My Cardboard Balcony

The Betting Pool Is Empty by Belinda Roddie The betting pool is empty because we have spent all our money on so many bets. It started with a bet on how long Jake could stand on his head (I won seven dollars for that). Then the stack got bigger when we bet on relationships, like the one Greg and Lily had - they lasted two years, and Jordan got one hundred for that. The green's been slipping out from between our greasy fingers - a fifty for how fast I could chug a gallon of milk. A fat three hundred for a chicken wing eating contest. Then thousands somehow disappeared, maybe because we bet on sports this year.

As the spider maneuvered its way up the tangle of vines, it found itself atop a wall that it had never climbed before. With all eight eyes, it stared down upon the abandoned temple, the moss clumping its windows and the dead foliage snaking its way up its walls like a dying man's fingers grasping his own stone temples. It waited for the rest of its family to catch up with it. It certainly seemed like a better home.

I See More Color With My Left Eye by Belinda Roddie There's a fragility , in the sense of whisking visual exploration; a London Underground railway exploring all the walls like canvasses streaked with the art of commercial gain. But something about the hues to the left of my periphery catches me off guard, not in the brightness of it, but in the shade. A sparkle to the amber sheen of a glass window - crisp, golden ale stains from a more than yellow sun. A hot pocketed spiral of blues within my lined paper route, the words crooked ebony on the bed of dissertation. Disillusioned, longing, turmoiled agate jewel crystallizes outside the schoolyard, turning pale gray when I look dead on instead of glancing to the side. I see all things beautifully, but the left brings an uncertain glow to the dew of bay area day. The fog swirls just right beneath my defending cornea. The spots, dancing, webs of retinal spiders spinning sky into threads along screens, bouncing o...

"This has gotta be the best bagel I've ever eaten." "Is it now?" Marla asked with an arched eyebrow as her friend kept snacking and smacking the asiago. "Hell, yeah. And the cream cheese? Best cream cheese EVER. This is why California's amazing. The dairy." "Eh, I prefer Irish dairy. I mean, it was a huge part of their rural economy, way back." Marla's friend frowned. "What?" "What?"

Jenna's Got Nice Lips by Belinda Roddie The rotund effect of a pivoting soft palate, the hot tongued, orgasmic syndrome in a handheld lover girl against my right hand. In short, she's got nice lips, and she knows how to kiss. She knows how to rub me in all the right backwards ways, from the spinal transmission of radio euphoria to the pilomotor reflex up and down my arms with just one finger, one dark finger, tracing constellations on the cusp of my astronomical, heart racing urge to incinerate the stars, just to fondle her faster. Jenna, you shake me, and you sugar me up, and you spice me down with the warmth baked into my pie crust cortex. You hypnotize my inner child, and you saturate my glutton angel. You've got the heat of a dessert-shaped molten lava spoonful of an intoxicating climax, served with cold medicine, peppered with one hundred five degree fever. You're fang-toothed, love-thirsty, pirate treasure-eyed ecstasy wrapped in a ...

The expression on her face was almost like mud smudged across her lips and chin. Her nostrils flared. She looked dirty. Felt dirty. She was like an angry, sick mongrel baying for nourishment. She felt starved. Emaciated. Weak. "Stop sneering at me," the stranger snarled, trying to be intimidating. But she wasn't intimidated. Not anymore, she told herself. As her hands curled into fists.

They Made Me Their Fool by Belinda Roddie They draped me in raiment when I was eight years old, jingled the metal worm in my ear like a carriage bell, and laughed when the pearl inside my brain screamed and died out and my speech came out slurred and stupid. They told me to dance like a fool, and to caper like a fool - to laugh like a fool, to fall like a fool, and to cry like a fool. They expected me to burn my feet on hot playground asphalt, smashing the tanbark into my cheekbone and leave the splinters sticking out, garishly, for them to sneer at. Because I was their harlequin marionette, and they wanted to tarnish my diamonds before they could sparkle. Now I'm older, and a little bit clearer, and I'm still a fool - but I'm the wise fool who clarifies errors to an erroneous king, through a smile and a slick sliding sound from the back of my tongue. Reminding him of the right ways he might be all sorts of wrong, while making him relis...