There There

In the Interlude, the narrator describes how shootings can happen anywhere. No one expected a calamitous event to happen at the powwow, but shootings are random, terrible events. Orange uses some violent imagery, followed by a simile, to describe a bullet in such a shooting:

A bullet is a thing so fast it’s hot and so hot it’s mean and so straight it moves clean through a body, makes a hole, tears, burns, exits, goes on, hungry, or it remains, cools, lodges, poisons. When a bullet opens you up, blood pours like out of a mouth too full. A stray bullet, like a stray dog, might up and bite anyone anywhere, just because its teeth were made to bite, made to soften, tear through meat, a bullet is made to eat through as much as it can.

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In a chapter on Opal in Part III, the narrator describes Opal's obsessions and superstitions, as well as her long history of regrets. After the previous chapter, which shows her as a young woman with a variety of unusual behaviors, this chapter shows her as an older woman with many memories and experiences. The narrator describes these in a metaphor:

So she bore those years, their weight, and the years bored a hole through the middle of her, where she tried to keep believing there was some reason to keep her love intact. Opal is stone solid, but there is troubled water that lives in her, that sometimes threatens to flood, to drown her—rise up to her eyes. Sometimes she can’t move. Sometimes it feels impossible to do anything.

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