My Cardboard Balcony

Warner's Coroner by Belinda Roddie Warner's coroner was a foreigner, taking snuff from a cardboard box, chewing gum in between sleeping spells. He drew pictures on the coffins and tried singing children to sleep when they were already dead. Warner's coroner was a total bore, never much fun at parties, even refraining from hitting piñatas but still wearing the blindfold while he drank heavily and greedily from the punch bowl. Warner's coroner had a disorder, a real need for clean, steady breeding, babies over sex, boys over girls, but never paying much child support while he stuck his head in a barrel of tobacco and breathed in lucky draws. He dragged in Warner's body, which had been shot twice in the head, and read him a bedtime story, even though the bastard was twelve hours dead and had a rigor mortis middle finger poking into the may-as-well-be-dead-man's eye.

A little dysfunctionality never hurt an American dream family, eating pie and burping chunks of filtered conversation so that they fall onto china plates (or on the floor, for the dog and cat to eat). The television set has lots of friends, and the newspaper feels like it's getting rough loving every morning and every night. The bedsheets are pulled up real tight to the chins of everyone in the household.