had slowly burned through the potent excess of patchouli like a sunray blazing its way through a purple fog, and now, after less than an hour of suppression, the goat gas—that chloride compound of barnyard and bedroom—was boiling again, filling the grotto with a sleazy vapor, a steam to press a rooster's pants.

• Alobar issued a sigh that was shaped like a funnel: a full quart of beet juice could have been poured through it.

• Alobar looked around him. In every direction as far as he could see, fierce outcroppings of gray stone, green curves of pasture, uncompromising slopes, spiny shrubs and delicate poppies (unlikely partners in a fling ordered by a reckless breeze), mountains teeming with invisible springs, clouds lying like oatcakes upon the blue tablecloth of sky, all of this seemed so inviolable that he could not entertain the notion of its vulnerability, and he said as much to Lalo.

• A ripple of annoyance like the shock wave from a splat of buzzard guano, zigzagged along Alobar's forehead.

• Compared to Western Europe, Bohemia and the Slavic territories were still wild and thinly populated, offering many a fox a place to linger over a bit of loon, like some remote animal ancestor of Ernest Hemingway, but even there in the Eastern backwash, the gold-dust twins, Christianity and Commerce, had set up their crooked wheel of fortune.

• The Middle Ages hangs over history's belt like a beer belly.

• Our little couple, however, our Alobar and Kudra, remained intact and indigestible, like the hard octopus beaks that sicken the stomachs of whales, causing them to vomit the ambergris that bonds the bouquet in great perfumes. Like octopus beaks, our couple. Or maraschino cherries.

• It is rumored that maraschino cherries are prepared with a chemical resembling formaldehyde, thus can neither be assimilated nor eliminated but must ride in the baggage rack of the bowels for a lifetime, like the seabags of the Flying Dutchman.

• Kudra gave him a look that you could spread on a bun. Her words, however, pricked him like the knife that does the spreading.

• Together, they watched the sun break through the morning fog, coming back to the deserted fairgrounds like a dandy returning to the boulevard, prepared, when the moment was right, to strut some stuff.

• From every doorway, the lewd breath of prostitutes rose like hooks of smoke.

• A misunderstood husband usually is armed with a blunt instrument, its knob painted red like the face of a judge.

• They circled Paris like microscopic angels, looking for harp concerts in the snow.

• Frankincense and myrrh might have reodorized the diapers of sweet Baby Jesus, but they disappeared in the goat god's gulf of funk like rowboats in the Bermuda Triangle; and sandalwood, clean, gentle sandalwood, lasted as long, to the minute, as a snowball in hell.

• Expansive, yet never cloying; romantic, yet seldom melancholy, jasmine has the poise of a wild creature, some elusive self-sufficient thing that croons like an organic saxophone in the tropical night.

• A few flat clouds folded themselves like crepes over fillings of apricot sky.

• The wheel rolled to a stop, and bubbles of oxygen slid off of it to skitter upon the surface of his stagnant blood like waterbugs attending to some dizzy business.

• So deep was he in "his" time, so removed from exterior time, that he made no sound in the room, but he cried "Methinks I have found it!" with force enough that the breath wheel was jarred into motion again, a wild thump rattled his heart, and all at once his trajectory reversed itself and he came flying back, shedding stars like dandruff, gaining weight, contracting, shrinking, until he tumbled back over the edge into the shallow bowl of our reality, his plasma sluggish in the pump, his eyes pasted shut with some atomic glue, but voice finally audible in the little sitting room: "Kudra! I have got it."

• Around August, however, when the plants go to seed, a pungent and singular aroma rises from them, like a gaseous wrench that gives the surrounding atmosphere a sharp turn to the left, twisting it into strange new configurations.

• Kudra's right shoe lay upturned on the thin carpet, like a boat washed up on a desolate shore.

• Stopping neither to eat nor sleep, his brain hot with imagined disasters, the man who once was a king in this land flapped through the countryside in his filthy rags, his boots (ailing away from his feet, his latest beard flying in the wind like a nauseated Chinaman losing his bird's nest soup.

• Shaking like a wedding announcement in a misogamist's fist, Alobar examined the shoe, unfolded and reread the note.

• They tasted like Grendel's underpants.

• It had been Wren who comforted him when that first white hair slithered like a viper into his happy garden, Wren who had aided and abetted his subsequent subterfuge even though she'd been shocked by his crazy notions of personal identity and survival, Wren who had plucked him from the burial mound—and that very night spread her legs for his successor.

• From the start, the various perfumes had had a confusing effect on him, but his native aroma made short work of them, generally, and it was seldom very long before he was cheerfully, securely stinking again like an old furnace stoked with gonads.

• The jasmine blew like a soft wind from Egypt across the scruffy pastures of his mind, the beet thumped a dance drum with scrotum-tightening rhythms.

• Pan realized that each application of the scent only made him foggier, but, like a drug addict, he was already too foggy to resist further fogginess.

• It was a fine, old bar, long and curved like a tusk and so solid that the entire membership of the Fraternal Order of Belligerent Drunks of America could not make it budge.

• The last chrysanthemums of autumn hung their heads apprehensively over the rim of a vase, like voyagers whose crowded boat was steaming into a strange and possibly dangerous port.

• Dannyboy was slender, svelte, and nimble, a tanned, athletic man with an Airstream nest of silver curls, teeth like the spots on dominoes, and more twinkle in his single eye than most men have in a pair.

• A laugh went off in his throat like a rat-bomb, sending the last of the guests scurrying for their bumbershoots.

• THE MINUTE YOU LAND IN NEW ORLEANS, something wet and dark leaps on you and starts humping you like a swamp dog in heat, and the only way to get that aspect of New Orleans off you is to eat it off.

• But there V'lu was, waltzing through the terminal looking as pretty and composed as Miss Tanzania on a TV beauty pageant, and smiling like the catastrophe that swallowed the Canary Islands.

• Like a baby grand in a town without piano movers, Ma-dame had settled firmly into place, her bulk as transfixed as a wild hog in truck lights. A jazz funeral could have marched through the gates of her corset, and she wouldn't have squirmed.

• Who but Bunny had a large, deep, soft, hot, suffocated voice, a voice like coal being formed in the swamps of the Cretaceous Period?

• The cassette silenced, Claude could hear the blood singing in the old man's clogged arteries like the choir aboard the Titanic.

• Luc said nothing. Like a paper snake with a white spark on its tongue, the tape hissed on.

• The cigar was smoldering against Luc's cheek, burrowing like a red-hot worm into the head that was now the color and texture of one of Bunny's beets.

• Alobar began postponing the cleaning of Einstein's office to the very end of his shift, but still the professor was there, 2:00 A.M., slumped in his chair, looking like a musical teddy bear with its springs and stuffing flying out.

• The instant the reminiscence faded, the symptoms of deterioration took over, grabbing the limelight like an insecure celebrity, drowning out, with Welkian schmaltz, the shy snores of embezzlers, the out-of-sync rasps of homicidal maniacs, the nocturnal whimpers of lifelong bullyboys.

• What chemical evil could be working in his tissues to cause them to smell like the bottom drawer in a maiden aunt's dresser?

• At least it was a cinch to remove. He simply pulled it over her head without unhooking it, catching her breasts as they tumbled out, like croquet balls from a canvas bag. They were as smooth as peeled onions and perfectly pinked. He squeezed one, nuzzled the other. The pink did not lick off.

• There was a run in the seat of her nylon panties. Neither of them seemed to notice. His hand passed over the run like a streetsweeper passing over a skid mark, maintaining momentum, registering nothing. The longest finger on his left hand curled like a celery stalk and dipped into the bowl of her buttocks, a bowl in which metaphors were easily mixed.

• Effecto had played Priscilla like an accordion. Wiggs worked her as if she were an archaeological dig: spading, sifting, dusting, cataloging. Now, lying in a puddle on the sofa, she felt like she was ready to be shipped to the British Museum. Accompanied by a crate of late twentieth-century come shards.

• Nude though he was, Dr. Dannyboy drew himself up like a bank president. He tapped his patch portentiously, like a master of ceremonies tapping a microphone.

• But his apparently sincere conviction that he could snatch the mouse hair and remove the scimitar struck her as the kind of high-pitched delusion that can shatter a man's mind like a cut-glass punching bag.

• After a bit, Wiggs took her nipple in his lips, applying a rubbery, rolling pressure, like Captain Queeg worrying those steel peas in his fingers during the Caine Mutiny Court Martial. Boingl The little pink pea stiffened with pleasure, much as an aged veteran will sometimes stiffen with patriotism.

• He snorted again, and his knuckle began rapping at his eye patch like a mongoloid woodpecker drilling for worms in a poker chip.

• Whereas Wiggs, on his good days, had a smile that snipped the tense prison air like musical scissors,

• Finding herself stunned and upended by that knowledge, like a myopic houseguest who has walked into a patio door, Pris groped for sturdy furniture with which to right herself.

• Her lids popped open. Any morning light that might have been stuck to her lashes fell away like spilled sugar.

• For a long time, she sat there regarding the beet, looking at it with optimism, misgiving, wonderment, bewilderment, and slight disgust, like a beginning medical student confronting her first anatomical drawing of a prostate gland.

• On page 83, a young actress was bent over like a map of Florida, affording an unobstructed view of the inland waterway around Cocoa Beach. Sailing in those backwaters would be sunny and brisk. But at the end of the voyage, he'd be searching the horizon for Kudra again.

• Gulls circled downtown skyscrapers, derelicts with faces like soup bones luxuriated on jewel-bright park benches, and out in the glittering bay, flotillas of sailboats showed off for watercolorists.

• She made that devastating discovery immediately upon returning to her studio apartment, where the refrigerator made noises at night like sea cows ruminating, where the toilet sounded like the audio portion of a white-water rafting expedition, where fallout from fifty failed base-note experiments perfumed the peeling wallpaper, and where the Kotex box on the bathroom shelf was empty now, except for a couple of frayed and yellowing pads.

• She lay in his arms, purring like a Rolls-Royce that has learned it isn't going to be sold to an Arab, after all.

• Her relaxed state was giving way to a video arcade of blinking wonderments and beeping forebodings. A chill, like current from a nuclear icicle, vibrated her sex-softened spine.

• "Not in the least," he replied, loosening, like an iguana butcher, the spinal column of one of his beloved zippers.

• In unison, they stepped out of their pants. Their gap-toothed zippers, split like the vertebrae of a temple sacrifice, made a tiny clink when- they hit the tiles of the tub-room floor.

• A tear bubbled up, like a syllable from a flounder, in his single eye. It hung upside down from his lower lid, like a transparent sloth from a ledge, until gravity finally pried it loose, sending it plunging, silently, headlong, salt and all, into the anonymity of the steaming tub.

• She dare not tell him of the bottle, but, rather, must show it to him, must hold it up to that gleaming orb of his and watch the silver hairs stand on his head like the bristles of a robot's toothbrush.

• She walked down the path feeling like three-fourths of two pieces of slug bait.

• Ah, but the next morning! When the streetlamps went out, the bees lighted up. Wearing the dawn like silver on their wings, they returned in a glassy phalanx to the scene of the crime. Like a glass spearhead come suddenly to life, like an animated dagger with an angry voice, like an electrified pineapple spike; like a darting fish made of noisy sparks, half full of fire and half full of cold, the swarm circled the death scene, diving and looping, again and again, a crazed cactus loose in the air, humming defiance, forty little spines dripping poison and pain.

• Like a necklace of gouged-out crocodile eyes—yellow-green and menacing, shiny and ancient—the renegade bees encircled New Orleans, a mosaic albatross that wouldn't lie still.

• Like a fertilized condor egg, filled with blood and promise, the bald head of Dr. Morgenstern split open. He died instantly.

• They say that February is the shortest month, but you know they could be wrong.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Compared, calendar page against calendar page, it looks to be the shortest, all right. Spread between January and March like lard on bread, it fails to reach the crust on either slice. In its galoshes—and you'll never catch February in stocking feet—it's a full head shorter than December, although in leap years, when it has growth spurts, it comes up to April's nose.

However more abbreviated than its cousins it may look, February feels longer than any of them. It is the meanest moon of winter, all the more cruel because it will masquerade as spring, occasionally for hours at a time, only to rip off its mask with a sadistic laugh and spit icicles into every gullible face, behavior that grows quickly old.

February is pitiless, and it is boring. That parade of red numerals on its page adds up to zero: birthdays of politicians, a holiday reserved for rodents, what kind of celebrations are those? The only bubble in the flat champagne of February is Valentine's Day. It was no accident that our ancestors pinned Valentine's Day on February's shirt: he or she lucky enough to have a lover in frigid, antsy February has cause for celebration, indeed.

Except to the extent that it "tints the buds and swells the leaves within," February is as useless as the extra r in its name. It behaves like an obstacle, a wedge of slush and mud and ennui, holding both progress and contentment at bay.

James Joyce was born in February, as was Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo, which goes to show that writers are poor at beginnings, although worse at knowing when to stop.

If February is the color of lard on rye, its aroma is that of wet wool trousers. As for sound, it is an abstract melody played on a squeaky violin, the petty whine of a shrew with cabin fever. O February, you may be little but you're small! Were you twice your tiresome length, few of us would survive to greet the merry month of May.

Confined to its usual length, February still extracted a toll from Priscilla and New Orleans. On Groundhog Day, a car-petbagger freeze turned banana plants as black as seminary shoes, and night after night, the Mississippi .exhaled Yukon breath. The small boys who tap-danced for coins on Bourbon Street were forced to compete with their own chattering teeth. Aside from tap and chatter, the Quarter was so quiet it might as well have been in Salt Lake City. Even the bees took refuge from the chill. Where, was anybody's guess.

• Apricot and artichoke were the colors of her gown, which clung to her like a child about to be separated from its parents, and cream was her turban, fastened with a glass jewel the size of half a peach.

• His nostrils opening and closing like the flaps of an airplane in distress, he pronounced it more precious than any in the South of France and swore that he would send a team of botanists to Jamaica to track it down.

• Wiggs stepped out onto the asphalt and lifted a benign, expectant face skyward, like the good-guy earthling in a flying-saucer movie.

• She felt like a can of cheap dog food that had been ruptured by a railroad spike.

• By Sunday evening, Priscilla was feeling slightly better, feeling less like a dented can of cheap dog food than like a dented can of expensive dog food. Alpo instead of Skippy.

• The sky was sorrowful and disheveled, like the head of an old musician.

• A tremor ran the length of her, causing her voluptuous flesh to quiver like the throat of a lovesick frog.

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