Thief

In another life, I stole a great deal of money from a bad man. I was a different person then, considering myself formed from marble rather than skin, a bringer of self-interested justice. He was at a club with some local woman with sad eyes. She was pouring him drinks, praising his vascular neck, his scarred nose. He was guffawing and saying ‘Thats the thing, thats the thing’, but never explaining what the thing was.

When he got up to take a piss, she called her boy on her phone. She asked him if he was being good for grandma, and told him that he had no reason to fear the dark, because she’d be back soon. The man had left his wallet on the table, and I, pretending to be drunk, staggered into the corner of the table and knocked it off. As I hunched in pain, I scooped it up. She didn’t know, I don’t think.

I took the money and spent it on a new bike, a crimson Kawasaki. The woman was found dead a few months later in a ditch. Her whole upper body was so bruised it was nearly unrecognisable. I saw the man in the club again several times before I left the district, before the death, and after. Still laughing, still saying ‘thats the thing’ as the women with sad eyes patted his arms.