My Cardboard Balcony

"I'd love to go to the party now," barked Helena from the other room, "but it'd really help if the zipper wasn't stuck on my jacket!" Emma laughed and sighed before entering Helena's bedroom, where her friend was struggling to move the metal bastard up and down without success. Emma let her fingers dance across the front of Helena's beautiful leather jacket, the blue hue matching her freshly painted fingernails.

by Belinda Roddie He, for once, did not start the fire. His mother did, and it glowed warm and bright in the living room hearth by the Christmas tree. The yule log smelled of oak and cinnamon, and the aroma renewed the strength in old men's bones and sad women's hearts. The lights glittered - the tinsel, too. The holiday was at last settling in. As cups of hot cocoa were passed around, his uncle asked the important question. "So, was last week Sylvester's third arson charge, or his fourth?" "His fourth," his mother said with a thin, cool smile. "Now, drink your cocoa." This week's prompt was provided by Amy Bernstein.

Hello, good friends, in red and green! We welcome you to this Christmas scene. Please, stay a while, sit by the tree. Enjoy the sweets and company. Carol sheets are on the table, beside the nativity stable. Cocoa and cider are prepared, and snow is falling everywhere. Our gifts for you are wrapped in gold; this holiday never gets old!

There's a lot I could talk about in this introspection, as we leave November behind and enter into another December and another official holiday season. There were moments this week that I enjoyed - positive feedback I received, time to have fun and even sing with my English students, collaboration with my Yearbook staff - and other moments that were more difficult. There's a lot of scary stuff going on in my country, which has not been new since November 8th of last year. I'm still focusing on a lot of personal creative writing, which is good, and I'm happy to continue pushing some of my energy toward that. But I don't really want to go into too much detail about any of those things. Instead, I want to share different moments. Simple moments. Moments between me and the people I love. Back on December 1st of 2015, Arden and I danced to Sara Bareilles' "December" in front of our Christmas tree, and I later played my original song, "Keep Me Warm...

Bright Season by Belinda Roddie December is the month when we dance under golden lights.

"I don't think anyone wants to be ignorant," Erika pointed out to the group, waving a fork loaded with potatoes as she spoke. "They just happen to be so. They'd rather just believe the things they do because it's comfortable. It's cozy. I had a college roommate - really sweet girl, liked to play piano - who was convinced that gay people were secretly out to turn her gay. Convinced . And I could never talk her out of it."

We're All Headed by Belinda Roddie We're all headed to worlds that do not want us, that do not welcome us to their banks, their continents, where all their species haunt the lands and stalk the grasses. All our thanks for escaping apocalypse go dry, like rivers in the heat, and we are left to wander on planets both young as I or far older, their ashen shores bereft of creatures such as us. The galaxies we flee to are not built for all our sins, nor for our history, which slowly bleeds into the water, making peaceful prince into tyrant, or love into a blade - we're headed to worlds where we should not stay.