My Cardboard Balcony

Oh, Granny by Belinda Roddie Grandma gave out candy on Christmas Eve, and before that, she put the star on the tree on Halloween. She sang carols while the kids ran around begging for sugarcoated treats, and she carved pumpkins while the snow fell and eventually turned to sleet. I guess that's one way to live by a different drum's beat.

Chad left a bucket of the worst Halloween candy he could find out in his front yard, and then he turned out all the lights and watched the second season of Stranger Things in his boxers, eating tiramisu-flavored ice cream out of the carton because he had to feel somewhat fancy about his life. Not surprisingly, when he brought the pail back into his house four hours later, it was still around half full. Also, an allegedly angry trick-or-treater had left a note scribbled out on binder paper, using quite a few cuss words that were more appropriate for teenagers' dirty mouths, to demonstrate their disappointment in the crude selection of sweets.

The Peace Chamber by Belinda Roddie You've coughed so much each time you've stepped out of the shower that you're not quite sure why you started doing it in the first place. You used to blame the temperature change, that adrenaline-jolting drop from Hawaiian mist to Bay Area pseudo-tundra. Now there's so much air lodged in your chest that it's like a latex balloon with nowhere to go but out, that seemingly necessary expulsion from the throat, rattling your entire frame until the glassy spots resembling stars start bouncing in the panes of your blurry, waterlogged eyes. You've never had respiratory issues, and the worst you ever got to an asthma attack was after running a mile in high school, resisting the urge to vomit in the bathrooms just nestled beside the dirt track, which had done wonders to the soles of your shoes with its bumps and divots, like pockmarks on old, corrosive skin. You try your best not to cough once you remove yourse...

There she lay by the chamber door, a broom all clattered on the floor. She'd swept and sighed and sighed and swept - for nearly a week, she hadn't slept. After the evening had elapsed, she stood and, all at once, collapsed. We didn't know just what to do, and so we left her, black and blue.

FUN FACT: OneWord misspelled the word withheld as "witheld." So I had some fun. English teacher powers activated! I examined the student's essay in front of me, and the first thing that immediately caught my eye was a rather awkward typo in the opening paragraph - in trying to introduce the concept that the United States government had concealed information and files of the JFK assassination, the college-level pupil had typed, "witheld," not "withheld," as it was properly spelled. Needless to say, I attacked the word with a red pen and moved on.

by Belinda Roddie The leaves rustled in the wind as the hairs prickled at the back of her neck. It was finally starting to feel like autumn, and yet the chill was so sudden that it settled into her bones like fire, burning away at her sinews instead of cooling down her ever raging temples. She stuffed her hands deep into the pockets of her coat, but after a while, they grew so damp and clammy that she had to draw them out again and expose them to the colder and harsher elements of the evening. Esther had gone on plenty of walks already this October, but this one was already different. Besides the rapid drop in temperatures, it was getting darker sooner, and that meant that the singing started earlier, too. At first, she thought she heard sea shanties on the wind - perhaps from her neighbor's house, where he liked to hold pirate-themed parties. As she turned the corner to another uniform residential block, the notes of what sounded like a funeral dirge sent anxiety down her stom...

In preparation for the Halloween party, we dressed up as pirates, drank several shots of tequila, found the dullest swords we could find, and challenged the Kraken upon the beach. Of course, there was actually no Kraken, but we did chase down a grubby old man with a metal detector and frightened a multitude of children. We were ultimately sent to the brig, with not a drop of grog to savor.