My Cardboard Balcony

So...where to start? My Yearbook students are giving me heart palpitations in regards to finishing anything by their first deadline. A trip in a dunk tank during the Homecoming Carnival ultimately culminated in a trip to the ER because get your ears flushed every year I'm serious guys. Found out that a couple of students have been trying to insult my identity behind my back, as if accusing me of being transgender or calling me a fat dyke is going to knock me down. Both these students have been through a lot - I get that - but really? Now I'm at my in-laws' house because it's their annual Halloween party, which I always enjoy, and it's the fifth time I've been a guest. My costume is ready to go, and so is my appetite for all the food and drink. Oh, and my Yearbook staff is having a Halloween party, too! It's the day right after my in-laws' annual party. So that'll be something - I haven't been to two Halloween parties in a row since coll...

Hello, Today! by Belinda Roddie Yesterday, I thought I'd die tomorrow. But here I am!

I loved you. I worshipped you. I treated you like a god. But you were mortal, just like I was. You may have worn the raiment of royal deities - the golds and purples, ribbons and beads, silver circlet atop your sunrise head. But you couldn't make the sun move, and you couldn't take sacrifices at the altar without getting your hands severely burned. I adored you, and yet you turned from me. And I was deemed a heretic for idolizing someone without the blood of Zeus or Ra.

I've Been Doing This Gig by Belinda Roddie I've been doing this gig for twenty years, selling my T-shirts off of busy streets, whether their logos boast of Christmas cheer or their colors match a Fourth of July feast. I've designed hundreds of tees, and I've tried to get them into all the stores in town, but I guess they don't like their business side because they just think I'm dicking around with them. They won't invest in my product, and so I stand on the corner each day, foisting off shirts for around twenty bucks a pop - not bad in terms of time and pay. My job's not easy, but it's really fun, and as for dreams - let's say I've got 'em done.

My hearing's been cut in half, and I don't know how to handle it. It happened just a week before an important deadline, and I don't know how to handle it. I've have anxiety before, but this episode? The other attacks can't hold a candle to it. I don't know how to handle my world being muffled like a silencer kissing the sweaty nose of a gun. Everything is too muffled, too subdued, too muted - too dangerous.

Pick One by Belinda Roddie The dreams we have are shuffled like cards within a deck. We don't know if we'll reach them if God breathes down both our necks.

After falling from the second story of his house onto a trampoline and then next into a sloppily raked up pile of leaves, Chester was more than just disoriented. He suffered two fractures in his left leg, and now he had to lie on his back on a boring hospital bed in a boring hospital room, watching a boring TV show that didn't even have the volume on. "Just goes to show," the doctor had told him, "not to drink that much bourbon before agreeing to skydive."