My Cardboard Balcony

Sitting On The Curb by Belinda Roddie Van's getting desperate for a pack of smokes, and I'm itching for a tall, frosty drink. We're chewing fog and spitting out rain outside the liquor store. We only have three nickels and a couple of bad scratch tickets to spare. Nearby, the ribbon of cars scraping out of downtown has been reduced to a frayed thread. One bicyclist screams at a driver who dared honk his horn at her. She's not wearing a helmet. Van scoffs at that. "She's gonna hit a fire hydrant and get brain damage as soon as she slams into the pavement." Sometimes, Van gets imaginatively specific. We see a friend shuffle by, and she's got both cigarettes and a lighter. The cold is masked by the smell of tobacco and the taste of ash and dusty paper. Across the street, a young boy cries because his mom didn't let him go into the toy store. It's dark out, and I can barely see beyond the street into the hills where light...

"I hardly find this country united at all these days," grumbled Vincent, a sentiment all too familiar and all too common among practically everyone I knew. "Everything is polarized. Liberals become more liberal, conservatives become more conservative. The enemy line is drawn. Forget terrorism or nuclear warfare; the real conflict is at home. "What ever happened to flesh and blood?" he continued, swirling his glass of gin.