My Cardboard Balcony

Arizona Trip by Belinda Roddie So you're a ranger, and I'm a cowboy, and we're in the desert together, kissing tumbleweeds and collecting cactus leaves for boiling. One sip, and we're miles away in a different wasteland, with sand in our mouths and a full moon in each eye, like lunar spectacles guiding us to plains with high grass, gluttonous cattle, and a great fat jug of moonshine to share when the sunrise crows like a rooster perched on the decaying vane.

Come! Let us strike at the fortress and slay the Demon King. He sits on a throne of dead men's bones and does all sorts of crazy things. Now, that's all so cliché, my friend. You know he's not like that. He sits in a den with the TV on channel ten and watches baseball, wearing a hat. No, the Demon King is a great many things, but a baseball fan he is not. He'll sit on his bed with ear buds in his head and listen to scream-o until his brain starts to rot.

Artist's Guild by Belinda Roddie Salvador Dalí sliced pecan pie and Georgia O'Keefe drank champagne. I sat with Van Gogh and counted both scars and stars while the phonograph grumbled nearby. There were five of us together, the last being Pollock, who kept hitting the white walls with a stick painted blue. We ate off plates the hue and shape of water lilies and wished we could decorate the sky, like our own Sistine Chapel - but without the cherubs.

They say the man on the corner of seventh and Alistair had a longing for someone he had lost long ago. We didn't know much else besides that. All I could wonder was how old the man really was, especially since he looked so young. But the way he talked made him sound almost fifty years older than he appeared. He told stories the way my grandfather would, years ago, when he would bounce me on his knee beside the fireplace as the blizzard raged outside his little house.

Why can’t there be an undo button for a day ill-spent? Perhaps a week or a month or a year? I wouldn’t want an undo for life because then I could lose all the good things I had salvaged from the wreckage. If it were all a Word document, a glaring white screen of text that I could edit and add to and omit details, that would be ideal. Just a little ctrl-Z command in case I need to avert a storm on the horizon.

by Belinda Roddie COFFEE IS FOR MEN. TEA IS FOR KINGS. That's what the sign outside the tea shop read as I across the street from it, reading a newspaper from two days ago. Inside were a few stragglers, most of them fairly and admittedly weighed down by boxes and bags and kettles. One customer seemed to be quarreling with who must have been the store manager, most likely over the price of a porcelain cup. I didn't pay much attention. I only drank hot chocolate, anyway. I was sitting away from the tea shop and directly in front of Flannery's Pub because I was expecting to meet a friend in about nine minutes. Most people would have said ten minutes, but my digital watch liked to scream specifics at me, which made me wish I had an analog watch instead, one even without notches in between the five minute slots. Nearby, a bus was idling near the clock tower, waiting for an old man to shuffle up the stairs into a seat. He was fumbling with something in his coat, mumbling as h...

The whole damn thing felt scripted. You had to make dialogue like this up. Yet, there it was, in the flesh, raw and improvised and meant to be viewed as completely natural. The boy was angry, shaking his fists and grunting. The girl, as if performing a perfect stage direction, threw her glass of wine in his face. The next act was almost too much, as the boy howled, jumped up, and almost bounced up and down with fury. I half-expected the restaurant patrons to stand up and clap.