My Cardboard Balcony

This Concrete Jungle by Belinda Roddie This concrete jungle is too harsh and cold for me to stay here, stewing over bad coffee, old newspapers, a crumbling scone, counting all the ulcers I've had this week on one hand. I'm as skeletal as my aged car, pathetic, rusted in the lot, waiting for me to take it wheezing back home so I can watch cable until I can no longer keep my eyes open. When I leave the coffee shop, I drop a dime into a panhandler's cup. He's pissed that I didn't leave him more. I'm ready to plant my shoe in his teeth, but then I find myself remembering God's jaundiced eye.

The projector in the classroom was broken, so I couldn't show the movie like I wanted to. Instead, I had the students bust out the smartphones and cameras and see if they could make their own movies. What started as individual tomfoolery, to my initial shock and my resulting admiration, turned into a class-wide act of cooperation. At first, students just wanted to make their own single goofy videos. Now, they wanted to create an entire group production.

Hyde, One AM by Belinda Roddie I'm sneaking sips from a mini bottle of Jameson at the bus stop with the best view of the bridge. Its metal snout breathes in fog and breathes out light and heat and bubbling stars. I think the whiskey's gone to my head, because I have the strange belief that behind me, the streets are being repaved with silver, and all the divots in the sidewalks are being filled with diamonds, like a ritzy operation on a broken nasal cavity. And all I want to do is curl up on a mattress where the sun hits me just right, but bird shit can't touch me, out where the silhouette of a brass arrow buries its nose deep into the drought-choked soil, and the rattling of repainted cable cars is the best free alarm clock I could ever ask for, and deep in the stew of my memory, I can see dinner for two at the wharf where sea lions sing harsh lullabies, and smell hot coffee and burnt sugar, and hear Irish reels telling me run away run away run...

The ward was sealed off from guests, which meant today, I would be alone in my room again. The judge had not come this morning like she had promised, to properly analyze and interview me, to see if I could finally get out of this hellhole. I was left with nurses with stiff white collars and rigid trays of multicolored pills that I was expected to swallow dry. The least they could have done was provide me some water. Maybe a shot of whiskey.

Market, One PM by Belinda Roddie In the café, she holds the notebooks out to me in trembling, wrinkled hands, like she's sealed her soul away in aged parchment and ancient ink. She tells me that this "manuscript" of hers has been sitting in her home for about twenty years, and she would like to have me type it up. No edits. Apologies for the sloppy penmanship. My nose catches the background noise of tiny cups of espresso in front of laptops, that sharp bitter aroma lingering alongside the burning plastic odor of an overheated chip of silicon buried in a motherboard trying desperately to contact cyber space. Above our heads, there could be God or aliens, but no matter what, our brains are constructed from frayed wires and dying batteries, and soon, ultimately, whatever we write will be burned by an ever swelling sun and we will yearn for immortality in the dry trenches left behind by the oceans that have boiled away.

You try to find a power outlet, but there is none. Not even the holes left behind by the prairie dogs offer anything. You stare in stupefied horror as your cellphone battery dwindles down to nothing. No Instagram. No Snapchat. No Facebook. No Vine. It's just you and Mother Nature now, and you feel too tired to take the half mile trek back to town to recharge your phone. A bird chirps above your head. You scream.

Mission, One AM by Belinda Roddie Tonight, the asphalt is hungry for rubber, in the form of tires and worn down sneakers, with holes big enough to let the smog in between your toes like greasy sidewalk chalk. Under the street lamp, an ex of mine smokes a cigarette and checks his glock to make sure it's loaded. He tasted like pennies the last time I kissed him. I take two steps from the hellhole that is a strip club to Owen's liquor store, where the window is still broken like a fragile jaw splintered under the weight of a metropolitan fist. Whisky and juice sound good to me: A bourbon apple pie from the bottle into my mouth, which still issues lingual soot when I exhale too loudly. My gun is an extension of my hip. The operation is complete. I am half human, half metal. My teeth are bullets, hot off the factory conveyor belt. The radio is the only good thing left in my jalopy. My father tried to drive this thing off a bridge ten years ago, but ...