My Cardboard Balcony

I'm Just Not In The Mood by Belinda Roddie I'm just not in the mood for these petty fragments that you call day-to-day life. And shut up about patience or sacrifice because I'm not interested in your usual fluffy philosophies. Let's, for once, retract all attempts to be calm and deep in a shallow world. Let's instead try to pretend we're shadows on the wall, or puffs of wind bursting from a cold kid's gaping mouth. Let's be nothing, and yet, let's be all the little things that we ignore or take for granted. Dreams may not come true, and adages may not hold weight, but I cannot lose my own life before I die.

The mirage of the hotel wobbled and wavered for just a moment, but after Claire blinked, it was as if she were staring at an oil painting, the smears never melting away from the wall illusions and tricks of the doors and windows. For something that was a mere glitch of the eye and mind, the hotel felt very real - and very, very welcoming.

Glow by Belinda Roddie After scratching binary code in exam scores, I found myself on my back, reading The Sun Also Rises with a wine thirst and a need for a brief, temporary respite, as the sky was dipped in the honeycomb sunset so a golden, sticky blemish coated my hands. I clutched the book tighter and tighter with each page, realizing all too well that I was skimming, and the faces of expatriates steadily blurred, and the charging bulls lost their horns in the glow of speeding colors, victim to a mind's flurry, propped up by wires spitting bronze fire into my eyes so that they burned, and the text, like it always did, became more of a menace than an entertainment.

In a very biblical essence, the wall of the cathedral crumbled and decayed as if time were sped up - almost immediately the debris had begun to settle right after it had fallen, the dust collecting around those scraps of stained glass that remained. The city claimed that it was "necessary" to tear down the edifice in light of new earthquake precautions, but in the end, a ray of light could only signify the tumble.

Ow! by Belinda Roddie The gentle kiss of wasp's feet on the backside of your left hand after you've tried to snag a hot dog from the barbecue before your aunt even put out plates. Call it nature's wrath or karma, but as it turns out, sweet revenge is the best condiment.

When she stood up for her award, I could see how purposely tousled her hair was, how the tail of her coat folded inward on one side, how one sock was rolled up while the other was bunched down so low that it nearly swallowed the shoelaces on her sneaker. She walked up to retrieve the trophy, and every teacher turned her head to look at her. She smiled, flashed the bird directly at the quarterback sitting and his head down, and walked directly out of the auditorium with her award tucked under her arm, disappearing into the May dusk.

Needle Road by Belinda Roddie There's a needle road I take back home, slick and silver, next to the lasso lane, the coil of asphalt slapping automobile hooves as they trot away from a long commute. On the tip, a taquería smells of carnitas and cayenne pepper, the hot chocolate spicy, the mariachi band trembling in their braided charro tapestries, breathing in the cold autumn with plucked strings and hot air in horns elevated to the cloudy heavens. When the tires on my truck hit the curb just right, it is almost as if I am the thread in the eye, a string looped around the chromed tesserae of the mosaic neighborhood - an idolized mesh of fabric and stone, woven and sewn to create a flow, a continual line that drapes over the lip of the needle road and doesn't even end around the simple, stabbing point.