My Cardboard Balcony

Bargaining by Belinda Roddie Let's make a deal: You take me to Bret Harte's Poker Flat, and I'll make sure you don't end up like Oakhurst, with the teeth of his own Derringer lodged in his sagging aorta. His skin pulsed and cried for some sort of panacea. The stuffing filled the scar. The strings tied themselves up into a hot air balloon. If you push your luck, you lose your luck. If you're out of luck, the night terrors suck. If I fork over a handful of fool's gold, you can slip it under your tongue like a fake token of gratitude to a god with mangy hair and a misshapen nose and a lisp from a cleft palate that he was never able to get fixed. The fates all settle their spines over tea in the basement. They discuss you and me, both equally. They giggle. They know I'll call your bluff. And in return, you'll probe my mind with second thoughts in the shape of a 9 millimeter smile.

I can't see colors. Shapes, sure - squares and triangles and circles and cubes. I can detect the verticals and the horizontals, the sharp and the soft, the texture and the tactile. I can see movement - quick or slow, sometimes even when it's such a blur that sound trails after it like a confused child. But colors? Nothing of the sort. Sepia is a foreign word to me. It's synonymous to my reality.