My Cardboard Balcony

The Day I Went Mad by Belinda Roddie The day I went mad was when a stranger followed me with half a pound of sugar in his pocket, snorting up speeches until I screamed, " Fuck off! Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off!" right before maple syrup descended from my left nostril and I crashed on one hip and made the pavement break beneath my weight. When I came to, the walls were pink and pulsing, like the sides of a sated tongue, and I shouted at the rising floor for answers, but the teeth on the table did not have time to speak. I drenched myself in hot lemonade and dripped sarcasm, watching it sizzle only for a moment before everything got very, very cold.

Tyler refused to play pool because it reminded him far too much of geometric stuff. That, and he was never good at cutting with a cue stick. And it made sense - he couldn't even properly identify right angles these days. Some might say he didn't pay attention in math class as a teenager, but in truth, stuff like geometry and algebra very much scared him. Anything regarding shapes, codes, and matrices was like a phobia.