My Cardboard Balcony

Please be seated and listen to the following instructions. Instruction Number One: Remember that you are not alone. There are many others like you, in this same room with you. And they are all feeling the same fear. Instruction Number Two: The right side of your belt has a key. The left side, a lock. Therefore, those two items are useless and should be ignored. And Instruction Number Three: Learn to hold your nerve, because without it, you are nothing but an empty skull.

Second Night by Belinda Roddie We spent an evening at Brown's house, exactly twenty hours after the wedding, and, like bastards from the Shetland Islands, we passed bottle and flagon around and felt hot honey whiskey burn our innards. I wore my silver band with pride and an ounce of courage, and my best man wrapped a leftover ribbon around my wrist as a half-assed symbol of fortune. In the hotel across the way, my new wife cut her long locks to give herself an older look, and she knew I would adore the pixie cut, and she would adore it, too. And ultimately, when the mead had sunken like stone into my cavernous belly, I'd walk back to our room where the champagne bottle was empty, and the rose petals were wilting, and her flesh was raw and inviting like the cold waves of salt settling on the shores of Lerwick.

Angel revved up the engine before sliding his hands across the steering wheel, the rubber sticky and cracked from all the sweaty summer days he and Michelle had spent down south. Reaching down for a cigarette, he realized that he did not have one, and he grumbled incoherently as he drove his truck away from the cabin. It was two hours before the wedding, and he needed a smoke.

"Did you know there was a guy who declared himself the Emperor of the United States?" said Otto as we sat down at the corner table in our favorite pub. "Name was Joshua Norton. He tried to make a fortune on rice and blew it." "Doesn't sound like a bad idea," remarked Sandy. "Not the losing money over rice, mind you. The emperor part." "I don't know, man..." Francis murmured into his pint of stout. "Hey, I'm down. The guy's funeral was attended by over thirty thousand people in San Francisco."

by Belinda Roddie Dad never wore a tie on a Sunday. Until one day, he did. He came down the stairs with a frayed strip of tie dye zipping down his sternum, somehow working brilliantly with his stark white dress shirt, nearly catching the light of the ceiling lamp as he sat down for his weekend oatmeal. "Um, honey..." Mom had stopped stirring her coffee. She stared silently at my father, who said nothing at first, until he noticed how rigid his wife's fingers were against the sterling silver spoon. "If you don't stir your sugar enough, it'll settle on the bottom and make your coffee grainy," he commented, before picking up the Datebook section of the Chronicle. I had just settled into my corner chair at the table, tearing the shell bit by bit off my hardboiled egg, and knew exactly what my father was up to. For the first time in three years, he was going to church. His older brother was in town after quite the hiatus, and the only way to tri...

I gave my girlfriend a pogo stick for a belated birthday present. No one was quite sure why I had gotten her a pogo stick until she started bouncing on it. The look of sheer mirth streaked across her sanguine face just made my heart melt, and my brother's head shake. "Can't she just like flowers or chocolates like the rest of 'em?" he asked as she hopped along the pavement in the backyard. "Nope!" I replied with a shit-eating grin. "Because that, my dear brother, would be boring as all Hell."

Here's the deal with first novels: They can cause a lot of trouble for a writer, especially mentally. It can safely be said that most authors see their first novels as things that need to be perfected and successful, and that makes sense. After all, if you want to be published and sell stuff, the first book that gets printed has gotta be good. Hell, Joseph Heller's first published work ever , not just his first novel, was Catch-22. And look how well that did! That being said, many first novels are written, stew in a journal or on a Word document, and never get published. They don't have to be published. That's the truth. And that was quickly becoming the reality in terms of my first novel, The Sequined Door. The Sequined Door is not, by any means, a bad book (and I use bad in the technical sense here). It's a fluffy, silly, colorful, LGBTQ+-teeming, fabulous piece of work. But it is, in many ways, inherently flawed. Many examples of queer-identifying individual...