My Cardboard Balcony

Culinary Accident by Belinda Roddie The eyes swim! A stumble in a stitched white kitchen, a pint glass shattered atop one's concave head. Explosion: Silica confetti to celebrate - what? An intervention. Confession of momentary clumsiness. The fingers don't pinch as hard as they used to, crab claw loosening its motorized grip. You slipped up again when dinner was served. The fragments hid in the folds of the chicken breasts and stayed there, happy in the heat of the meat and salt glittering on the shrooms, browned by fire and grease and butter. Now it all had a crunch unappealing to a concussion sufferer's appetite. Shake, shake, pretty hands. Convulse once more, and then against my unscathed skin be silent.

I'm not very religious, and yet a little god spoke to me on my seventeenth birthday. She was dressed in a little purple robe and wore a little black hat, and she slurped soup from a little white bowl that smelled like something I could get from a Vietnamese restaurant. Her little blonde curls bounced from under the brim of her hat, and she giggled when I stared. "You know," she squeaked, "it's rude to ogle a deity like myself." She was no bigger than a house cat, and yet here she was, chastising me for alleged impropriety.