My Cardboard Balcony

Living In A Fantasy by Belinda Roddie I'm looking for a hole that I can live in like a Hobbit, eating bread and drinking mead until the apocalypse ends. Then I'll drag my hairy feet to the edges of the earth, where I'll find an oasis and begin my life again.

"If I had all the wealth in the world..." She paused, then stuck her pipe back in her mouth and exposed crooked, browning teeth. "Well, then I wouldn't really be wealthy, would I? Because it'd hold no real value." "Depends on what your definition of wealth is, isn't it?" "Perhaps," she murmured through a plume of smoke. "Perhaps. I'd take a sunrise over a gold coin any day. Both are fleeting, but the sunrise always comes back the next day."

Today's Top Stories by Belinda Roddie I stopped reading the Sunday paper. Its headlines scream at me, black text shrieking for deliverance. It wants me to listen, but I'm inundated with information that's half false, half mad, full of ego trips. I'm losing my grip, and the fact checkers scratch their heads. They don't know what to do with a case like mine. All they can show me are the liars with their pants on fire, but they're sure as fuck not dancing on telephone wires. All I look at are the crosswords now, maybe the comics when I'm in a good mood. The colors they use on the characters are overly saturated, and I'm tempted to scribble on their faces. Give 'em a good ol' mustache and devil horns to boot, like my days in elementary school, when the books were bigger than my head, but my head was big enough to hold my dreams in. Now the threshold's shrunk a little, and there are bills to pay, and I can't sleep as well...

Still no update on the OneWord website. Two days in a row. That hasn't happened in a while. Hmmm.

Current Events by Belinda Roddie All of the demons I used to know - they have all gathered in the local town square. Picking up sticks and stitching them into crucifixes that they weave in their brimstone hair. The black stickiness lingers on their fingers. They cackle at the sobs from those already marginalized, now afraid of a lifetime of peripheral vision, or a bullet leaving stains on their car seats. All of the demons I used to know - they are all crowded around computer screens. Their keyboards smoke as they pound out their anthems of political decay. Listen: They'll tell you everything is great again, but there's an asterisk at the bottom of the page. You gotta be Caucasian to get the rights we fought so hard for, and you better not trust the Muslim lawyer who lives next door. They want you to prick yourself with your own safety pin, stay in the echo chamber you've gotten so comfortable in. They'll laugh at your protests and indulge in the...

No update on the OneWord website today. Welp.

I see stagnation in the future, and not just economically. Stagnation of progress. Stagnation of social services. Stagnation of hope, of body and soul and mind. I feel as if I must collect a tower of books to read before the year is out. Cram my brain with other worlds to remind me of the kindness that might yet remain in the one I live it. Drink any semblance of knowledge or story so that the history that unfolds is not so much a repetition of evil, but a repudiation of it.