My Cardboard Balcony

by Belinda Roddie He will break bread with us, and he will refill tired bottles with life as sweet and plentiful as our prayers. We will offer him our finest bed, but he shall demur, and he will rest his head on the wooden floor instead. And when he sleeps, he will sing - his body will shake with the hymns of his dreams, his chest rising like a heat wave and igniting the tired bones beneath with music. I will notice how weary he is then - how emaciated and haggard he looks, as if he is thirty but has aged to look like he is fifty. I will fight back the desire to cut his hair, to trim his beard, to pinch and pluck his eyebrows, even, as they descend close to his still fluttering lids. I will ponder filling a basin with hot water to soak his weathered brown body in - that misshapen flesh, baked by too many treks in the desert, scarred too much by the caressing hand of the devil. And then I will see his open wounds. That famed stigmata on the palms of his hands - it will stand out t

Let's make a blanket fort in the living room. Let's set up thirteen Christmas trees, string up so many lights that we'll glow like a multicolored sunrise. Let's build a gingerbread house, laughing at the fact that we certainly couldn't be architects in the real world, but hey - gumdrop roofs are a great aesthetic in Winter Wonderland Real Estate. Then let's make tea and cocoa and watch the classic films again and again.