My Cardboard Balcony

House Warming Bring a bottle of Heineken, spiking the punch bowl, rolling the cookie dough, scooping up pastry kisses from a round red cup and frosting over lips with sugary frisks up and down the inside of a gray T-shirt as the supermen huddle, drinking caffeinated high times and low times with cinnamon whisked into statuesque molds on holy grail brims. This isn't a party, it's a get-together. No, it's not a get-together, it's a hang-forever. It's a tea time free rhyme fiesta-riffic swirling of edible confetti in plastic spoons. It's a kick to the tongue and a hug to the throat as you swing your hips around in a stereo's belt, and your girlfriend drinks warm, warm beer in the light of a cheap 2007 chandelier that your mother dusted off just for your new habitat under strawberry stars and uniform blue cars huddled in clusters around a cul-de-sac of overdosed lemon twisted martini glasses all in a row, heating up the play-doh in your s...

Despite everything Maynard had told me, I still didn't hate him. I didn't hate the way he had literally minced his words with his large tongue and overly sharp teeth. I didn't hate the way he loudly breathed through one nostril as he talked. I didn't hate the names he had called me or the complaints he had sent my way like a grossly stamped envelope with more than just a bad card. I waved him away from my table and he strutted off like he had owned the place. It didn't matter. It was my restaurant, not his.

Omelet Burger by Belinda Roddie When ham and eggs just weren't enough to satisfy you anymore, you had to murder the cow and slide its innards between two baby birds who never got to see the light of day. The piglets were indifferent to their fate.

"Together again." I blew a smoke ring out of the left corner of my mouth. "Yep. Like every other year." We were watching the neighbors finally take down their Christmas lights, even though it was March. Seeing the neon rainbows being stripped from the tall evergreens in their front yard was a bit calming. You and I exchanged a cider bottle while we smoked pipes like old men. You smiled at me amid the smoke. "Can we do this every year always?" "Sure. Why the Hell not?"

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?