My Cardboard Balcony

Hungry For Noise by Belinda Roddie We bump and we clatter, we stumble and shatter. Our glasses are tinkling, our dress shirts are crinkling. The fire is crackling, the night wind is tackling the dark world outside, where it's quiet enough to hide.

Bella claimed that she wasn't being a brat, but she sure acted like one. And to top it off, she was forty-two years old. There had been so many nights where I had to leave the dinner table because of her screeching, endless rants on things that were so frivolous in comparison to everything else. One night, I almost slapped her for screaming about a bagger accidentally making a bag slightly too heavy for her on her way out of the grocery store. "Sometimes, I think violence is the only way to solve the problem of my cousin," I remarked to my friend Stewart over coffee; Stewart always liked hearing about Bella's ridiculous vitriol.

I'm [Not] Crazy by Belinda Roddie We all have conspiracy theories stuffed in our back pockets. They leak oil and blood and pus and everything cancerous that could kill us. Above our heads, the jets leave chemtrails that are meant to turn our lungs black like the charred remains of pseudo-terroristic threats. I swear, they're out to get us. I don't leave my house. I sit in the corner and face east or west, because north and south are just too convenient, and they show up everywhere in history. Remember the Civil War? Do not trust the poles, their magnetic pulls, their leverage on our brains. That's exactly what the aliens would want from us. I like to think my "conspiracies" aren't conspiracies at all, that they're real, and that there are layers to the foundations of all we find rational and matter-of-fact. Maybe some day, I'll peel off my tin foil hat and go on an adventure, scavenging for meteorite shards, questioning Ma...

I never really knew my father, save for one bleak memory. Warm, but gray. Muggy. We were standing in our backyard together, him drinking a beer, me sipping on some cider I had made with my mother. When I looked up at my father, I noticed he was balding. His hair was gray. He was fat. His teeth were stained when he smiled. And he kept looking out toward the old white fence that sealed us in, as if waiting for someone or something to break through, snatch him up, and steal him away.

I hadn't meant to cause a scene, yet, there we were. Sitting almost helplessly at the corner table, the clatter of forks and knives on hard plates having subsided to hear my mother's crying. This wasn't gentle weeping, nor hiccuping sobs. It was more like this plaintive wail, this keening, like she had just been stabbed in the abdomen and was trying desperately to breathe but could only exhale continually. I stared down into my wine glass. The Merlot was starting to look like blood.

A man with a tan got buried in the sand while the girl wearing pearls said she owned the whole world. On the coast with the most sunshine, I would boast I could fly in the sky with a towering mai tai.

by Belinda Roddie My heart donor was a homeless guy who literally lived at the gym. I never knew his name until afterward. No one did. He simply hovered around the treadmills by day, eating some sort of bagel that had probably been stale and free from the local café, before retiring to one of the locker room benches at night. Why none of the workers hadn't kicked him out was beyond me. And the one time he had stepped out of the gym, he had been bowled over by a motorcyclist who was still high from the adrenaline kick after thirty minutes on the elliptical. His heart seemed to be the only thing that had avoided skidmarks or road rash. I had never been to Riley's gym. It wasn't your standard chain gym - it had endured the YMCA's and the 24 Hour Fitness's and the Equinox's. In fact, it had been going for over fifty years now. Riley Samson IV - spry and balding and barely thirty years old - had recently become the owner and was the one to break the news about t...