My Cardboard Balcony

by Belinda Roddie Look at you, shakin' the sugar out of your shoes. You shared a funnel cake with me, and some of the sparkling cinnamon was lapped up by the leather tongues protecting your weak ankles. You walked out onto the grass, stripped your feet bare, and waved your socks in the air like streamers. Clouds of sweet dust occupied the remaining bubbles blown from a nameless child's plastic magic wand. Before the funnel cake, you held me when we watched the fireworks at the fair. Look at you, clinging to me like sugar to your shoes. Hair lit up by distant golds and reds and purples and greens and blues. You got to watch the explosive confetti in person and from the glowing lens of my camera. I kept your whooping quieter for the sake of my ears. I could see your smile without even turning around. Before the fireworks, we walked together in the fine arts building. Every painting, photograph, sculpture, and mixed media had a different story to tell. Some stories, of cours

We wanted to be rebels so badly. Break the rules. Cheat the system. Hack our way through the conventional expectations of the world we lived in. We thought shoplifting candy bars and individual cans of beer was edgy, and we were certain that climbing over steel wire fences with large black "NO TRESPASSING" signs meant we defied the boundaries and borders set around us. Then we all went to college. Got jobs. Raised families. Until the system itself grew fangs and began to devour us, we moved with it like molasses down a pipe.