My Cardboard Balcony

Right now, I am sitting in the living room of my friends Chris and José's condo. It's almost eleven o'clock, on the very first day of 2016. I have been in Southern California for five days and five nights. I have met up with old buddies, revisited some of my favorite eateries, brought out the guitar and mandolin for jamming times, resisted the urge to buy a dulcimer, and cheered in the new year with peach sorbet and champagne. 2015 was, overall, a very good year for me. It was also a busy, crazy, stress-inducing year. I jumped into my student teaching assignment feet first, working with two mentor teachers and over fifty students. I designed unit plans, learning segments, and scaffolding strategies in class. I continued to work at my private school job, teaching classes I never thought I would teach, like economics. I even worked a couple of shifts a week at my bookstore job before I finally requested to be designated as an on-call employee. Through it all, I continued to...

Rules of the Cyborg Apocalypse by Belinda Roddie Bros before robos, dude! Haven't you read anything by Asimov?

Everyone who knew the president on a personal level understood that she was no tyrant; she was simply attempting to maintain order in a society that was crumbling apart like stale bread. Yet the accusations stained the newspapers and magazines on a daily basis: Tyrant, Dictator, Megalomaniac. Yet President Sardonna would not let any of the vitriol get to her when she had a job to do.

This New Year's Eve by Belinda Roddie This New Year's Eve, I cut up potatoes, carrots, celery, and onions for soup, which I'd devour happily, my nose twitching at the delightful odor. Soon, we'd pour the champagne and sets out the sweets and salted nuts and chips. Soon, we'd cheer for the new year, despite the anxiety of what was to come: Politics, the world in chaos, polarized communities across the country. My fiancée was hundreds of miles away from me, with friends, waiting for confetti and fireworks. I hoped that this next year would not be too insane, but it would be crazy, I knew.

"Look, officer," I told the woman in blue, "my hands are clean. I gave you my alibi. I told you who could vouch for me. Yet I'm still in custody. So I have two questions: Am I going home, or am I going home?" The woman in blue said nothing. She stood there, frozen, moving her tongue across her upper lip. I suddenly felt a cold bolt of pain.

Valley Of The Roses by Belinda Roddie Across the street from the valley of the roses, I see the oil well pump yield to the wind, an obedient Trojan horse dipping its snout into the drinking pool, legs bucking against the browned midnight sky. Ahead of me, headlights wash over a woman in red, who's walking too fast for me to really see if she's a mother, a daughter, a sister, a wife. On the way home, I pass a man compulsively patting the same side of his head, either trying to tuck something back into place, or to knock something unwanted away. The suburban sprawl is shallow, and insignificant, but the paper memories are all I have to offer, and I crumple them into meaty wads to toss out my window onto the dead lawn below, where the dogs chew up Mother Nature's robes and the stars are hidden within a hostile and lonely smog.

The scent of baked apples and cinnamon rolls filled the small bakery's lungs up with a sweet, happy air, and I breathed in the aroma and felt its nearly aphrodisiac qualities work its way into my brain. As I looked at all the pastries, I recognized the girl working behind the counter. She kept her cute red curls beneath a gray cap.