Luckmonkey by Alysia Constantine

Author:Alysia Constantine [Constantine, Alysia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2021-01-07T03:38:30+00:00

Chapter 8

Caught

Dear homeowner:

Congratulations! Your possession has been Uprooted.

Do not be alarmed: you have not been robbed, nothing has been damaged and no one has been harmed; your coffee maker has simply been repossessed by the universe. Since it was made of atoms that move freely and belong to no one, it was never yours to begin with, but only appeared temporarily to be in your home. It could have stood anywhere, had the atoms collected in another place instead of here. Do not mourn its loss, for it is not gone; rather, it has been absorbed into the Great Exchange.

To compensate for the loss you probably feel, the universe has left you this very nice desk chair. Please enjoy!

—The Uproots

When they’d broken into the office park, it was because Twee insisted that they were still hitting the Little Guy and they should be aiming at Business. The computer place had been a little too little for everyone’s comfort.

They’d let themselves into the main building of the complex—Twee had actually let them in, thanks to a rock and a skinny arm. She’d cracked the glass of the front door enough that she could reach in and unlock it, and, from there, it was easy to get into the lobby and the main hall. Problem was, after that, they would still have to break into one of the offices.

“Let’s hit the dentist, in memory of Vas,” Kohl said, jiggling the door’s handle.

“He’s not dead, he just left.”

“Okay, in memory of Vas’s teeth, then,” Kohl said.

“That makes no sense. Besides, what would we take? Who’s going to want a dental drill?” T asked.

“Definitely not me.” Twee went sprinting down the hallway, jiggling door handles and peering into the occasional plate glass window.

“This is a bust.” T wheeled the office chair to the side of the hallway and left it there, out of place and useless, like those sneakers people hang on telephone wires.

“Here’s a ladies’ room,” Kohl said.

“Don’t they lock those things? Don’t you have to have some sort of official key to get in?” T asked.

Kohl tried the door—it pushed open without resistance.

“It’s our lucky night,” she said. “The ladies’ is open!”

“That just sounds bad,” T said. “Anyway, what are we going to take, tampons?”

“And pads. We’d be liberating them for the good of femalekind if we did. They charge an arm and a leg for something that should be free,” Kohl said, skipping backward into the bathroom. “We could distribute them to homeless women.”

It actually wasn’t a bad idea…maybe better than what they had been doing. T filed it mentally under Things to Consider, and then, without a second thought, followed Kohl into the mirrored lounge.

The ladies’ room smelled like powder and lavender, probably some sort of freshener spray that made it seem cloyingly less fresh. It was close and windowless: cinderblock walls glopped with insistently pink paint, disintegrating posters (Picasso’s “Fleurs et Mains” and a shrunk-down version of a Monet water lilies painting in a fake gold frame, and, for some probably horrifying reason, an anti-choking poster).

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