My Cardboard Balcony

by Belinda Roddie Herbert Campote lived a very average life, in a very average town, on a very average street, in a very average house, near very average people, until one very average day when everything changed. It started with fever. His wife Lucy had come down with an outrageously high temperature. The first night, it was one hundred three. The second, one hundred five. Herbert had Lucy wheeled to the hospital, where the doctors searched for something - anything - to explain why her body was reacting so negatively. But they found nothing. Tests came back negative, so all they could was spoon medicine into her constricted throat and hope for the best. It didn't stop there, however. Not only did his wife began to suffer convulsions, but his neighbor, Charles, began showing the same symptoms. It was odd, because Charles and Lucy never interacted, so no contagion could honestly be spread. To make things stranger, after said seizures, Herbert and Charles' wife Laura would

Charlotte wanted to burrow into her mound of sheets and blankets and bury himself under the fabric like she were hiding in a cave. She pulled the miniature flashlight out of her pocket and, remembering the page she had marked, began to read the book that her father had forbidden her to touch the night before. Sure, there were some rather risque things to read, but she was enticed by it. And she stayed up for hours reading the characters kiss again and again.