My Cardboard Balcony

by Belinda Roddie "I don't go out to restaurants so much as haunt them." "Yeah. I know." "I mean, the bill can be so steep..." "Yep." "Especially the booze." "Uh-huh." "Always the goddamn expensive booze." "I hear ya." "So I hover around the tables a bit and look a bit sketch until someone leaves. Then I get the remains of their meal." "..." "John.  John. I'm fucking with you." "I know, but...ew." "Ew?" "As in, ew, don't eat people's leftovers at restaurants. I mean, germs." "Oh, yeah. Of course you focus on the sanitary part of it, dude." "Well..." "And not the concept that I am joking about legitimately freaking people out from their tables to eat their stuff." "Well, that was a given." "Oh, fuck you." ...

It was a sacrifice I was willing to make, and one that I carried out quickly and efficiently. I knew that someone out there would need what I was giving up. It wasn't just money. It wasn't just livelihood. It was something that had made me far more functional than the average human being. Something that had turned me into the hero at the end of the twentieth century, now broken down for science a good twenty years later. I was giving away the organ that had granted me superpowers.