My Cardboard Balcony

by Belinda Roddie Waffle House used to be Jeremiah's favorite restaurant, until Sheila had to burn it down in 1987. By then, it wasn't serving waffles - at least, not the waffles that one would douse in boysenberry syrup and top with butter squeezed out of a tube. In the small town of Knovacoke, Waffle House became rather notorious for its characters. Namely, behind the dilapidated kitchens and seating booths with puncture holes in the shiny green cushions, there was a teeming cesspool of dirtier activity. Everyone and his grandmother knew that the place secretly became a giant brothel in 1984, even Jeremiah, who was sixteen and had grown out of his love for the Belgian dough delight and gotten into underage drinking, smoking, and motorcycle riding. Still, the restaurant held a sense of nostalgia for him as he ripped by, his heavy bike practically making ripples in the asphalt as he cast a glance at the neon "Waf-le Ho s" sign and the whitened windows. It was a ...

Not providing one iota of justification for it, I managed to incinerate the entire year's worth of files with some gasoline and a single, floppy match from a set I had swiped from the Moonshine Motel back in my hometown. They were unable to discover that I was the culprit until two months later, when I had safely stowed myself and some minimal belongings in a one-story house in the California mountains. I did not expect the phone call. "Hello?" "We know you burned everything," came the raspy voice of my former boss. "Why?" I snickered. "Because I don't think you deserve any more money."

After about twenty days, I was able to write another chapter of The Authoritarian Auction. It's like I figured - you start a new project that's somewhat different, and it sometimes is a little slow-going. Also, does anything know of any tricks to differentiate two women in the third person without overly repeating their names? I swear, the names themselves take up ten percent of the word count! Lot of things coming up in my life that are pretty big. Next week, I'll be officially turning in paperwork for a new job. After that, I'll be working and searching for a place to live with my sister and my girlfriend. It's scary being an adult, but it's kind of a requirement now to bite the bullet and go with it. In the meantime, I'll write. Writing's a good way for me to center, focus, and relax. Which is kind of ironic, given that I write a lot about really stressful shit. Yaaaay, literary displacement! Time for me to go to bed. Writer's Quotatio...

Dogma by Belinda Roddie If there were a God would you build Him a house? Would you give Him somewhere to sleep on the planks on the splinters of a criss-crossed criss-crossed pattern? Do not disturb our guest Recite your hymns in your head He is dreaming of a little cottage where He drinks tea and people Pray The work you see here was originally written in the fall of 2010. It was last edited on May 10th, 2011.

All four of his son and all seven of his daughters buried their mother in a shallow grave, just on the outskirts of their property, where the blue daffodils grew in enormous and majestic clumps and the sun kissed the hill just right so the mark of golden lips remained on the grass. The oldest brother, Ernie, helped Cindy, four years his senior, put away the shovels while their father fetched himself a beer.

The Soviet Man: A Story in Five Sonnets by Belinda Roddie The Soviet man's hands were tinted blue as he took time in the snow dumping dead in holes after the great Bolshevik coup that painted all the banners crimson red with the Tsar's death. But sympathy took stealth, for revolutionaries donning black could not pity those who once held their wealth in manors. They were killed in each attack upon rich courtyards once teeming with green, now dried and sticky with borgeoisie blood. The man, braving the weather cold and mean, preferred to work away from ragged scud, but he was given tasks more for a dog, digging graves, part of the Soviet cog. When done, he met with an old comrade. Gruff and surly, the comrade still gave him warm tea and dry bread to savor under tough conditions, both their coats and trousers torn. Frost drifted in, and the man's heart would thump loudly from time to time within the dark shadows of his ally's home, and the stump of...

After I had laid out the fillets of red snapper, Uncle Rob proceeded to douse the fish in a homemade, sundried tomato vinaigrette. The smell of herbs and black pepper filled the room, and I could almost taste the crispness of the spinach leaves as we chopped them and layered them onto our meal. "Into the oven, then?" I asked my uncle with a smile. "Beautifully baked fish," he replied. "Just like your mother enjoyed."