My Cardboard Balcony

I am not a big fan of the musical Annie. Not to say I don't like it: It has its songs and it has its moments, and who doesn't love watching evil Mrs. Hannigan throw a hissy fit about running a juvenile orphanage (which I wonder why she even took on if she hated children so much). I just happen to give it the almighty and powerful "meh" when someone asks what I think of it. But its lyrics certainly fit my mood lately, and no, I'm not talking about the ever popular "Tomorrow." I'm talking about lyrics from "I Don't Need Anything But You." Those lyrics between Annie and Daddy Warbucks ring rather true to me currently: Yesterday was plain awful! / You can say that again! / Yesterday was plain awful, / but that's not now, that's then! Yesterday was plain awful. No, I won't say it again. Nor will I go into much detail. All you need to know is that I made mistakes. I slipped up. I sucked it up. I worked my ass off. And as a res...

Life of Luxury by Belinda Roddie I am a very wealthy woman. My father left me this mansion, set with ivory gates and marble prosceniums. Any richer, and I would have jewels in my teeth. I live a life of epic luxury in large,  empty rooms and wide hallways. It gets lonely in this mansion, and the corridors don’t help. They seem to lead to the edges of the world, but they only go so far. They should be made of stone. I did love someone once. He died on the balcony, clutching his chest and dropping his champagne glass. It shattered into pieces so tiny that I could never clean it all up. I keep the shards in a box on my mantel. He was a gardener. Nothing has been planted so tenderly in the courtyard since. I walk down these corridors every night. Perhaps I'll have the wood and plaster stripped and stone set into the twists and bends. It's only appropriate, for I live a life of cold empty luxury in a fortress that gives no warmth and no love. The work you see here has not ...

Stable boy cleans the stable. Rich wife of a baron who hailed from a stuffy family in London trots over on her black horse. She has been hunting foxes. Stable boy mops his brow from the flies. He smells like shit and sweat and sweaty shit and shitty sweat. Rich wife can't get enough of him. She wants to tear off that bodice of hers and tackle him into the dung. How typical.

My Wife Kissed Me by Belinda Roddie My wife kissed me good night and went to work with white florescent lamps above her head. She'd wear a mask and blood specks on her shirt as she tried to re-animate the dead. The brittle bone would snap in her hands. She would squeal in sharp exasperation when the heart would not beat. The tongue would not scream obscenities once body breathed again. Then one cold summer, stained with weariness, my wife lit up the eyes of a young girl who grew frightened and quivered in protest of being brought back to the scary world. My wife kissed me good night. Her hot lips burned. She's with her daughter and has not returned.

I slouch. I slurp. I slip up. Again. I thought I was better than this. 3 o’clock on the computer. Three minutes fast. I screwed up again. Hammer to the head. They glare at me. What did I do wrong? I’m trying. I really am. I’m isolated. I’m failing. No papers are coming in. I’m writing in my journal. No. Not allowed. All my fault I’m not doing well. All my fault. All my fault. All my fault.

Barney's Dead the petroleum smell so familiar in Old Barney's Coffee Shop by the Chevron station Barney pours my coffee then goes into the kitchen and promptly has a stroke while baking muffins no one notices, of course until a regular (fifty-eight years old and bustier than a cheerleader) wonders why Cristóbal is getting her tea instead of the big white guy

Anywhere is a word that tends to bother certain people because saying you could go anywhere you wanted isn't exactly accurate, being that we are stuck on this tiny pearl of a planet and do not fly out to Mars for fear of our heads bursting like candy-filled balloons, spraying confetti all across the solar system - or travel back in time, for that matter, to Victorian England, where you'd be more likely to get the black lung than have a lovely dance with the aristocracy, but at least your lungs wouldn't compress into ribbons upon your intrepid voyage to Jupiter...without a helmet.