My Cardboard Balcony

Solitary Inmate by Belinda Roddie She was stripped naked of everything - her make-up, her name, her ammunition, dropping like mints onto the floor, dissolving into powder in cold water. Drink up, you bitch - the cavalry's calling. Tucked into a jail cell as warm as a womb, she hallucinated sunsets when it was sunrise. She smoked cigarettes that didn't exist, but the smoke still coiled its fingers around the bars. The guards couldn't make sense of it. There she was, stark - all truths denied, yet all truths exposed. All truths gathered in clumps of wet hair. You cut and you cut, but the follicles stayed intact. Everything continued to grow. And everything continued to sprout. And everything

My Foot's Asleep by Belinda Roddie It's resting, unlike me - and easily having better dreams than I could hope for. I want to shake it out of its daze and make it weep for another half hour. If only it understood that the pins and needles have done their work on it, and now it will barely be able to see the world through blurred and disoriented glasses.

Several days later, I finally saw a new prompt emerge from the void. It was a simple prompt - a singular word, in fact. At last, the burden of the drought was over, and I was ready to slake my thirst. I scrambled to my keyboard and let me fingers perform their dance. When it was over, I returned to the rankings, and there I was - still in third place. "One day," I told myself, "I will be the OneWord Champion."

Lukewarm by Belinda Roddie the brain occasionally maintains the consistency of cold soup that's been left in the microwave for too long and now has a film over it hope you enjoyed that mental image now residing comfortably in your broth brain