My Cardboard Balcony

She Said It Was A Smile by Belinda Roddie She said it was a smile caught in the rain when she presented the drawing that I had instructed her to work on that day in the stifling eighty degree classroom. I had told ten girls to draw whatever first popped into their minds after closing their eyes. At first, this student's paper was nothing but Jackson Pollock-esque squiggly lines, and that was all she could at first call them. But then we drew together - number eights with smiley faces that we called friends, a snake singing "S" that I concocted in my mind. So her picture soon became two eyes, and a smile that held in the rain.

I broke down the timeline of the night's events again to Stewart, just as the ice was being to melt into fresh globs against his still apparently aching brow. Obviously, step one to the entire process had been to crack open our neighbors' most expensive bottle of tequila. "And Rodrigo didn't mind?" "Not at all. He hates agave. His cousin gave it to him." After that, it has all been confetti and insanity.