My Cardboard Balcony

by Belinda Roddie Gunther was six years old before his mother realized that he was just a sack of potatoes. Granted, his sister was a giant cucumber, while his older brother had won first prize for biggest watermelon at the county fair. And anyway, Gunther's father was a box of saltine crackers. Ms. Dreyfuss had been coping with the loss of her family pet - a sweet little old Corgi named Sir Lawrence Addley Howard Charlemagne IV, who had always kept her company on her little front porch in front of her little mobular home. There had been no Sir Lawrence Addley Howard Charlemagne III, or II, or even I. The number four - especially in roman numeral form - just pleased Ms. Dreyfuss to no end. So after burying the poor old fluffy man in the yard with a sprig of fresh lilies (which, ironically, could be toxic to both dogs and cats, but the Corgi was already dead, so what did it matter?), Ms. Dreyfuss created her own little family. For some time, she even carried around a pillow un

In my experience, I had never come across a werewolf. Tonight was no exception. No, instead I was confronting rapidly spawning legions of seemingly rabid llamas. Granted, this was post-apocalyptic Cusco, deep in the plague-ravaged valleys of what was once the beautiful country of Peru. The thing was, I was hoping to go to Machu Picchu to see if something could be re-established. I found llamas instead.