My Cardboard Balcony

The Dead Playwright by Belinda Roddie His characters had learned nothing. The women were all left drinking. The ice grew colder by the end of the act, not warmer, far against the physics of passion, the kind that he had never grown accustomed to practicing. And somehow, when the ribbon on the typewriter broke, and the second half was never completed, there was something more dramatic in the way he settled in the corner of his room, the rum hotter than his own frustrations, his heart giving out loudly to the sound of outside traffic, where a comedy roared in the rundown tavern, and a soliloquy was hummed beneath the fire escape by a girl wearing gloves to cover the scars on her fingers.

I stood upon the weathered stone and waited for the ocean air to hit me from the left, cooling the aches in my shoulder and elbow as I tried to forget the very concept of pain. It occurred to me that the walk to the shore had taken two hours, and my small village was nothing but a distant shadow behind me. The Atlantic was the only thing separating me from another continent, and I wished dearly that I had the endurance to swim the entire way across it.