My Cardboard Balcony

Alive and well, far from hot Hell, he dusted his shirt off and doffed his hat to the ladies fair, who wondered where he'd been the night he'd gotten his lights punched out, his shoes worn out, his pants ripped up, his tongue near torn out of his own skull. He wandered aimlessly through the dark city and thought about where his assailants had gone. Bruises never stopped him.

by Belinda Roddie It was the ugliest tattoo she had ever gotten and she loved it. Not that the other tattoos were much better. Some people did actually have taste in art and aesthetics. Any regular fool who knew how to decorate a house with the proper patterns and colors knew when a painting or a design was bound to fall flat on its fresh acrylic oily face. But for Gwendolyn, it was like color blindness taken to the entire visual spectrum. Gwen had gotten her first tattoo when she was eighteen, and just turned eighteen, two hours after the analog time on her birth certificate. The wretched looking butterfly with the broken-looking wings was still melting on her back to this day, and it looked more and more like purple-pink candle wax with each passing year. On both arms, she had gone for smiley faces stars with big, drooping red tongues - like a celestial ":P" emoticon on her skin instead of a cellphone screen. They were Chinese characters that claimed her babies would...

Temporary blindness, they had told me. It would go away sooner rather than later, they had told me. Yet here I was, three months after the accident, the only thing I could see being white shadows dancing in an ocean of salty, repugnant black. My father was behind bars now, and if I couldn't see him, he'd see me. The baseball bat to the back of my head had been damage enough, but my mother dead?

Hello friends! It's another guest post by Arden here, as is the norm when Belinda is visiting me (or I am visiting her which is for once not the case!). While she's been busy settling into a new job, I've been busy trying to get ready to go back to school. I'm entering my final year of college and it is only slightly terrifying.  And by only slightly, I mean extremely. Don't get me wrong, I'm excited to go back and see all my friends down there and learn every last ounce there is to learn (Ravenclaw that I am) but what really scares me is what happens after. What happens in June after I've finished everything and I finally grab my diploma? What happens if I don't get into all the classes I want to take, or all the shows I want to do? But I guess those are the kinds of things it really doesn't help to worry about ahead of time, I just have to go live it as best I can and see what happens. So that's what I'm going to do. Hopefully it all works ...

I wrote stuff in the past. Unfortunately, I do not have my computer at the moment, as I am visiting my girlfriend. I think we can do without a literary flashback this week. In the meantime, however, I did write a memoir for my former high school. You can check it out here. Click here for high school memories! Click here!

Crispy and fried? Atta boy. Serve the gravy hot and brown onto that meaty mess. Why is it that it's usually brown, but it's called "gravy?" It sounds like the word gray is in it. Maybe I'm overthinking this. You've made me such a fine dinner, and it'd be a shame to talk too much. Tasty chicken.

A Whiskey Popsicle by Belinda Roddie A whiskey popsicle awaited me in the freezer once I returned from work. I licked the stick clean while watching TV as my oldest brother, the big old jerk, carried four tablets of ibuprofen in his hand, a roll of toilet paper under his arm, and a small just-for-rent CD player into the room. I stirred from my re-runs of Seinfeld just to give him the middle finger for no reason. He did not notice it for once in his life, disappearing into the kitchen. I licked another whiskey popsicle and wondered how our lives would be less dull.