My Cardboard Balcony

Carbs With Friends by Belinda Roddie After Robby ate an entire pepperoni pizza all by himself, I was pretty worried that he would spill the half-digested contents all over my mother's afghan as it wound itself around his sluggish ankles, but instead, he found it more comforting to sleep off the intake of processed dairy, meat, and crust rather than expel it. So I was grateful for that. Three of us played cards while he snored - Chelsea making garlic bread in the kitchen, my sister stirring marinara into her tortellini. We dealt spades and aces that got a bit crinkled when the crumbs from our fingers stained in all the weirdest ways, and half the game was lost in the impending food coma that knocked all common sense from the left side of my noggin. I wanted to drink a beer at some point, but I simply forgot to do so - as if the carbonation wasn't beckoning to be imbibed, and the wheat could be spared from the onslaught of stomach acid for another night. B...

The irreverent jokester believed in no God, served no king and sent taxes to no president. He had no leader but the one foxtrotting around in his head, feeding him more comic material through a funnel. He had been imprisoned several times along with his sister, who was equally as irreverent but ten times as funny. They would pass around the bucket of pork offered to them by the offended duke, and they'd make more jokes at his expense and laugh loudly enough for him to hear.

My White Kettle by Belinda Roddie My white kettle never brewed tea, didn't like water and never loved me.

It was the cat's meow. The bee's knees. The hip of hooch in a zoot suit's steps. Andre had never been happier to have prom be nineteen twenties themed. He dressed in his best suit and learned the Charleston. He walked in hoping to snag a flapper girl. He had gone stag, obviously, as his date was not exactly a fan of Great Gatsby. She'd have to learn, old sport. She'd have to learn.

How can one unwrite a note and make it unwritten? How can one unride a bicycle, or unread a book, or undigest a pizza that you shouldn't have gotten with all those extra toppings because the Italian sausage alone added two extra bucks to your order and you really should have just ordered the breadsticks because they're super cheesy good? You can't. And I fucking loved that pizza, so shut it.

by Belinda Roddie Every razor blade hidden behind the bathroom mirror told a story, and it helped that they had been collected from several different people. Some blades held the wear and tear of daily or nightly shaving, from the jawline to the thigh, with few nicks in between. Others, surprisingly, were adequately honed and sharp. Something Sweeney Todd could use to slice up human hor d'oeuvres before the main meat pastry entree. Jules worked as a psychiatrist in the main ward of Helm Hospital, and she had taken the time to pick out each razor, tag them, and slip them behind the mirror where her husband wouldn't notice. Raoul was a desperately paranoid man, and for one reason or another, he was always worried that Jules, in the long run, wasn't as conventionally happy with her life as he had hoped. One look at the collection of pointy metal slicers, and he would most likely have gone into cardiac arrest after beginning a tirade on how life was so worth living to his m...

There were six doors in the entire house, but they all led to the same core room: The Zone Room. It didn't matter if you were waltzing out in a bathrobe with toothpaste still stuck to your lower lip. It didn't matter if you had just finished scrubbing a stubborn spot of egg yolk off a tarnished frying pan. It didn't matter if you had just had the best sex of your life, cleaned up, and gone out for a bottle of wine or a pack of cigarettes. You always wound up in the Zone Room. And it was a good thing.