My Cardboard Balcony

Just Gray by Belinda Roddie She doesn't take kindly to shadows crawling on all fours across her canvas. Nor does she prefer the light to grace the oils she lets drip across the white. The absolutes she detests in art - no high moral ground, no golden pedestal to perch an easel on (or even a silver one, for that matter). Her once vanilla smock is drizzled with impromptu designs that lead to nothing and mean nothing. For all her attempts to be in the middle - for all of her valiant efforts to expose things for their detail and complexity - the gradient she has stained across the cloth is too dull to catch the sun, too plain to impress the moon. She has perfected the gray area in that she has scribbled out the substance, bleached the sentiments, left nothing but odor-less smoke behind.

I taught my very first creative writing workshop in the basement of a small and nondescript pottery store, which closed around 5 PM and had an owner who was more than happy to let me use his space provided that he got twenty dollars out of it. The handful of students who had agreed to tis arrangement would file into the basement one by one, sitting on the motley array of cushions and old wooden chairs that squeaked so loudly that it almost sounded like we were strangling cats every time we shifted our weight.

The Stoic Are Not Always Robots by Belinda Roddie Sympathy is not in my vocabulary. It is not built into my motherboard, or lighting up my circuits. I am more carbon than silicon, but the cardiovascular rhythm in my chest is not a response to ecstasy, or pity, or love. I wait outside until you stop crying, then return to your room with something strong to drink. This is how I cope with others' feelings. This is how I imbibe emotions: Tiny sip by tiny sip, so I never really taste it, and it's much easier to stomach. When you look up at me through salty glazed eyes, I know you're searching for gray matter beneath my skull instead of chips and gears. The truth is, you and I both run on electrical currents - the burst of nerves and synapses, those fragile wires leading to Tesla's towers so they can erupt with physiological fire. We are chemicals in glands bulging like bags behind our eyes and mouth and forehead, the bile threatening to spill into ...

I encountered Mister Lackley behind the school office around six in the evening. He was smoking a cigarette, dragging his boot-clad left boot across the same road skid of run over leaves, as if he wanted to rearrange them into a pattern that felt more alive and less like tire residue. I propped my shoulder against the wall beside him and looked at him. "No soccer practice today?" I asked. "Nah," he replied. "Too many kids on the team are sick. No scrimmaging this time."

"Don't evade the question!" "I don't have to prove anything to you, douchenozzle!" Elijah spat, slamming down his half-empty pint of cheap beer and scowling at Will. "I don't have to tell you anything to show you how much of a man I am!" I wanted to say something - do something - before it got worse. But my husband held me back. I felt his hand on my shoulder, but the tension in my body did not fade.

by Belinda Roddie I was going 92 down the Bay Bridge in my Chevy Astro. The hippie couple in the back still hadn't finished making love and I was afraid the drugs were starting to wear off. Mind you, the dope and the pills I had enjoyed weren't exactly the heaviest, but the high they had granted me was enough to ignore the horny hitchhikers as they attempted to make a baby right on the just freshly steamed backseat of my beloved Neil Armstrong. Yeah. I named my Astro Neil Armstrong. If that's not the most appropriate fucking name, then I don't know what is. Anyway, I screamed my way into the city and dropped those fornicating bastards off at the closest liquor store so they could smoke cigarettes in the afterglow, before I drove almost another mile out to Hotel Griffon. Now, normally I could never afford a room at that little "paradise," as my more "educated" friends liked to call it, but it turned out that a buddy of mine was staying there...

“Mom, where’s the cat?” “Upstairs.” “Where’s Dad?” “Downstairs.” “Where’s the dog?” “Outside.” “And where am I?” I stared at my son, whose eyes as blue as the sapphire on my wedding ring shone back at me with that typical youthful innocence that you read about in those books that are badly written and overly sentimental. Then I blinked and put down the ladle that I had been using to scoop up soup and said, “Well, you’re here, kiddo. You’re in the kitchen with me.”