My Cardboard Balcony

Nine To Five Whimsy by Belinda Roddie Her daydreams are kept in the pockets of her denim jacket, and occasionally, she extracts one and pinches it between her fingers as delicately as she would hold a dragonfly wing or dandelion dust, all lighting up from her cubicle window. When work is over, she collects the fragments of her coworkers' hopes and fears, sweeping them into a bucket to take home with her, so that she can piece together a mosaic to share with all of them at the Friday potluck, while they're just happy that they can be business casual instead of stiff and stern. Her boss is tired of being lenient; he thinks she's lost her way, her paperwork scattered, her penmanship sloppy, her head lost in the towers of imaginary nebulae in a universe only she can see. Maybe she collects second chances, too, and traps them in a mason jar. Then, one evening, he means to summon her to his office so he can finally let her go, only to find that she...

We didn't have much of a gameplan once the school burned down. Sure, we were all psyched to not have to go to classes anymore - it was only March, after all, and there just wasn't enough room to house us on other campuses until next August. But now? Well, maybe we did take our education for granted. The first two weeks were awesome - the gang ate pizza, played video games, and goofed around all while sleeping for twelve hours at a time. But then, oddly enough, we felt a strange sensation - we missed getting an education.