S⅁NIH⊥ ƎSƎH⊥
Ashliene McMenamy
I’ve never stolen anything truly meaningful. Not technically. I like things that make me feel like I’m holding a secret I’m almost too careless to keep—a bar of soap, its scent blooming from my bag, lace panties clinging together like a barrel of monkeys up my sleeve, coasters from a store too pretentious to notice they’re missing. A magazine at checkout, ceramic chopstick rests, a tube of lipstick, any shade. But I’m a careful person. For example, I wouldn’t take Colette’s coat. Real rabbit, she insisted. Found at an estate sale, because at some level, everyone knows the best things belong to someone else. She was still talking about it when she met me and Michael for dinner.
“It’s the most environmentally conscious thing to do,” Colette said, grabbing a menu. “Wearing fur, I mean. The fake stuff looks good, but it’s so much worse. It just stays there, in the landfill. Forever.”
Colette’s coat was slung over her chair. I thought about the sensation of the beige fur beneath my fingers, soft and yielding, its weight on my shoulders, its warmth pressing down on my collarbones, how tension feels when it’s drawn tight, the sting of pressure when it finally snaps.
“Since when did you care about the environment, Colette?” Michael peered around the restaurant for our waitress, a youngish girl with pencil-thin eyebrows who was, at most, spiritually present. “If you start thinking about what’s right and what’s wrong, you’ll never live. I mean you were vegan once, right?”
“For two years,” I corrected, raising an eyebrow. This was back when Michael and I dated, back when he was straight, back when I thought I could stop my hunger for things I shouldn’t want. We were both wrong, of course.
“And it was miserable,” he said. It wasn’t a question, but I knew he was asking for confirmation.
“Miserable,” I finished my drink. At the table next to us, a couple split a steak. I liked the clink of the knife as it met the plate, how quickly they sopped the blood and grease with a torn piece of baguette.
“That’s what I’m saying,” Michael said. “I hate to complain–I really do–about there being no such thing as ethical consumption, whatever, whatever, but at the end of the day, we’re humans with needs….”
The conversation drifted. Across the room, at the bar, a man in a suit unbuttoned his collar. He was politician-handsome, silver hair slicked back over a boyish face. Tall. Slender. I watched the motion of his fingers, his watch catching the soft amber light. I leaned in just enough to see him notice me. I pressed my thighs together. The sharp edges of my chair bit into my legs.
“And they’re doing all of that in a petri dish. Can you imagine that?” said Michael. “Lab-grown meat?”
“Yeah, weird,” I said. “Has anyone seen our waitress?”
Colette drummed her fingers on the table. “I think she went for a cigarette.”
“That’s the other thing,” Michael said, tearing into what little remained in the bread basket. “Nobody wants to work for anyth–”
“I’m getting another drink,” I said, rising from my seat.
An old mirror hung from across the bar, distorting my reflection as I slipped into the empty seat beside the man in the suit. This restaurant used to be different. People say that about every place you go to in the city, but there was a time when things were actually different—tables full of old men, regulars reading the New Yorker over plates of rabbit and ketchupy steak tartare in the back. The menu is the same, but nobody eats. It’s hard to have an appetite in a city that asks for so much just to give you a $26 martini to sip on under a framed photo of a B-list actor in return.
“Too loud over there?” the man in the suit asked. A tea candle flickered between us, throwing a soft light against his knuckles and two tumbler glasses, empty except for the remnants of something not quite orange or brown.
I said I’ve never stolen anything meaningful, and I mean that. In the beginning, I was just reallocating resources necessary in order to move out of a model apartment, and it was easy in the bars and the clubs, where jackets were piled next to tables covered in bottles of vodka and cranberry juice. Most of the time I’d find coke baggies, tubes of chapstick, and receipts in the pockets, bobby pins, gum wrappers, the usual garbage. Other times, I’d find some loose change I could dump into a mason jar in my room, a ring I could sell online, and if I were lucky, a wallet.
I always thought wallets were such strange, sacred things, the center of someone’s life and only mine for a fleeting moment. As I rifled through student IDs, loyalty punch cards, and neatly folded bills, I’d imagine all the choices that led their owner to me. Desire is like that, I think—an invisible thread pulling people through a series of seemingly justifiable events.
I tilted my head to get a better view of the man’s face. His jaw was sharp but softened with age. His eyes were a pale, near colorless blue. Almost foggy. Good. My pulse thundered in my ears, blood rushing so loudly I almost didn’t hear the faint clink of his watch against the bar as he gestured for another drink. He was saying something, but I couldn’t hear what. I smiled and watched his gaze shift from the bartender to my eyes, my lips.
I remember reading somewhere that all desire is rooted in shame, but I don’t think shame is a bad thing. Not in the way people make it out to be. Shame makes desire real. It makes you fuck people you shouldn’t and ignore the interest quietly building as you sleep and live off of dried fruit and green juice when all you want to do is sink your teeth into something that was once alive. My thoughts snapped back to Colette’s coat, how it would look on his floor, his tie in my hand, slipping free from his collar with a soft hiss–
I felt the weight of the watch in my pocket as I returned to the table with a drink I didn’t order in hand. Michael and Colette were still talking ethics, now with a bottle of wine between them. The man in the suit turned his head toward me. He smiled, raising his glass halfway in a silent toast. He didn’t realize it yet, but he would soon. Maybe in an hour, maybe in the morning. Maybe he’d convince himself he left his watch in the bathroom or in the back of a cab. Maybe he’d never realize it was me. These are the things we tell ourselves.
Ashliene McMenamy is a NYC-based writer whose work has appeared in Teen Vogue and PS. She loves oysters and natural wine, collecting 70's Playboy magazines, and tide pools. She also loves when you follow her ig (@ashjenexi) or her Substack, Status Update.