Petty And/Or Crime
- Mar 13, 2020
- 4 min read
by K Chiucarello
My father had always been disappointed in me, so I found ways to work with it. I fashioned myself around petty crimes the way one would typically climb a work ladder. Initially, none of my offenses were technically considered illegal and that was exactly the point of it.
I started small. I only unfriended people on their birthdays. I spread rumors bereft with rotten falsities sinking mushed at their core, to the nature of La Croix is actually pronounced Le Crosse, like the sport. I keyed an ex’s truck because, well, first they stole $1,344 from me. I guess a thief loves a thief. I took three grapes from bundled batches at the grocer and let them disintegrate in my mouth, looking the stockist dead in the eye while I sucked at the gummed shelled lump of fruit. He gave me a wink which was when I knew I could burn this entire place down and never be held accountable. As I grew older and found most men to be irrelevant, my interactions with them were as petty as the food I was sampling. When I was telling a story and a man began to speak over me, I would let him ride, nodding hazed in agreement. After he finished I paused for consideration, resuming my story, never an acknowledgment to his interruption. The city would be down on a raincast, bodies drenched. I would arrive to my office elevator, a reprieve from dampness, and hear co-workers running through the lobby. I gestured towards holding the door, while inside I pounded at the close button, tilting my lips with condolence, shrugging my shoulders as suits ran for the doors weeping shut. It took 42 floors to get to my office and I wanted the steel privacy. My dream was to one day leave a restaurant and scoop two fries off a plate of a dining passerby, waltzing towards the exit with a salty string greasing downwards and a patron screaming after my linen coattails.
I don’t know if I didn’t have any standards or if I had just been exhausted by abiding to the standards with no real win out at the end. The line between petty and crime began to blur like those seven martinis I had put on my corporate card, later expensing it as a work meeting with myself.
Then I met Meg. She was a walking billboard of be gay, do crimes. We hopped turnstiles, making out on the bench plush in the middle of the station, her hand up my shorts pushing flesh that hadn’t been weighted with this kind of urgency in months. A couple of kids called us dykes and we stole their bikes, floating down Union Street on frames that were too small for us anyways, singing George Harrison songs like we were being cheered on by a college karaoke bar. We bought buckets of grapefruit and sat there peeling childhood stories out of the other, slinging the citrus at Mr. Harris’ door, juice ricocheting down the woodwork of a home we could never afford to buy. It was a warning sign to Mr. Harris after he suggested we should cover up one afternoon.
Meg and I were lying in bed, a strong grasp of coffee and eggs settled over thighs, when the news came on the AM radio. Not a word was between us when Meg got up and began tossing my clothes in a backpack. If the radio was accurate and there was only one year left on this planet, then friends, family, co-workers were out. U-Hauling was now an apocalyptic survival tactic. Meg grabbed a screwdriver on our way out the door.
She gestured towards Mr. Harris’ car as an encore of revenge. I watched her guide to the vehicle, Meg slamming the screwdriver between the top frame and the door, wedging enough of an air pocket for the metal clothes-wire to breathe down the window’s spine. The tip pricked the unlock button and it was my time to solo. Her fingers pushed on my palm as she released the tool into my hand. I leaned to Meg, my knee rising to the emptiness between her, wet before I even lapped into the driver’s seat. The screwdriver hit the ignition with a paramedic force. When nothing came, I knew God was roll-calling my history of crime. I smiled up, saying to the filmed, dusted air, I can outrun you. I pulled the screws next to the steering wheel out, four cavities that needed a filling. They sang into my kneecap, a delicate shine you could have missed if you blinked. The panel gave itself next to me and fell loose to the floor, three sets of wires naked and exposed, the red begging to be handled. I rubbed the battery wire clean with the screwdriver, twisting the ignition wire to it, the car lights bursting into a hot and yellow song. I fingered for the motor wire, heaving my shoulder on the dash, and once I strangled it still I sliced a piece of insulation from the end, touching the twisted wire set and the motor wire together for a revealed amalgamation of electricity.
History is tagged clean inside of our bodies. When kismet runs amok, I want to be a bundle of loose ends gathered from previously turned lives. I could not tell you where Meg and I were going or how long it would take before we arrived there but I can say with certainty that a life where structure does not glisten in the way of late capital is a luminary one that is of the greatest risk.
All of this time I had been outrunning parameters of a society intent on destroying itself when those same parameters now needed to start outrunning me.
K Chiucarello is a non-binary queer writer/editor living in Brooklyn, NY. They currently oversee submissions for Susie Magazine. They were last published in Slaughterhouse and have work forthcoming in Lammergeier. In these trying times they are trying to stockpile as many puzzles as possible. Twitter quips on gender and writing can be found @_kc_kc_kc_.
