My Cardboard Balcony

by Belinda Roddie Maybe if he were more careful, things like that wouldn't happen so often. But as it were, Todd's truck had been totaled, a lion cub had escaped from the zoo as a direct result of said crash into the wildcat exhibit, and an enraged zookeeper with a greasy coif and a long-handled taser was after him. Now he was crawling on his hands and knees through tall grass, not knowing how close he was to the zoo after so much running. The entire city was surrounded by forest and valleys, almost nestled into nature like an ugly metropolitan steel tumor. He could be lost in the thickening landscape, for all he cared, with no food or water. The only two things he had on him besides his hoodie and his baseball cap were his dead zoned cellphone and a crushed can of beer - which he had been unapologetically drinking at the time he had barreled his way past the lemur cages and disturbed the lions. Poor lion cub. In the last minute of pulling himself from the smashed pick-up

Everybody's moral compass points north, and no one bothers to question why. North has never been forward, nor has it ever been backward. Magnets tell us nothing about the direction we should take in life, and frankly, I'd personally like to forego the compass entirely. A moral map is what I need, with destinations and roads, and my decisions on which paths to take and which towns to travel through.