My Cardboard Balcony

Refusing Her Sugar by Belinda Roddie And there were guns hanging on her wall, all stripped down to their basic metal parts. Skeletons, every one of them, gleaming gray bone as they displayed a history of America that had never exactly become history at all. We drank bad sour mash, played chess on an old board with pieces missing crowns and snouts and heads. She undressed me without touching me, navigated castles into my corner, and shackled my queen to one sad, solitary square. She told me she had wanted to be the sheriff's deputy, and even when the job ultimately went to his fat, aggressive Kentucky son, she wore the cowboy hat better than anyone in all of Southern Appalachia. Said she could shoot a deer between the eyes every time. It'd never blink. I guess she thought I was supposed to be entranced by this. To be wooed, courted by a rugged lady hailing from the thigh gap between the Midwest and the Northeast. I won two out of five games, but

The armor is coated in dust and grime. The knight is geriatric and wheezy. He sits in a chair all day by the window, knitting tea cozy after tea cozy. He remembers the days he jousted and battered the enemy's walls with his sword. Now he lets the steel rust as his needles fly across the patterns he's expertly designed.