Painting Pictures With Similes Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains”, is a story from the future about the last house standing after a fire swept through a town. Bradbury uses similes to help readers understand the setting. The middle of the story contains an incredibly vivid simile, “ [a]t four o'clock the tables folded like great butterflies back through the paneled walls” (Bradbury 2).This simile creates imagery and helps the reader picture the setting at that particular point in the story. The simile helps the reader imagine just how the table folds into the wall. Another example of figurative language is the use of the simile, “[t]here was the sound like a great matted yellow hive of bees within a dark bellows, the lazy bumble of