My Cardboard Balcony

Tuesday Has Horns by Belinda Roddie Yesterday, I wore black over blue because underneath, I was bruised, and the spread of a hematoma on fabric was oddly cathartic for me. They told me that I've found the love of my life if I no longer worried about the end of the world, but instead of comfort, it made me concerned that if I was going down, I'd take her by the glass hand and pull her down with me. My demons wore top hats and tailcoats, drinking champagne on the window sill as I worked. They told me to stop crying because it was overwhelming for them - like being sated with a meal, yet the seconds and thirds keep coming, with extra salt.

"She's offering me fifteen dollars an hour for start, possibly seventeen later on." "That's ridiculous," scoffed Callie. "Her office is in the most expensive part of the city. That includes steep costs for parking. How the Hell does she expect you to pay rent and commute just on that much?" I shrugged. "I tried asking for twenty, and she sort of rolled her eyes at me." "Sort of?" "Okay, she did roll her eyes. You get it."

Sweet Pirouette by Belinda Roddie A girl got drunk on perfume and danced until her knees gave out and she was carried away. When the doctor asked what happened, she replied, "Sometimes, the smell of someone beautiful gets my body moving in all the wrong ways."

Roger knew the punch was spiked, so he stayed away from it. His mother's shrill voice echoed in his mind as he maneuvered his way to the corner of the living room: "The devil's drink will destroy the way you think." It was a foolish rhyme, but it was one that had stuck in the poor eighteen-year-old's head for years. He would not touch alcohol. "Beer?" asked his mate Charles, and Roger visibly recoiled from the cup extended to him.

How You Keep Her 101 by Belinda Roddie This is how you keep her: You leave a bowl of ice cream outside her bedroom, and if she refuses it, you pour the melted soup down the sink. You drink half a bottle of wine just so you can get the courage to sing her a song in front of a ravenous group of friends. You know when to quit and when to begin just from hearing one word, or seeing one smile or frown or twist of the tongue, all the cues memorized like the lines of a yet-to-be-written script. When it's dark outside, you let her glow in her own light. When it's raining, you watch her dance in it, and you don't intervene. And when she decides she wants to keep you, she does so out of her own volition - not because you did everything right, but because you did most things wrong and she still found value in the things you managed not to fuck up. Every time she said yes, every time she kissed you, fondled you, held you close, she was weighing the scales of ...

"They say that the Proffer family was cursed back in 1891," said the old man who had decided to converse with me by the bus stop. "Have you heard of the Proffer family?" "No," I replied. "I just moved here." The old man wrinkled his nose and let out a warm rivulet of air from between his lips. "Lovely local family," he muttered. "Pity what happened to them. All over some silly Native American burial grounds."

As of two hours ago, we have fully integrated our specimen into a real world setting as created by holographic tools and technology. So far, their behavior has been stable. All reactions to stimuli are recorded as normal. With luck, these specimen will be trained and released into actual society to carry out their coordinated missions.