My Cardboard Balcony

by Belinda Roddie Waffle House used to be Jeremiah's favorite restaurant, until Sheila had to burn it down in 1987. By then, it wasn't serving waffles - at least, not the waffles that one would douse in boysenberry syrup and top with butter squeezed out of a tube. In the small town of Knovacoke, Waffle House became rather notorious for its characters. Namely, behind the dilapidated kitchens and seating booths with puncture holes in the shiny green cushions, there was a teeming cesspool of dirtier activity. Everyone and his grandmother knew that the place secretly became a giant brothel in 1984, even Jeremiah, who was sixteen and had grown out of his love for the Belgian dough delight and gotten into underage drinking, smoking, and motorcycle riding. Still, the restaurant held a sense of nostalgia for him as he ripped by, his heavy bike practically making ripples in the asphalt as he cast a glance at the neon "Waf-le Ho s" sign and the whitened windows. It was a ...

Not providing one iota of justification for it, I managed to incinerate the entire year's worth of files with some gasoline and a single, floppy match from a set I had swiped from the Moonshine Motel back in my hometown. They were unable to discover that I was the culprit until two months later, when I had safely stowed myself and some minimal belongings in a one-story house in the California mountains. I did not expect the phone call. "Hello?" "We know you burned everything," came the raspy voice of my former boss. "Why?" I snickered. "Because I don't think you deserve any more money."