My Cardboard Balcony

Harlequin by Belinda Roddie if you tell me I look happy, it's because I am happy, dancing on tables with seven women in red dresses all watching me with green money eyes. see these bells? they inhale love mint juleps and they exhale this brilliant noise that rattles glasses in a fat man's fists. exquisite spectacle of gold balls hovering in the vision of a sweet twenty-something who will strip the diamonds off my flesh and marvel at the fact that they match.

The man at the demonstration was naked from the waist down. As my son pointed and stared, I tried to cover his eyes with one hand while pushing my daughter's stroller in the other. " 'Let it all hang out?' " I heard one man complain. "That's such a lame pun!" Really? I thought. Out of all the things you see, sir, that's what you complain about?

The Banjo by Belinda Roddie The banjo played three notes over and over all by itself. Joey heard its plaintive plunking and promptly wet himself in terror.

I swing my arm from the branch and lift myself onto the rotting tree house planks, their sighs and screams muffled by my lackluster girth. The air picks up around my face and stings at every clogged pore and every blemish I get to show off to the world. My nephew, Timothy, is playing basketball with my cousins below. The concrete is dry and scarred, and I don't want to climb down.

REM User by Belinda Roddie REM user dream abuser stealer, thief, Arabian mischief flying on a shred of upholstery kissing sand with threadless teeth you glide and every wish becomes a dream and every dream becomes a grain in your burlap sack you don't sprinkle them back and the desert just keeps sleeping.

We tell everyone the same thing: Don't try these stunts. We're professionals. We've got years and years and years of training on us to do these so we have less of a risk of cracking our heads open on raw asphalt. But every year, it's the same thing - a kid tries the 2003 motorcycle trick over a bridge, breaks his knees and his ribs, and we get sued for it. I've started to save the subpoena notices. They're tacked on our bulletin board.

This was my town. Four buildings and a church. A general store, a hardware store, a lumber yard, a fire department. A banner proclaiming a brand new opportunity to have a Monte Carlo night. I lived a mile or so away in the woods, a small cabin being my home. I had no TV, no computer, no DVD player. Just a record player for my musuc. And I loved it.