My Cardboard Balcony

Drunk Candy Run by Belinda Roddie Drag yourself on foot, at eight AM, to the local candy store where you can pound a honeycomb chocolate marshmallow cocktail down your throat and not hiccup once. Do me a favor: Make sure you bring back butterscotch sweets and butterscotch schnapps. Drench a caramel in kahlua, and you have a festival in my dry, fermented mouth. The wine's cold, but the jelly beans are warm, and the sugar melts sideways on the furthest molars in my jaw, and I am left to sift, sift, sift through my lungs the dust of pixie sticks, until I can't taste the difference between right and wrong.

"Flee!" screamed my sister. "Flee! Flee! Fleeeee!" The guards had her by both arms and were dragging her toward the freezing chamber, and I was screaming and sobbing and flailing as the doors sealed behind me. I was left outside in the blizzard, which, in truth, was warmer than where the soldiers would put my sister, her heart slowing into nothingness. I buried my face in the sleet and wailed, belly collecting frost beneath my tunic.