My Cardboard Balcony

by Belinda Roddie Two clean-cut young men in shirts and ties stood on my door step and asked me if I had heard the message of their Lord, Aslan. I promptly invited them inside for drinks and a good old-fashioned literary conversation. They were pretty satisfied with the fact that I had appreciated the joke. In truth, the boys were named Ivan and Jonathan, and they wanted to promote literacy to at-risk students. We were young adults all living in a low-income district of the city, and many of the elementary schoolers were English learners. Ivan and Jonathan had taken on the door-to-door routine as partially a joke, partially a message on literature. Unfortunately, many people hadn't gotten the hint. "We actually wound up at a Mormon's house, and he was none too happy about our set-up," sighed Ivan as he enjoyed the bowl of nilla wafers I had set out - I didn't really have a lot of sweets in the house, and my husband had used some of the cookies for a cheeseca...

The Esther plague had begun with a woman named Esther. She had been an average fifty-something who had traveled to a country no one had heard of and not even an able-minded scholar would scrawl onto an atlas. It was too small and seemingly too insignificant to be noted by anyone of any notable status. That is, until Esther returned with half of her face turning purple. It had started with the color, and the pain had been the final symptom. She had transformed into something entirely different in the middle.