My Cardboard Balcony

New Daily Material by Belinda Roddie The scraggly, balding man wearing the enormous green backpack sticks his hand into the nearby bushes and produces a bike pump from the leaves. He strolls off with either a new treasure or a protected, prized possession. At the closest gas station, two blokes in black, splattered with the oily guts of their truck, scream obscenities at one another for not being proper mechanics. Into my own car, the inky gold is digested. I have two books about princes and wanderers riding in the passenger's seat. Both prince and wanderer die, but one of them gets to return to his home planet and stay with his rose. When I get home, the keyboard is still hot from my raging fingers. The pen can still lash its tongue out against the paper. Sometimes, all it takes is for me to step outside and carry on with my schedule and peer into the neon kaleidoscope and see patterns and colors in ways I never thought were possible, nor worth a sin

"I found buried treasure!" shrieked a little girl from the dune close to where my boyfriend and I were soaking in the sun. As her mother ran over, we were surprised not to hear approval or cooing, but instead a blood-curdling scream. "Honey!" her scurrying father suddenly yelled. "Don't touch that!" Yes, a five-year-old aspiring archaeologist had discovered a complete human skeleton, buried on the beach.