My Cardboard Balcony

Pick One by Belinda Roddie The dreams we have are shuffled like cards within a deck. We don't know if we'll reach them if God breathes down both our necks.

After falling from the second story of his house onto a trampoline and then next into a sloppily raked up pile of leaves, Chester was more than just disoriented. He suffered two fractures in his left leg, and now he had to lie on his back on a boring hospital bed in a boring hospital room, watching a boring TV show that didn't even have the volume on. "Just goes to show," the doctor had told him, "not to drink that much bourbon before agreeing to skydive."

The Symbol Of by Belinda Roddie This is just an outline of how we begin and end, of how our lines intersect before they're back to parallel and forced to repel the magnetism. I draw your fingers over mine, using pencil because the ink will make this far too permanent. Everything is temporary, and the dust of graphite just seems to emphasize that reality. When two ballerinas pose for me, their toes half-digested within the maws of hungry pointe shoes, I let the canvas crease under my brush. The geometry demands a pressure point, a level of anxiety that I can add color to - reds and greens and blues. You are a collection of dots and segments, of criss-crosses and strict angles, but when I add your curves later, the shapes form a mosaic of faces, all coated with cement, their teeth glittering with broken glass and marbles buried into each nostril. I make little for my art, and you make little time for my attention. When we are perpendicular to each othe...

"Last I checked," grunted Ricardo, "that one bedroom had seven windows built in. Seven! Who wants that many windows looking into their bedroom?" "A narcissist," Isabella replied. That got some giggles out of her sister, Clara, who was playing X-Box on the couch nearby. "I'm just saying, if we want a good house, it shouldn't be cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. You get my drift, right?"

Pick-Me-Up by Belinda Roddie The words are super sweet, and the delivery is just seamless - like a road with no speed bumps, tickled by the tires of a freshly realigned truck, carrying your suitcases to my house after three months together. But the aftertaste of each phrase is bitter, and it's hard to tamp down with either water or whiskey. The burn isn't enough to reduce your cues to cinders. You declare something that's bait for the audience - but they all feel empty in their pews once you walk away.

It's been a while since Papa called me; I haven't slept in days. I've wept out all my sins, and now I'm lost with Mary Jane. My papa's quite the bastard; he lashed me pretty good when I was still but half your age, living in this neighborhood. Papa has a cellphone, but it doesn't work too well. Is the reception bad, or is he just ignoring me? Time will tell.

Tracey removed the glove from her left hand and let her fingers descend into the open chasm in the victim's throat. The sounds she heard as she dug through his flesh and tendons certainly weren't...appealing, to say the least. Nor was the texture of her excavation particularly enticing. Still, once her fingernails struck metal, it was as if she had found gold nuggets in the deep West. "There," she grunted as she extracted a rather impressive piece of shrapnel. "That's a murder weapon for ya."