My Cardboard Balcony

Counterproductive by Belinda Roddie People beg for me to sympathize after they've slammed their worn boot against my cheek, pushing and pushing me down until I'm crying with a squeaking jaw. They ask me, "How does it feel, to be ground into the dirt?" And I say, "Makes no sense for you to hurt me just because someone happened to hurt you."

Everything around the churchyard was decomposing. This was where people dumped relatives already stricken with rigor mortis. The harsh weather patterns stripped away the dry, stale flesh and lukewarm blood fairly quickly - the winds tore apart the tissue, the rain clogged up the opening pores and dissolved the salty innards of the eye sockets. In only months, there were skeletons littered beside the vestibule.

Bed Death by Belinda Roddie The buzz of excess harmony; the dial tone of your idioms, factory-pressed and cooked into commodities. You attempted to breathe ecstasy where there was none to begin with. No kick, no habit-inducing spree of intellect. You offered little to nothing in terms of value. Beads break eventually, and the string that holds it all together separates into a bristled tail, and not even animals can wear the jewelry without feeling embarrassed. You held worth in second thought sentences, when the meaning was half diminished, half pulverized, in the mid-chew of lingual gristle. You couldn't tell me how you really felt because you felt nothing. You liked to use big words so you could be a big lover, and the flavor was lost when the marrow was buried under pearl-white lipids. The stuff I used for wax on temporary candles that lit our path to the bed only so many times before the spit tired out the wick.

The day I started out as an elementary school coach was the day my girlfriend passed away. She had been sick for a very long time, and we had just celebrated the start of my new job in the hospital, having snuck in a bottle of champagne. Still, the death felt painfully sudden, and I wasn't sure how I was supposed to function. My first class was fifth grade - the big guys. I had to be careful about my composure.

When I think about fools, I don't think about the same fools that others do. April and idiots aside, I think of the fools in Renaissance times, and how they were meant to snap people back into reality, not sugar coat it. The fools were, in fact, the wise ones, meaning to imply that the wise ones were the fools. Whether or not they sang songs or wore bells is irrelevant: The fools I know are the fools I relate to. We tell the truth, and we giggle while doing so.

by Belinda Roddie When the seedpods opened, the little farm girl screamed. But the truth was, there was nothing to be afraid of whatsoever. For out of the pods emerged the greenest, plumpest, tastiest giant peas that one did ever lay her blue eyes on. Her uncle, rugged and superbly masculine as he was, laughed and clapped his large hands together, then stooped down to pull a pea the size of a fist out of its opened, fleshy womb. He held it out to her niece, but the girl wildly shook her head. "Self-opening pea pods," her uncle tried to explain. "I swear to you, the peas will be the best you've ever eaten." The girl was not interested in eating something that came right out of a giant green shell without the need of human hands. Besides, she didn't like peas. Uncle Jared owned the patent on the giant genetically modified vegetables that he farmed now, having once operated the company born out of the genetic study, "Allegranto." In ...

"If we use the velcro shoes I invented," Lisbeth snapped, "then we can sneak into Letterman's mansion undetected." "How?" She sighed and shook her fist at Hammel. "You don't listen," she scowled. "The shoes have been equipped with astute stealth capabilities. They make no sound. They leave no prints. And they also carry a electronic signal in them that can corrupt burglar alarms like as solar flare."