My Cardboard Balcony

Insults Gone Rhyme-y by Belinda Roddie You dumbfuck nunchuck upchuck out of luck total nut mangy mutt super slut bubble butt buttercup size me up nip and tuck Tom & Huck sly Puck hanging on a telephone wire!

When my revised draft of my essay was returned to me, I found that the professor had given me the same mediocre grade that he had given me for the first draft. This was alarming to me, especially since the revised draft was two pages longer, had a modified thesis, and offered almost a dozen more quotations and pieces of evidence. When I brought it to his attention, he laughed and shook his head. "I was probably drunk when I graded it," he confessed, which rendered me speechless.

Good Ol' Politics by Belinda Roddie the Blues are fighting with the Reds, and the Yellows are drinking piss-colored sorrow in glass jugs and longing for the good old days when the Browns were clashing with the Purples and the booze was so much better.

After the latest economic collapse, I found myself living in an admittedly rather spacious tent on the corner of one of the busiest, craziest streets in the city. Everyone was scrambling for something. For money, for food, for clothing, for survival. I kept myself huddled beneath my tarp canvas, eating cold and congealed soup from a can and doing my best to keep warm beneath a sleeping bag that was older than I was.

"According to these notes, four Creebacks are being held captive," Barkelee read to Arvey and Quinoni. After six days, he still was unable to walk without a cane. The journey so far had upset him greatly, leaving him not only physical injuries but also emotional ones. Arvey reached for Quinoni's hand. It was cold, yet the temperature was oddly comforting. "So what do we do?" she asked. "Simple," Quinoni replied, her one good eye narrowing. "We save 'em."

by Belinda Roddie On those long country drives, I see the silhouette in the back seat. It seems to have gotten smaller these days, though. Almost as if it, too, has become stooped with age, such as I have. I have always had white hair. My friends used to call me the Human Cockatoo due to the way it rose like a bright firework from my head, infamously capable of defying gravity. I always liked it. My wife liked it, too. She said it made me look like Andy Warhol. Only unlike him, I was not a homosexual. I had been driving my truck down a Nebraska road when I first heard the thump beneath my wheel. It had been admittedly dark, and my headlights had been flickering in and out, in and our, for the past hour of my trip. When I got out of the car, there didn't seem to be any sign of a stone, or a stick, or an animal, or any object that would have disturbed my car. I let my hands listlessly paw through my own rocket of hair, exhaled, and went back to my seat, only to find a young...

Of the six of us remaining - the six of us, bloodied, bruised, beaten nearly to individual pulp that still managed to breathe through one nostril and talk out of one side of the mouth - four decided to flee. Two of us didn't. One of those two was me. I propped my aching body against the nearest wall, trying to inhale and exhale rhythmically and ignore the pain in my broken ribs. The second of the two was my little sister, trying to stop the crimson streaks still oozing from the gashes on my arms.