My Cardboard Balcony

Winter's End by Belinda Roddie Are you just? Are you fair? Do you drink mint so your enemies don't smell the truth on your breath? Or do you string their toes up on a January morning that's eighty degrees Fahrenheit, leaving the heat to bake the ideas in their heads until they're nothing but naughty whims?

The crowd looked at me with an awkward reverence, their eyes never leaving my exposed hands as I stood in the middle of the lake. It was as if they had experienced a baptism in the aftermath of a rebirth - all I had merely done was bring a confused young boy back to shore because he had followed his dog into the water and could not swim. As I slogged my way back to solid ground, I noticed as my white shirt seemed longer and dragged behind me like a robe. I assumed that such an occurrence did not dissuade the audience from a Christian-like image.