My Cardboard Balcony

Indecision by Belinda Roddie At first, I was a little concerned about you - how many times you counted the pencils on your desk, how much you paced until you left tracks like tire treads on the carpet. Somehow, I knew that you were still brooding over the final decision that you claimed to have made only to throw some serious shade on your own convictions, using one crooked branch arm to block out the sun. I told you this would be good for you. You've dipped your hands in so many pots now that we can't serve an entire kitchen; the food is tainted by your own anxiety, stripped like your own skin, sloughed off in hot water that you agreed to submerge yourself into - a scared submarine. Let me demonstrate: A frightened shadow in a secluded corner of a room, quiet as a catacomb, where all the skulls are plastic with their empty eye sockets turned toward the nearest wall. You claim to have a rapt audience when there isn't really any observation of yo...

Jerome worked overtime for the third day in a row, and when he walked back to his apartment, he found, to both his horror and resignation, that he had been robbed. His TV had been stolen, his desktop computer swiped. The remains of his clothes were strewn across the worn down carpet of his bedroom. In fact, the only thing the robbers didn't seem to grab was his cat, Lily, who had hidden under the bed in fear as they did their work.