My Cardboard Balcony

The Zealot's Banquet by Belinda Roddie Let this be a lesson to me as I sit across the table from you: you spoon words into my mouth as cold as the gazpacho served to me in an ivory bowl. I choke on the language, its foreign tang stinging my tongue. This is your speech infiltrating my taste buds, not mine. Look at you, so serene as you dust the crumbs of your victory onto the napkin in your lap. I want to take my fork and gouge your goddamn eyes out - watch the pain course, red as wine, from your whiskey-addled mind. You can't hide your insecurities under marinara and risotto. No salt or pepper will season a bland persona. You think your undercooked diatribes impress me, that your passion on platters speak to me on a spiritual level. They fucking don't. I am left struggling to separate my opinions from the ones you forced upon me, cutting them into pieces with a steak knife, feeding them to me as you would a baby, ignoring the gagging throughout the

The priests and deacons and parishioners all tried to tell me what my grief was supposed to feel like. But I shut their words out like I would the cold, pulling down the fragile, frosty glass of my cerebral window and enjoying how much softer the wind seemed to roar against the pane. For hours on end, I would sit in my easy chair, reading the newspaper, cutting out words from the headlines that reminded me of her. Perhaps that was not what my fellow churchgoers thought of when they talked about sorrow or mourning, but for me, it felt like a proper idiosyncrasy, a personal and comfortable way to express myself without falling apart at the seams.