My Cardboard Balcony

by Belinda Roddie I was going 92 down the Bay Bridge in my Chevy Astro. The hippie couple in the back still hadn't finished making love and I was afraid the drugs were starting to wear off. Mind you, the dope and the pills I had enjoyed weren't exactly the heaviest, but the high they had granted me was enough to ignore the horny hitchhikers as they attempted to make a baby right on the just freshly steamed backseat of my beloved Neil Armstrong. Yeah. I named my Astro Neil Armstrong. If that's not the most appropriate fucking name, then I don't know what is. Anyway, I screamed my way into the city and dropped those fornicating bastards off at the closest liquor store so they could smoke cigarettes in the afterglow, before I drove almost another mile out to Hotel Griffon. Now, normally I could never afford a room at that little "paradise," as my more "educated" friends liked to call it, but it turned out that a buddy of mine was staying there...

“Mom, where’s the cat?” “Upstairs.” “Where’s Dad?” “Downstairs.” “Where’s the dog?” “Outside.” “And where am I?” I stared at my son, whose eyes as blue as the sapphire on my wedding ring shone back at me with that typical youthful innocence that you read about in those books that are badly written and overly sentimental. Then I blinked and put down the ladle that I had been using to scoop up soup and said, “Well, you’re here, kiddo. You’re in the kitchen with me.”