Michael Malone - Weebly

of those bizarre images attributable to his lightheadedness.
"Outdoors too?" called Smalter in greeting.
Abernathy could see the quick series of flaring red as
Smalter puffed on his pipe. He began searching his
pockets for his own.
"Yes. Rather muggy."
"Horrible. The whole sky feels like a steamy towel
in a barber shop being lowered over your face."
"Yes, I suppose it does." Did it? How could it?
What unsettling images Smalter evoked as a matter of
course, as if his habitual frame of mind was as
conceptually inebriated as Abernathy felt his own to be
tonight. What a different way of seeing the world, to
look at something through a simile rather than
translating it into a simile after the fact. Very different
from his perennial "it is as if" tactic in efforts to persuade
Beanie to agree that he was right. And now, after all the
verbal debates he was accustomed to winning both in
his court and in his castle, he had been persuaded by
Beanie that she was right, perhaps even right when she,
absurdly, remarked, "I don't know if you'll want to, I