My Cardboard Balcony

It's not easy to talk about loneliness without sounding indulgent or self-pitying. So as this year ends, I'll keep my mouth shut. I'll lie on the couch and stare at the ceiling, while the Christmas lights we haven't bothered to take down yet flicker around me. I'll roll a pair of dice over and over in my left hands, so that the rattling ultimately sounds like personalized percussion. I didn't expect the year to peter off like this. Feels...anticlimactic somehow. Especially now that I sit in this tiny house alone, with the fire fading in the hearth, and the snow outside more like slush than anything. Inside, the dishes have piled off. I can still smell the marinara sauce and turkey I cooked up last night. The angel hair sat uncomfortably in my stomach - perhaps real angel hair would do the same thing. Why I'd eat real angel hair, I dunno. Why I think angels may be real, I don't know, either. I should do the dishes. But I'm so tired. It's not...

I called the police after hearing glass break at my neighbor's house. Instead of a smashed window, however, it was an empty wine bottle that had made the sound, and by the time the officers arrived, Mr. Pollack was kneeling against the wall, forehead pressed against the plaster, a precise stream of red flowing from the exposed back of his head. Mrs. Pollack was nowhere to be found.