I love metaphors, figurative language or suggestive phrasing folded into a story like raspberry filling in vanilla layer cake.

• “ReMem,” by Amy Brill, One Story

This brilliantly crafted story spins our present technology out into the future. The raspberry filling is the riff on memory. Among the many sentences I underlined, this one:

For my concern I earn a look beamed directly from the border of Pityland.

And this one:

One could tuck a basketball between her chin and the top of my head.

(Geeky writer comment: what a great way to show that the teenager is taller than her dad.)

• “Marlinspike,” by Tom Paine, One Story

A metaphor employing an object used to untie tough knots works its magic in the story of two people who come together to heal each other’s hurts. Pay attention to how well the author treads the waters of what readers could view as an inappropriate relationship were it not for the author’s skill.

Paine did a great interview with Will Allison about this story. His writing advice:

…you can’t write a good story until you become the person who can write a good story. I mean a change in your soul, not your sentence structure. 

• “Harrison Bergerson, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

An updated Animal Farm, more chilling because the political control masks as social justice—meted out in violence when a crack appears in the system created by hundreds of Constitutional Amendments that mandate correct behavior. No metaphors here. Metaphors were probably outlawed by Amendment 210.

• “The Graven Image,” by John O’Hara, 50 Great Short Stories Edited by Milton Crane

Some metaphors are institutionalized. The golden pig signals membership in Harvard’s Porcellian Club and represents bone deep elitism. The politics of elitism run through this tightly crafted story.

• “The Garden Party,” by Katherine Mansfield, 50 Great Short Stories Edited by Milton Crane

It’s easy to find fault with the privileged family staging a lavish garden party while just outside their gate an impoverished mother and her children lose their husband, father and breadwinner in a tragic accident—until we ask ourselves, what fancy displays do we excuse as our right in the face of other people’s struggles?

• “Rules of the Game,” by Amy Tan, The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories edited by Tobias Wolff

Many an author has used the game of chess as a metaphor for life, but when Amy Tan sits down to play she checkmates them all. Not only does the immigrant family learn the rules to get ahead in American society, they learn how to change the rules.

That is the power of chess. It is a game of secrets in which one must show and never tell.

“Only the Dead Know Brooklyn,” by Thomas Wolfe, 50 Great Short Stories Edited by Milton Crane

I researched this story to discover its meaning and found that no one else knows what it means either.  If readers are looking for a metaphor, I’d choose the map. Da big guy needs a map to find his way, and still he gets lost. But he has fun in the process. The narrator ridicules the map, saying it’s not possible to know all there is to know about Brooklyn (so why try). I’m not sure where death fits in, except the guy with the map asks an off the wall question about drowning and the phrase “swim with the fishes” popped into my mind. Wolfe is a trip.