My Cardboard Balcony

A Well-Deserved Vacation by Belinda Roddie Each - stressed - syllable  - provides the ambiance of a small restaurant, where spaghetti is twirled into your hair and the forks are tipped with fool's gold. Your meal is free, courtesy of the chef with the grin and the lazy eye. Eat up before the wife finds out; kiss the waitress before the wife finds out; take two ladies back to the hotel with you and let them regurgitate your poetry - your hackneyed odes to a century that brought you technicolor war that brought you tanks and cigarettes that brought you politicians choking on their own manhood sweet sweet sweet rich and full of nutrients but still a carcinogen roiling your stomach more violently than the cannoli. You used to write your own stories without relying on nostalgia and the magazines that kept you hard and happy. You saved up so much money for this trip abroad, and now here you are, new millennium stranger clinging to the mirage that vintage ...

The school district had been closed for five years - every single school shut down. Students were bused to the adjacent city to complete their education, sitting in desks older than their grandparents, still using chalkboards to write out equations and spelling lists. I visited the high school - Smith High School, as it was blandly named - and was reminded of the years preceding the Civil War.