My Cardboard Balcony

Where Were You by Belinda Roddie Where were you when we set the church on fire, exposing all the skeletons inside? Their bones gleamed orange as each solemn spire crumbled like sugar, redemption denied. Once entombed, they were freed, the smiling skulls with crooked teeth, all torched by searing heat, and one by one, their purgatoried souls found quiet sleep eternal underneath the earth. They were unnamed but had been killed by Christ's so-called "apostles." Heretics, they called them. Sick and blasphemous. Weak-willed. We freed them from their mortal cages. Bits of ash clung to our clothes, but you weren't there. We'd destroyed pure evil. You didn't care.

"Her skin was soft as silk," she wrote before crumpling up the binder paper in her left fist and tossing it into the nearest wastebasket. Bah. "Soft as silk." Why did everyone like using that? Holly was sure that human skin was not the same as silk texture-wise. If anything, skin had bumps and grooves and hills and valleys. That seemed better than comparing it to a piece of cloth.