The ballerina was a swan, gliding across the stage.

The alligator's teeth are white daggers.

This contract is as solid as the ground we stand on.

They wore jeans, which made me stand out like a sore thumb.

Mrs. Waddlekins is a sea cow.

The smell coming from Mrs. Pancher's room was like clam juice.

I am so thirsty that my throat is as dry as a bone.

The cast on his broken leg was a plaster shackle.

At five o'clock, the interstate is always a parking lot.

The teenager's stomach was a bottomless pit.

Don't just sit there like a bump on a log.

He is as funny as a barrel of monkeys.

The road ahead was a ribbon stretching across the desert.

Watching the show was like watching grass grow.

He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

She was a couch potato in the gravy boat of life, flopping dejectedly on the sofa.

The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

Clint is a toasty tortilla, full of meat.

Nick is a Duck

Mason's mouth was a fountain of delight

Caleb was an overbearing cake with salty frosting, and frankly, I was on a diet.

Owen is a late bloomer.

You are my fire

The one desire

Believe when I say

I want it that way

Her artistic sense was exquisitely refined, like someone who can tell butter from I Can't Believe It's Not Butter.

You know how in "Rocky" he prepares for the fight by punching sides of raw beef? Well, yesterday it was as cold as that meat locker he was in.

She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.