My Cardboard Balcony

Beverage Of Choice by Belinda Roddie He drinks his glass of orange juice, then remembers at the very last minute that he doesn't like orange juice, and his mouth puckers from the power of a thousand Florida orchards. When he asks for iced tea, his butler reminds him that he hasn't had a sip of iced tea since he caught his wife in bed with a rival golfer and a tall Arnold Palmer in her slick, bedazzled fist. So he demands a good old-fashioned beer instead. "It's eight in the morning," says his butler, but his boss won't hear a word of it. He lets the carbonation roil his stomach like an old, cracked cauldron. His inner pipes don't work the way they used to, yet he belches loudly and laughs as if he were nine years old again, challenging his older brother to chug a cola or two by the baseball diamond without stopping to take a single, necessary breath.

At first, Charlotte wanted to be a painter. Then, she wanted to be an actress. Then later, a dancer. Until finally, she had a Eureka moment. "When I grow up," she proudly declared to her skeptical parents, "I'm going to be the first dancer to paint something onstage while also performing the world's greatest monologues!" Well, at least her shows went viral on Youtube.

I didn't want to lose my mind. I didn't want to get upset. But seeing the way my town, my state, my goddamn country looked now, I was ready to go completely and irreversibly mad. I wanted to buy a one-way ticket to the other side of the world. I wanted to buy a boat and sail off into the ocean and breathe in the salty air. Anything to get me out of this circus. Anything to keep me calm.

by Belinda Roddie The freight train rumbled through the night with just the hint of clanking carriages in the air. It did not matter that the rails it glided across, after dashing through valleys and past mountains, led to precisely nowhere. What nowhere was remained to be answered, because no one actually drove the freight train. It had simply gained a mind of its own, rattling like a metal ghost across the tracks that were no longer used for supply or passenger purposes. In fact, no one in the town had ridden a train for over ninety years. I would hear the sound of the horn at exactly three o'clock AM each night, though as I got older, I could sleep through it easily. When I started struggling with insomnia at the age of twenty-five, the train's lonely howl was legitimately a call for me to act rather than sleep. I would write, dance, eat, drink, take walks - anything but actually try and fail to succumb to some sort of bizarre or disjointed dream that my mind had painsta...

Leslie bought cigarettes. Lindsay bought chips. Lois bought a brand new gloss to fancy up her lips. Landon wanted popcorn. Lawrence wanted coke. I went home with Leslie for a much-desired smoke.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child "When the magic becomes unbalanced" by Belinda Roddie A review in lieu of an introspection. WARNING: Spoilers Ahead! August 19, 2016 The Harry Potter series is an absolute leviathan. That cannot be denied. Taking the literary world by storm, it revitalized what was objectively viewed as a failing industry, bringing the love of reading back to the foreground of both children's lives and adults' experiences. It was the jumper cable that restarted the printed word's dead car battery, a jolt to a fluttering heart that desperately needed more oxygen in its blood circulation. Ultimately, to say that Harry Potter saved books is a fair assumption to make. And that's not without merit. Yes, the series certainly has its flaws, which can be debated to high heaven, from the questionable motives of some of its characters to its more rudimentary structural and plot issues (It should not take an entire year of a Triwizard Tourname...

Never Touchy-Feely by Belinda Roddie I cannot hug you, sadly, for I have no arms.