My Cardboard Balcony

Her Bodily Treasures by Belinda Roddie She drew honeycomb from her ear and lit it in a dark room, the amber spreading beneath her hand and molding shadows into sticky statuettes, ready to dance for dinner. I watched the wax melt into a perturbed puddle of sweetness, the lost hum of bees haunting me as I held my ribcage between my fingers. All the heat was lost from us; all the gold was lost from us. But from her orifices, she pulled the last luxuries of a past life into the dusk. She saved dawn for last. I saw pink stain the skies again. I could hardly breathe. There was silver in both our eyes.

There sat the lonely gentleman, with his crumpled hat in his hands, his chin lifted so that his beard pointed toward his assumed heavens. His eyes were hidden behind very, very thick glasses, and even the lens seemed glazed with a personal fog that he could not shrug off his visage. I tried to sit beside him, but it was as if the wind pushed me away from the bench. It made me wonder if the lonely stranger, in the end, was meant to be abandoned all along.

Alien Abduction by Belinda Roddie There was gold dust left on the bottom of my shoes. There was light beaming down upon me. The rain was washing away the clods of brown, imposing earth, exposing new flesh underneath. Flesh as white and smooth as an oyster's devoured pearl. I tipped my hat and scraped the dirt off of my arms. The hair follicles on my wrist seemed clogged with something. When I pulled a tuft out, it gleamed with a silver intensity that did not seem real or terrestrial. My prospecting days were over. I was going home. Their home.

I decided to pay Doctor Vox a visit on the eve of September twentieth. It was a particularly warm evening, yet it did not stop me from wearing the scarf that my mother had sewn for me, tightly wound around my raw throat. I stopped by the towering house where the doctor resided and knocked three times on the door - just as she always requested. After a good ten or so seconds, the door creaked open, but I couldn't seem to see who exactly had come to greet me in the first place.

Every Year by Belinda Roddie I can fake being deaf to the storm approaching my front porch, or I can remember that, with every year, there is a growing heat in the sky, a rumbling beneath my feet, a scent of sulfur in the soggy soil, a tint of fear caught in my irises, casting a slight glow upon the dry plains that crave water, that crave cold, that crave life.

"It's curtains for you!" snarled the dastardly villain of the play, swinging his cane wildly onstage. It was at that point that the curtain operator must have dozed off or spazzed, because at that point, the curtains went down with a loud whump. The audience sat there awkwardly for some time. Then, through the silence, "No, not literally, you oaf!"

She wanted to go fishing. He wanted to stay inside. She wanted to engage in a lengthy talk, but his little brain was too fried. She wanted to count the stars at night and have the constellations memorized. He wanted to keep to his games and his booze while the red swelled up in his eyes.