My Cardboard Balcony

Pay the Ferryman by Belinda Roddie I came across the river Styx and felt the soul inside me melt. I'd thought the next life more than this, and not this pot of tears and tricks that carried me from Orion's belt. Kharon was waiting in his boat, his hair pulled back, revealing bones, and once I boarded, we started to float down streams forced down a devil's throat, the water gushing 'round blackened stones. As we both sailed the river Styx, I gripped the boat's sides, splinters trapped between my fingers, my eyes lit by flames that glowed blue once they met the air from which all life was sapped. I asked Kharon, "Much farther now?" and yet he did not answer. He just cast a dim, skeletal frown. His wordless questions: Why? And how? And just what was the point of me? And just what was the point of all the bodies huddled on the bed of Styx, making their panicked calls to ferrymen who rode to halls of ever growing swarms of red? ...

"Who's standing in your driveway?" No one I knew. She was tall and handsome and dressed in all blue. She wore a big hat all jaunty on her head, and the only different color was on her lips: Dark red. She waved with gloved fingers as I pulled up beside her, a smile revealing the slyness inside her. I asked her, "Excuse me, is there something you need?"

Under Par by Belinda Roddie Everyone left the course when the rain started, but the golfer's daughter was adamant, and she let herself get struck by lightning trying to score a hole in one for the first time to impress her drunk dad, who was sitting at the clubhouse bar, drinking mojitos and wincing at the memory of his wife's voice, all rough and husky after seventy straight years of smoking smuggled Cuban cigars, and she was now living in Havana with a much younger man, his chest hair thicker and darker than his own shadow, his face buried in her sagging cleavage, breathing in her folds, breathing in her creases, breathing in her octogenarian origami, her skin as thin as paper (and smelling as acidic as paper, too), and as they made love, and as the noise of the clubhouse died down with each swallow of vodka and lemonade, outside lay the golfer's daughter, who was now sprawled in the grass with electricity in her hair, Jupiter's weapo...

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A Well-Deserved Vacation by Belinda Roddie Each - stressed - syllable  - provides the ambiance of a small restaurant, where spaghetti is twirled into your hair and the forks are tipped with fool's gold. Your meal is free, courtesy of the chef with the grin and the lazy eye. Eat up before the wife finds out; kiss the waitress before the wife finds out; take two ladies back to the hotel with you and let them regurgitate your poetry - your hackneyed odes to a century that brought you technicolor war that brought you tanks and cigarettes that brought you politicians choking on their own manhood sweet sweet sweet rich and full of nutrients but still a carcinogen roiling your stomach more violently than the cannoli. You used to write your own stories without relying on nostalgia and the magazines that kept you hard and happy. You saved up so much money for this trip abroad, and now here you are, new millennium stranger clinging to the mirage that vintage ...

The school district had been closed for five years - every single school shut down. Students were bused to the adjacent city to complete their education, sitting in desks older than their grandparents, still using chalkboards to write out equations and spelling lists. I visited the high school - Smith High School, as it was blandly named - and was reminded of the years preceding the Civil War.

I felt the colors of my skin flake away, like the fragile neon patterns of a butterfly's wings, scraped off by God's invisible blade as He attempted to cleanse the artistic palette. All at once, I was falling  - pitching forward, chin making contact with the marble floor, though no pain reverberated from my jaw to my nose. I simply lay there, as my muscles contracted. As my bones shrank. As my entire body metamorphosed.