My Cardboard Balcony

A Cookie from the Lobby by Belinda Roddie Peanut butter and chocolate chips wrapped in a fragile yet mothering napkin. The curtains drawn over our tiny hotel room. We are naked under the sheets. We are sated, and we still have sugar in our mouths.

"Who's the new gardener?" The new gardener is not, in fact, a new gardener at all. She has been working on and off for the Mills Residence ever since she was seventeen years of age; that was almost six years ago. She goes to a particularly temperamental patch of weeds and pulls her gloves back on. They smell faintly of lilacs and a trace of juniper. Orville Mills is eighty-two years old. He has no idea who the gardener is, but he doesn't remember much of anyone or anything these days.