My Cardboard Balcony

by Belinda Roddie Every year, the village quietly lit their Christmas lights in hopes of bringing him back. One by one, each red, purple, yellow, orange, and green bulb sprinkled their incandescent shadows upon the sleet and snow, the icicles appearing to be crystalline blue beneath the artificial sheen, the crevices of frost almost looking as if they were rising up to swallow the colors whole in their icy jaws. As each door was locked and every window shuttered and latched, all the light that remained were the endless strands of festive hues leading any stranger through the cropping of dilapidated houses, offices, and buildings. That night, there was nothing one could hear, but everything to see. Whomever the citizens were waiting for, no one from the outside could safely say. Some claimed that it was a long-lost governor or king, when the village was a majestic city, cast in gold and the envy of the rest of the modern world. Others scoffed, saying it was merely a sad attempt to

Todd missed his son's graduation, and then his daughter's graduation two years later, and then his nephew's graduation three years after that. The reason each time was that he had been led as if on a leash over to Papa Fred's Bar and Grille, where he drank himself stupid with his friends Mac and Erin, oblivious to the passing time as he swigged shot after shot of bourbon. In the meantime, his family took group pictures, celebrated and hollered when their loved ones crossed the graduation stage, and toasted to each night, all while Todd slowly succumbed to another black-out night of revelry and short-lived glee.