My Cardboard Balcony

Let Us Go Forth by Belinda Roddie The service ended as the sun bathed its fragile body in a tub of grass and scrubbed its back with a dead tree. The bells clanged like a giant's chattering teeth in the cold, and all the churchgoers bustled out in their black coats and their blue shoes, their black scarves bunched against their blue noses and chins. The Catholics and the Orthodox Jews sat on different sides of a picnic table that was rusting around its ankles in the park next to the old brick chapel, red breath held between white lips so as to not kiss the forehead of a stubborn and reluctant God. No one bothered these two groups; while they were different, they were good company at parties, which were kept hush-hush at the crab feeds and congregational picnics, where ham was served on white bread, and the children drew pictures of men in broad hats, wearing curly beards. As the swarm subsided, the pastor drank the rest of the communal wine and frow

The charm on Samantha's necklace was a thin, flat, circular disc of gold and silver, with runes sketched into its metal flesh, runes I could not read. She seemed to understand them, though, for she would lift the chain from her bosom and calmly recite a language that must been the one written there.