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First her ears hear; they open. Then her eyes can see; they open. Her face, a revolving door, swings open and shut, open and shut. She no longer sleeps at night; it’s too hard to breathe after four breast-implant operations. She drops, like rain down a window, collapsing in fatigue, breathing through her mouth, and even exhaustion seems miraculous.

The above lines are from 'The Coming Flood', a short story by Andrés Barba. What does the line in bold mean?

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    I've fixed up the tags here, but please do peruse How do I tag questions properly? to see how our tagging works :)
    – bobble
    Nov 27 '21 at 18:09
  • It would help to provide context. It might mean that she's talking incessantly (mouth opening and closing), or her eyes are opening and closing, or her mouth is moving in an attempt to speak, or her head/face is spinning round and round. Or it might be something stranger - has she had facial surgery? I guess revolving doors move ceaselessly, but that doesn't help a great deal.
    – Stuart F
    Nov 27 '21 at 18:52
  • @StuartF These are the very first sentences of a short story.
    – Tsundoku ♦
    Nov 28 '21 at 21:30
  • Apart from finding a comment on this from the author, I think it’s worth mentioning that metaphor is very powerful and intriguing for how mind-expanding it can be, in that we can adjoin two unrelated things and force the mind of the person perceiving/apprehending the idea to reconcile them and mentally entertain a novel conceptual experience. This writer clearly loves daring and adventurous metaphors. So we should not assume it has a single coded meaning at all. The writer, driven by intuition, can be exploring the outer limits of language and leaving the effect up to the reader.
    – Peter Elbert
    Nov 30 '21 at 12:43

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