My Cardboard Balcony

Glow by Belinda Roddie After scratching binary code in exam scores, I found myself on my back, reading The Sun Also Rises with a wine thirst and a need for a brief, temporary respite, as the sky was dipped in the honeycomb sunset so a golden, sticky blemish coated my hands. I clutched the book tighter and tighter with each page, realizing all too well that I was skimming, and the faces of expatriates steadily blurred, and the charging bulls lost their horns in the glow of speeding colors, victim to a mind's flurry, propped up by wires spitting bronze fire into my eyes so that they burned, and the text, like it always did, became more of a menace than an entertainment.

In a very biblical essence, the wall of the cathedral crumbled and decayed as if time were sped up - almost immediately the debris had begun to settle right after it had fallen, the dust collecting around those scraps of stained glass that remained. The city claimed that it was "necessary" to tear down the edifice in light of new earthquake precautions, but in the end, a ray of light could only signify the tumble.