My Cardboard Balcony

R'lyeh by Belinda Roddie I'd praise Cthulhu if only his creator hadn't been a staunch white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer Maybe he waited dead dreaming until his bastard master felt the tentacles growing inside his small intestine After all it takes more than a yacht to the head to subdue a creature worthier of being a god than the racist who inked him

I didn’t mind my job, honestly. Sure, the work was occasionally tedious, and spending all that time in a cubicle did quite a deal of damage to my already out of shape back. But my coworkers were nice, and my boss had a good head on her shoulders. I worked 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, and felt a sense of normalcy. I hadn’t felt that in a while. Of course, that was before my brother called me from prison.

by Belinda Roddie "I love these shoes," she said, "but I hate the way they pinch my toes!" Sally demonstrated this to her wife, Nicole, by stripping one heel off her right foot, revealing one or two swelling blisters on her hallux. Nicole wrinkled her nose. "If they pinch your toes so badly," she quipped, "then why do you wear them?" "Because I like them. Duh." Now Nicole raised an eyebrow. "How can you like shoes that hurt you?" Sally's face scrunched up dramatically. "You don't get it!" she cried out. " Beauty is pain!" "All right, all right, Miss Femme Fatale," sighed Nicole, waving her off dismissively. "I gotta pick Wesley up at the station. I'll massage your feet later or something, okay?" This week's prompt was provided by Arden Roddie.

We were barely hanging on to life when the heatwave took over the battlefield. By then, water supplies had dwindled to almost nothing, and those who weren't dehydrated quickly succumbed to heat stroke. It was, allegedly, record-breaking, the earth scorched and the grass turned brown by the time the pressure eased off and winds began to blow again. I cradled my sergeant in my arms on the last day and tried to give her my canteen of water. But she refused to take a single sip.

I miss theater. I say that a lot, especially immediately after I've seen a show. I miss acting. I miss working tech. I miss seeing my words come to life onstage. I want to get involved in that world again - and in music as well. I just feel like I can't anymore. When I first decided to be an English teacher, I figured that my time after school would remain mostly available, save for some paper grading sessions. One of my New Year's resolutions, in fact, was to get involved in theater again after such a long hiatus. The last time I was in a play, I was almost eighteen years old, so it's been over a decade. This thespian's a bit deprived here. What I didn't take into account, however, was the wrench thrown into my plans: I was hired as the yearbook adviser at the high school I work at. Yearbook takes an immense amount of time out of my day. Ideally, it wouldn't; my students would organize, design, write, and photograph the whole time, and my main job...