My Cardboard Balcony

by Belinda Roddie It was the ugliest tattoo she had ever gotten and she loved it. Not that the other tattoos were much better. Some people did actually have taste in art and aesthetics. Any regular fool who knew how to decorate a house with the proper patterns and colors knew when a painting or a design was bound to fall flat on its fresh acrylic oily face. But for Gwendolyn, it was like color blindness taken to the entire visual spectrum. Gwen had gotten her first tattoo when she was eighteen, and just turned eighteen, two hours after the analog time on her birth certificate. The wretched looking butterfly with the broken-looking wings was still melting on her back to this day, and it looked more and more like purple-pink candle wax with each passing year. On both arms, she had gone for smiley faces stars with big, drooping red tongues - like a celestial ":P" emoticon on her skin instead of a cellphone screen. They were Chinese characters that claimed her babies would

Temporary blindness, they had told me. It would go away sooner rather than later, they had told me. Yet here I was, three months after the accident, the only thing I could see being white shadows dancing in an ocean of salty, repugnant black. My father was behind bars now, and if I couldn't see him, he'd see me. The baseball bat to the back of my head had been damage enough, but my mother dead?