My Cardboard Balcony

Edge of the Bed by Belinda Roddie On the edge of the bed, you swerve around me, the contours of a lover so warm and so enveloping that I can sleep between your mountains and breathe in the pollen of your valleys, the slopes playing their crescendo across my quivering chest. Your hand does not creep or crawl or slither. Rather, it glides and slumbers against the back of my head, gripping the follicles of my hair in the most comforting way, while your lips moisten the already sweaty skin of my forehead as you repeat to me the same, tired mantra at three am: That it's going to be okay, that it's all going to be okay, that I'm okay and I will be okay and it will all be perfectly and adequately okay, and the only reason I can believe it, as I regain the tepid rhythm of my breath and the cooling of my brain, is because you hold me so tightly and never let go once, until the hyperventilating has stopped, the tears have dried, and I can dream again w...

Lillian's look could have withered all the flowers in the room, decadent buds reduced to gray, dead globules of what they once were in their glass prism vases. She snatched the paper out of Herman's grip and proceeded to tear it, very slowly, in half, never changing her expression as her husband gurgled out a verb-less protest as she threw the pieces to the floor. "Not." She uttered it slowly, word by word. "On. Your. Damn. Life."