My Cardboard Balcony

He Coughed Streamers by Belinda Roddie He was a party assembly man, a goofball, a confetti buffoon, a clown who wasn't really a clown, but he carried enough red and blue balloons to fill his house twice over (and they all fit into the pockets of his gray carpenter jeans). Since his twenty-seventh birthday, he had popped out of forty-nine birthday cakes: for family, for friends, for politicians, even for his own wife's fiftieth. She loved it, kissed him so hard that she sucked away patches of frosting from his cheeks and nose. Delicious. And the man couldn't help it. Firecrackers lit up his blood. Ribbons and bows coiled around each tendon that sprung wired like the lights of a Christmas tree. Merlot made his cheeks red and turkey made his belly rumble with music. He was a happy rambunctious soul, and people loved him. So much so that when doctors discovered from his autopsy that he had swallowed seven rolls of purple tissue streamers, we laughe...

"We can't sustain ourselves this way." "I know." She passed me a mug of coffee. It was like drinking stale black sugar lumps. I could barely keep the stuff down. "We'll have to start running again." She shook her head. "Nuh-uh. I don't want to." "But you just said..." "I know what I said," she growled, biting into a strip of year-old beef jerky. "But I'm terrified, you know?" "I know."

by Belinda Roddie [ Inspired by Daft Punk's "Technologic"] crack their skulls with ram and mem'ry and you'll find a sea of sadness wrung out emotion assembly slow descending into madness pop the metal joints and pivot all their fingers toward the ceiling every dent and drop and divot in the walls is so revealing watch the pupils scrape together as they see more than they want to watch the lips start asking whether the same pictures also haunt you 'cause they have their x-ray vision and they have their mega-sensors ultra-super-powered mission to take minds and have them measured every scar and every fissure every cut and gash and crevice every line that a publisher marks up red for sake of premise every fault that you're ignoring they can't shrug away the scratching clawing at their sinews, boring into steel cerebral thatching doesn't matter if the pain is artificial or proverbial they don't know what their own name...

Was it a miracle, asked the oracle sitting on a stool while the boys played pool at the kitchen table, and the father unable to stop their descent into false merriment. Was it a miracle that the whole spectacle put an old smile on Miss Benniworth while the girls slept on the stairs with their heads all in pairs and the dogs on your laps, tongues all dripping out sap?

"I've got you covered, Shay!" "I sure as Hell hope you do!" I craned my head from over the short concrete wall. No one was racing over yet. No sound of screeching wheels or shrieking wails of sirens or horns. "You've got the sack?" I heard Dexter ask from my left. "Yeah!" I pushed myself up to my feet. Now it was time to start running.

by Belinda Roddie The skeletons tap danced until they had completely fallen apart. Rather than hearing shrieks of alarm or confusion, I listened to the sound of over six dozen audience members' enthusiastic clapping as a janitor swept the bones away. "What's going to happen to them?" I asked Louis, who was looking through binoculars even though we were only two rows away from the stage. "Eh, you know," he mumbled sardonically. "Put 'em back together." I knew who those two skeletons were: Martin and Alex, twin brothers. "Show business must be tough for them." "Sure, I guess." We had decided to partake in the recital at the university, where our son Stephen studied dance and music with several creatures of supernatural background. It wasn't like the town we came from: Here, we were the minority. We were humans surrounded by werewolves, ghosts, vampires, and other conventional or non-conventional entities in the...

The fruit had a very different texture than the apples I had eaten earlier that morning. As I chewed and voiced my confusion, my sister trotted up to me. "What's that?" "I don't know, but it's crispy." "Like...apple crispy?" "No. Like...crispy. Like chip crispy. Or candy bar crispy." "Oh." She frowned. "Does it taste like chocolate?" "No." "Then what does it take like?'