My Cardboard Balcony

Market, One PM by Belinda Roddie In the café, she holds the notebooks out to me in trembling, wrinkled hands, like she's sealed her soul away in aged parchment and ancient ink. She tells me that this "manuscript" of hers has been sitting in her home for about twenty years, and she would like to have me type it up. No edits. Apologies for the sloppy penmanship. My nose catches the background noise of tiny cups of espresso in front of laptops, that sharp bitter aroma lingering alongside the burning plastic odor of an overheated chip of silicon buried in a motherboard trying desperately to contact cyber space. Above our heads, there could be God or aliens, but no matter what, our brains are constructed from frayed wires and dying batteries, and soon, ultimately, whatever we write will be burned by an ever swelling sun and we will yearn for immortality in the dry trenches left behind by the oceans that have boiled away.

You try to find a power outlet, but there is none. Not even the holes left behind by the prairie dogs offer anything. You stare in stupefied horror as your cellphone battery dwindles down to nothing. No Instagram. No Snapchat. No Facebook. No Vine. It's just you and Mother Nature now, and you feel too tired to take the half mile trek back to town to recharge your phone. A bird chirps above your head. You scream.