“All human acts and all human
creations constitute a single drama, and in this sense we are all saved or lost
together. Our life is essentially
universal.” Ponty
Dominique Hughes was picked up for
shoplifting
by the Bon Marché security guards.
This yellowed index card says he
was nine years old.
Another card stapled behind it —Dominique—
age twelve,
weighing in at a slight 95 pounds, was
caught peeking
into the women’s dressing
room.
All of us articulate want as legibly as we can.
I skip to another card, the one with
my name, accomplice.
It shows I’m fourteen and is a
lie. I am tempted to rip it
like one does with paid tickets. Or
at least scratch
and replace accomplice with observer.
After all,
when Shelbie snapped the rose-etched,
leather bracelet
around her wrist I hissed, put it back, remembering
Glenda and I stopped and searched at
J.C. Penny’s
just a month earlier for palmed lip
gloss and dangly earrings.
I didn’t even have pierced ears. Those
blue beads looked cold
as ice cream, like polished milk. I was hungry with want,
but a want that yearned to receive more
than this take.
Shelbie didn’t put the leather band
back
so between tears, her mouth
contorting like a hooked trout,
the security guards squeezed and
bruised her upper arm.
Not one, yet, to challenge authority,
on command
I lifted my shirt, shivering and self-conscious
as drafts in that gray concrete cellar
hardened my nipples
into worthless currency.
I am momentarily surprised, but
there it is,
the Bon Marche hired me to track
and add
shoplifter’s names to that collection.
Thousands of cards, each
documenting someone who,
for want, gripped some small watch,
or slipped a pair of shorts under
their skirt,
as though stealing is humanly
natural.
I am not sure if I am here due to
oversight,
or to the store manager’s act of charity.
And Dominique. Three years later Dominique,
got sucked into a maelstrom of
violence,
concealed a loaded gun and strutted
into the Bon.
Although, I’m
adding strutted, who knows?
The card descriptions are stark,
the handwritten scrawls fading.
From where I sit any theory is
possible. Conspiracy.
Vengeance. A force-administered soup
of psychoactive drugs. Nature or
nurture.
Dominique’s history may have been
nothing more
than a series of bad choices
kick-started
by an over-abundance of desire.
These are old
memories surfacing.
This is my break
time.
I am reading in
the news that today
Dominique Hughes is
being sentenced for murder.
Before I can tag
this in my brain onto an imaginary
white index card,
something flat and easily misplaced,
something I can
set down and put away,
my new manager waves
me over.
He’s playing video
footage of American Air-fighters
zeroing in on
insurgents. I grimace and walk away
before the blood
which would probably
at this distance, not
be visible, all that rubble.
They deserve it, he says, punching his
desk with his fist
to make sure that
I get it.
Just the day
before he was telling me
about his annual hunting
trip with his nephew.
He had stopped
talking to apologize
because he can no
longer bring himself to shoot elk,
about how he can
only catch and release fish;
that’s how soft
he’s become.
He said he hopes I
won’t think less of him,
his new want to
hold back the kill.
Some days all the want and shame,
they become too much for me to sort
through.
We are all connected, I suppose,
and this is why I can no longer
tell
where one desire ends and another
begins.
