My Cardboard Balcony

I hadn't meant to cause a scene, yet, there we were. Sitting almost helplessly at the corner table, the clatter of forks and knives on hard plates having subsided to hear my mother's crying. This wasn't gentle weeping, nor hiccuping sobs. It was more like this plaintive wail, this keening, like she had just been stabbed in the abdomen and was trying desperately to breathe but could only exhale continually. I stared down into my wine glass. The Merlot was starting to look like blood.

A man with a tan got buried in the sand while the girl wearing pearls said she owned the whole world. On the coast with the most sunshine, I would boast I could fly in the sky with a towering mai tai.

by Belinda Roddie My heart donor was a homeless guy who literally lived at the gym. I never knew his name until afterward. No one did. He simply hovered around the treadmills by day, eating some sort of bagel that had probably been stale and free from the local café, before retiring to one of the locker room benches at night. Why none of the workers hadn't kicked him out was beyond me. And the one time he had stepped out of the gym, he had been bowled over by a motorcyclist who was still high from the adrenaline kick after thirty minutes on the elliptical. His heart seemed to be the only thing that had avoided skidmarks or road rash. I had never been to Riley's gym. It wasn't your standard chain gym - it had endured the YMCA's and the 24 Hour Fitness's and the Equinox's. In fact, it had been going for over fifty years now. Riley Samson IV - spry and balding and barely thirty years old - had recently become the owner and was the one to break the news about t...

They told me I had to watch my weight, but I sat and stared and slept and ate as much as I could and as much as I wanted, not gaining an ounce, and I went out and flaunted my beautiful curves and my beautiful bends, my beautiful beginnings and my beautiful ends, my bumps and my lumps and my rises and falls, my fleshy domain with its own private walls. Got a bag of cheetos and a beer to spare? I'll eat the whole town's food - I don't even care.

This week has been, for lack of a better word, eventful. I've been getting to know my students, getting to know my mentor teachers, and getting to know my credential peers. I'm being encouraged to start lesson development, even though it's extremely nervewracking and I still have to finish Cannery Row before I can start doing anything reasonably academic for it. I've worked with my bookstore manager to reduce my hours, and I've picked up new students at my other teaching job. And to top it all off, I've realized that I still have a long way to go in order to truly accept my genderfluidity. While my post on May 15th earlier this year, in which I officially came out as genderfluid, is fairly to the point in regards to how I feel, there have been times in which it hasn't been that simple. Yes, genderfluidity does mean I occasionally feel more female or male, and it also does mean I can feel like both. It also kind of means I can feel like neither. It really d...

In Case It Wasn't Clear by Belinda Roddie I'm genderfluid, and I am damn proud to be so.

She hadn't mentioned to me that she was expecting Carlos to show up. He never did appear. We tried phoning his family, but the ringing just went on and on, like some sort of endless void of noise sucking my ear into the receiver. I tried texting him - no dice. Emily was sniffling now. I could tell she was getting nervous. "Hey." I pulled her into a hug. "Hey, it's okay. He's probably busy. Maybe he forgot we were supposed to group up."