My Cardboard Balcony

Log Cabin in the North by Belinda Roddie These footsteps outside my door belong to no friends of mine. No loved ones stomp the snow from their boots when the blizzard is shaggy white. I light a candle to see my own shadow fleeing from the window. It wants to see me once in a while, but it's too shy to stay in winter.

Grandmother suffered her third cancer relapse two months, and despite my parents' protests, it was back to chemo. There was one thing you could never say about my gram, and that was the idea that she wasn't a fighter. She was more than a soldier; she was a five star general braving D-Day in World War II. And when I visited her in the hospital, she flashed me a thumbs up and didn't even wince when the nurse stuck the IV needle in. "Gotta get my fluids," she said. "You've been hydrating, too, I hope."

Duck lit the incense, and we breathed in the fumes, sitting in our separate corners, smoking dope from long, crystal pipes that lit up like fireworks at the end, all neon rainbows and shit. Nearby, Ellie was cooking something on the stove. It probably smelled better than it tasted; I could catch hints of cinnamon, some brown sugar here and there, the occasional stab of hot butter as well, before the sizzling stopped and plates were handed out to anyone who could still keep a grip on porcelain.

In my office at the school I work at, I happen to have a game called The Storymatic . It is a great tool to have for students who are interested in timed free writes or creative writing exercises, as it provides prompts for both character and plot ideas. Rather than use a specific opening line this week - and because I am actually putting this here on Thursday to be posted on Saturday due to my going out of town for a wedding - I decided to use the story I wrote in one of my classes while a student of mine wrote his own story using the same original two prompts (I have a philosophy of working alongside the student, not just watching him or her work). This story was written in forty minutes, utilizing multiple prompt cards as per the game's rules. Before each section of the story, I will put the prompts down in italics and parentheses to give you an idea of how the story went in the direction it did. The title of this story (rather than an actual, y'know, title) will be the orig...

Down the narrowest corridor, there was a village built from gold. But all the people there were gold, too. Their hair dropped down in flaxen rings that barely caught the light of the outside world. As beautiful as they were, they were trapped among stone walls, their huts and hovels built from the shrapnel and crystals dropped from cavern ceilings and slopes. When asked why they remained here and not out in the open, they replied, "We were deemed too precious for the world."

I'm at my fiancée's parents' place because tomorrow is my fiancée's best friend's wedding, and apparently it's going to be beautiful, but it hasn't happened yet, so I can't talk about it, and I'm tired, anyway, since it's been a long week and I started student observation for the high school I'm student teaching at and it's gonna be cool but so stressful and nervewracking and ahhhh I'm going to sleep and focus on having a good time at the wedding. Storyteller's already written and will automatically be posted tomorrow evening. Broke my own rules a bit. Because I can. I have that right. Have a great night and a great weekend, everyone. I promise that next Friday, I'll provide more details about all the crazy stuff that's been happening in my life as of late.

Hallucinations by Belinda Roddie I haven't slept since last Saturday. Everything is so sparkly.