My Cardboard Balcony

Fish Sandwich by Belinda Roddie Cornucupias of conversations over an awkward fish sandwich, the kind that leaves you hovering over a white basin with your guts around the edges. You wash down the bad taste with beer, but the beer gets dry in your mouth, and the stranger across from you keeps blabbing, blabbing, blabbing on and on and on about the implications of war taxes or dehydration of neurological philosophy or something blurred in your nutrients-deprived cortex. Never you mind questioning. Just sip the water provided - leave the stein on the left corner of the table. When you're done projectile spewing, you can hoist him up with a rope and tie his throat to the ceiling fan, watching as he whips with the summer wind, eyes as scaly as the salmon.

"Don't do it!" screamed Madison, flailing in her bed, as the doctors closed in on her. Her face was bright purple and her fingers were numb, but she would not stop her convulsing. The men in red polos and jeans, with syringes clipped to their hips and flasks stapled to their belts, did not falter in their task. They tried to pin her as she screamed. Her uncle stood languidly in the corner.

No OneWord today. Site didn't get updated. Hopefully I'll have something for y'all tomorrow.

by Belinda Roddie Jeffy picked the nose of the bust of Abraham Lincoln, which opened a secret door in Grandma's study. He had always had a strange inclination to do something wacky like that - in fact, when he had visited the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. back when he was six, he had wished greatly to pick the nose of the giant statue, similar to a particularly fun episode of Ren and Stimpy. For a long time, Grandma had kept a bust of Van Buren, mostly because she found his mutton chops to be, sarcastically, endearing. But after Jeffy's pleas to see Honest Abe's nasal cavity violated, his granny was eager to oblige. The young boy had known about his grandma's study since he was seven, when he had seen her disappear seemingly into the wall of the small room where she kept what he called a decoy library. Her study had taller shelves of copious volumes and tomes, most of them beautifully bound, swirling in a spiral formation around her desk. Jeffy shuffled over t...

The sergeant suffered a strange fatigue what flatlining on a field of tundra death, with tumbleweeds encircling carcasses that decomposed, and flowers popped up all around the lonely bodies. Dandelions in eye sockets, a golden poppy nestled in a nostril, and al the pink and white carnations bursting from a ribcage, petals blooming from each gap of bone and life and breath and humanity.

So, I'm kind of tired of going over every hardship in my workplace (it has gotten better, though), or delving too deeply into my latest test-taking (looks like I passed the CBEST - yay!), so I'ma just gonna talk about a crisis I have that is significantly more frivolous. I have normally been very good with titles. Hell, sometimes I create stories based on titles I scrounge up. The Sequined Door came very quickly for me title-wise, and my poems usually start with a title and go from there. But for the life of me, I cannot - cannot - think of a title for my latest novel. I've just finished reading it aloud to a friend and have edited it frequently. No matter what, no one seems to be able to find a title for it. The premise is simple enough - it follows particular tropes, but my colleagues claim it's a strong character piece. And yet every title I think of is either cheesy, vague, too formal, or just weak. My sister keeps jokingly insisting that I should call it, ...

Ready, Aim, Desire by Belinda Roddie He’s in love. Pulling on his heavy gloves, he lets his fingers trace the outline, massage the long, dark neck. That elegant neck, which gives such shine, seductive in her look and touch, can make him shudder as he holds her, but though she can be rough, she steeps all lovers in a slow and easy sleep.   He’s in love. He’ll have no other, wants no other. He’ll take his lady to the woods and let her spit a vicious, but lusty fire from her lips – she kisses their heads, paints their bodies red. And then, he peruses his fallen prey before returning to the quiet thrill of caressing, kissing that long, dark neck. though she may become the Black Widow that so many fear, through the years he hasn’t fallen in love with the kill, but the murderer forever bent to his wil The work you see here has not been edited not altered since December 19th, 2007.