My Cardboard Balcony

by Belinda Roddie The market is always my favorite part of errands day. Or at least it will be, though I don't let my husband know it. That's why, on the same day that my husband left for a sailboating trip with his agent, I've decided that I will take the three months' worth of income that I have secretly saved and go to Mania Market. I have approximately two thousand, seven hundred and fifty-two dollars stored in a small brass heirloom box – money I have kept away after spending the necessary increments on food and bills and the occasional new spool of thread to patch my favorite fraying, purple dress. And that isn't counting the coins, either, and I have plenty of those. My supervisor, bless his wrinkled, saggy heart, pays me a generous fifteen hundred dollars a month for my minimal shifts at the Teapot Tavern – and, as my husband's grown very tired of my smelling like a cross of John’s Mead and Earl Gray, my supervisor also gives me a complimentary fla

I'm getting tired of seeing a metaphor tattooed on a cockroach's shell. It means nothing, no matter how many nuclear holocausts it survives. The moon does not smile. A river does not sing. Any melody you hear is just the crackling of water against rocks. Any grin you see is just a pattern of craters along a desolate landscape. Nothing is secretly more beautiful than it already is. And the cockroach is going to eventually die.