My Cardboard Balcony

Dejeration by Belinda Roddie She swore she'd always love me as we buried ourselves in our nests, the five foot lamp abusing us with its hostile lighting. Her kisses left prints on the Bible between us, to tell the truth, and nothing but the truth, but in the end, no matter how solemnly one swears, the windshield of the moving car cracks just a little, lets too much warm air in, and stifles vocabulary until it's dried out and crunches under my bare feet, like it did beneath her skidding shoes as she ran with two suitcases under her arms.

There was a sharp rallying cry as the swarm of students all broke the first line of public safety defense and stormed their way up the main hall, where the chancellor's office was hidden. Now the chancellor could be seen bursting his way out of the side door, his suit jacket billowing behind him, as he fled. One girl, red-faced, charged after him, and I could hear her scream, "Yeah, go run, you pansy! That's exactly what the student you raped two weeks ago couldn't do!"

A Chef's Regret by Belinda Roddie He had hoped to please the rowdy family by providing the finest of the finest, marinated to the point of perfection, and spiced to the edge of insanity. And yet he instantly wished he hadn't because they shared no gratitude for the colorful displays and admittedly delicious trays upon trays of food, merely whining about the candles emitting too much heat, or the couple sitting nearby being too romantic, or the chairs being too small because of their bulging rumps. And the chef wished instead that he could have taken a fork right to the father's gizzard, a frying pan to the mother's forehead, and a baster to the son because he was fat enough to roast like a pig before sticking a Granny Smith apple into his maw.

As it got hotter and hotter in the valley, all of the remaining water and dew clinging to the weeds dried up or turned to vapor, and the mist that followed easily dissipated under the demanding bulk of the sun. No one dared to leave their houses that day, cranking up their air conditioners full volume, sitting in chairs with cushions that wouldn't grow sticky when making contact with perspiring skin.

The silver daffodils bloomed once a month, and if you were very good at timing, you could watch the buds slowly open by the light of the crescent - for they always seemed to enjoy a sliver of moonlight, rather than a glaring, white orb riddled with cratered eyes, watching them. When the dawn returned and dew soaked the blossoms, they closed up again, never quite withering away.

by Belinda Roddie She always walks with a limp on Sundays, and she won't tell most people why. She's a very private individual, and therefore not everyone has the privilege of her spilling her personal stories to her over tea or a warmed up chocolate croissant. But she tells me, it's at a small French-influenced restaurant, where I feast on rabbit chasseur with scalloped potatoes and she cuts into a chunk of cheese-smothered cordon bleu. We both drink White Zinfandel. She tells me that the limp is nothing to worry about, that it has been with her for a very long time and she has dealt with it for so long that it really didn't impede the speed of her walking. The question remains, though, as to why the crimp in her step only seems to occur on the Sabbath day. "I don't know," she replies with a small smile. "God's vengeance, I guess." She calls it His vengeance. I call it an alcoholic father mishandling a baseball bat. I call it th...

The husband and wife were polar opposites, married with the cold snout of a shotgun as their minister. They stayed in different parts of the house, ate different meals, slept in different bedrooms, and even watched separate television sets. What the two of them did not realize, until twenty-three years later, was that every Saturday they would watch the same sitcom, routinely, without thinking about sharing the experience with each other. In fact, it wasn't until their disenchanted son pointed it out that they understood it.