My Cardboard Balcony

Flirting With Musicians by Belinda Roddie I broke three out of the six strings on my guitar, so I carried it to the music shop where you were fixing a grand piano, and I loved the way your fingers arched against the ivory and ebony, the curve of its bones. I asked if you knew how to restring my poor, shabby instrument, and you directed me to the man behind the counter, whose beard was so majestic that I wanted to snuggle against it like it was a rich, red carpet for me to rest upon. As he tinkered with my guitar, I saw her, skirt bristling as she brought in her clarinet, and I wanted her so badly to wet the reed and trill the metal keys. That's when I realized how much of a hopeless case I was, so I hid my shame behind my fretboard once the pretty gentleman passed it back to me, and I played the same three notes over and over again in the corner until the store was closing and you very politely asked me to leave.

No update on the OneWord website today. Le sadness.

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.