My Cardboard Balcony

The Devil Wore A Bowler by Belinda Roddie The devil wore a bowler Christmas eve and twirled a cane tipped with silver. He curled his fingers around the door knob and pulled ever so slightly to ensure entry into the tiny apartment. He found a young mother rocking her weary child to heavy sleep beside the neon tree and half a dozen presents lined up nice and neat in a short row. The devil stopped to pull a small comb from his coat and slick his mustache into perfect shape. He left a parcel wrapped in red and green paper with gold ribbon on top. The devil's gift would leave the household quite awfully sick.

"Franky!" my mother stammered. "Where are your manners?" I furrowed my brow at the question. I hadn't done anything wrong; I had merely slipped my hand across my girlfriend's knee, keeping it from shaking, due to her being so nervous. My other hand had never let go of my fork, which was loaded with mashed potatoes. "I'm sorry?" I asked. She kept glaring at me as if expecting me to read her mind. My father cleared his throat in order to diffuse the silence.

Things You Touch by Belinda Roddie old man wrinkles littered with print fading, inky white gray against pink fingers, trickling text against cuticles, crackling whiskers, constantly trickling down, down, down. hard-soft keys in a board pressing indent and impact fonts and ctrls and dels but you have that feeling against your hands, and you have that surface to play with. Malleable plastic and binding and wood and glass and disks to pop into slots and see pictures. but with just a slab and everything far too light - a flick of a finger across air to take a picture. No buttons, no scrapbooks - just floating icons so easy to see disappear. You lose the things you touch, and in the end, you lose the feeling altogether.

We found illegal substances in his car. But not the typical illegal substances like meth or marijuana or cocaine. As the sergeant lifted the trunk of the car, we all stood there with quizzical expressions and popped up eyebrows at the conglomeration of glass and metal canisters within the vehicle. "What are those?" Patrol Officer Taft asked. The sergeant lifted up one canister and eyed the symbol. It was alien.

Frank's Face by Belinda Roddie Frank's face was covered in a sticky paste from the arts and crafts project that Mrs. Grace had assigned the six-year-olds that day. He tried to wipe it off with a towel, but the towel stuck hard to his chin and he cried long and hard until his friend Sally had the idea of using water. As he cleaned up the souring residue of paint and silly glue, Sally sat with him and passed him a jar of blue. She said, "You can make an ocean so you can remember how water fixes everything." And how Frank wished it really did.

The verbal assaults were only the beginning of the barrage of hate that she and I faced walking down the corridors where the military gray lockers waited unyielding with closed metal lips. The words were typical, more dangerous due to the laces of tone than the actual constructs of speech. I had certainly heard the derogatory terms before. But it was the way they were said that was more malicious and more frightening. I never thought people could hate us this much.

Second Picnic by Belinda Roddie A second picnic together is always better than the first; you know exactly what you want to bring, and you know exactly where to sit - far away from the anthills and tick weeds and other insect-infested stumps and ditches and trees. You pick a new tablecloth (a cleaner one, too). You bring more food. More drinks. You wear ideal picnic clothes. Not the jeans and jacket you trotted along in when you last improvised your first picnic with a bag of popcorn, two candy bars, and bottles of water. Now there's sugar and salt and sweet and savory all at once, the classics of sticky peanut butter and too much mayonnaise, the perfectly spicy salsa to go with your tortilla chips, and a cake made from a recipe written by your good old parent or guardian. What doesn't change, however, is the company. And for us, it's still all about the weathered skin against weathered skin, the toes intertwining among dry, dry grass, and the cons...