My Cardboard Balcony

Exodus by Belinda Roddie No more jugs of happiness to pour into your bloodstream. We've gone down this road too many times. The asphalt's cracked and wearing thin, like aging bone too brittle to fossilize properly. I'd like to stay, but the vertigo is no longer digestible. I've eaten enough spinach and chicken to get me through the desert like a bedraggled Moses. My people were let go, but I was never free. They told me I should've broken these suburban chains long ago. Now I have the strength to split the white picket fence with a hatchet. You stock your fridge with drinkable shame. Take a sip, and the iron gets thicker and heavier around your ankles. I'm miles from you, in a truck on a repaved freeway. You're drunk on artificial satisfaction. I'm breathing fresh, rural air again.

So we were at a mixer the other night, and there were two girls just staring at us the whole time. Like, non-blinking, eyes-bugging, legitimate, bona fide staring. I remember we went to the bar to get ourselves some martinis, and one of the girls with the never ending gaze just tapped me on the shoulder - right on the sore spot, too, where I had just gotten a fresh tetanus shot - and she asked me: "Do you like your women like you like your martinis?" I didn't know how to answer. "Uh, you mean dry and with olives?"