Everything, she thought, is an accident of where you are.
STEALING HOME BY KAY BONTEMPO 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 78
Two bell peppers, Muenster cheese. Cauliflower, a pack of Newports, Tampax. Martinelli’s apple juice. Paper towels two-ply. English Breakfast tea. Boil-in-a-bag rice, paper clips, ramen noodles. Maybe some ice cream if there was money left over. America’s Choice vanilla, eaten straight from the carton. It wouldn’t be bad.
With an uncomfortable pop, he pulled out of her and lay beside her, breathing hard. It was 11.52pm. She wondered if the Shop’n’Save would even be open.
Lucas was 23, like her, and also graduated from the local college. He had a calm assurance that things would be the way they were forever. In his apartment he had hung the same basketball posters and St Pauli Girl beer sign that had adorned his dorm room. In the corner, a Yeti cooler-fridge hummed, relentlessly content.
She liked him, she thought, in the way that she liked cereal—enjoyed on occasion. Some things changed from week to week, from moment to moment, but raisin bran was perpetual, and so it seemed was Lucas.
She rose and dressed, and slid out of the apartment with a noncommittal goodbye. He didn’t see her swipe the mini cactus from the corner of his dresser.
Back at home she fiddled with the hundreds of assembled trinkets on her bedside table and wondered what she would tell the next boyfriend about him. Maybe about his impressive collection of polo shirts. Or that his favorite TV show was The Mindy Show. The Mindy Show Guy she would call him to the next boy and they would laugh without shame but also without malice.
She had carved Lucas’s cactus into the exact shape of the State of Texas.
Her office cubicle had three walls the color of unpolished pewter and a divider she shared with Marcia, a heavyset woman who typed with two fingers and gave off the ever-so-faint scent of mothballs.
Her desk was mostly bare, save for a too-smiley photo of her and Lucas that he had put there himself. In it, he was wearing a turquoise polo shirt and giving a thumbs-up; her eyes were half closed, something she had pointed out to him and he had ignored.
The desk drawer housed hundreds upon hundreds of cap erasers, stolen one by one from the supply closet when no one was looking. Matte and pink, they pointed upwards like small animals begging for direction. She had arranged them painstakingly into a map of the world, Africa looming large in the center and Japan hanging like a question mark.
She wondered what it was like in Japan. She pictured bamboo reaching toward the sky, TV-inspired images of temples built like layer cakes.