Shoes

This flash fiction piece was written as a story companion to the day 29 drawing prompt Shoes from the 2020 Inktober prompt list. Click here to see the drawing.

I’m wearing stolen shoes.

I keep thinking it over and over again as I walk through the mall.

I’m wearing stolen shoes. I stole the shoes I’m wearing. I’m a thief, I’m officially someone who steals stuff.

It should be upsetting, worrisome. I should feel guilty, or at the very least concerned about getting caught. But I don’t. The adrenaline of that realization is pumping through my veins as I stroll casually past the Auntie Anne’s.

Ooh, a pretzel sounds good.

Standing in line behind a woman with three noisy kids yelling about cheese sauce, it occurs to me that I shouldn’t be hanging out at the scene of the crime. I mean, sure, the shoe store is up on the third floor and I’m down on the first, but that’s not exactly a proper getaway.

And yet, somehow, I find myself sitting down on the benches near the fountains and watching the water splash up and down while munching on cinnamon sugar pretzel nuggets. I cross my legs and bop my illegal foot up and down, thinking about how it went down.

I was trying on Adidas and the only guy in the whole store was standing in the back, blabbing away on his phone. When I’d tried to get his attention for some help when I’d come in, he completely ignored me. I wanted to know if they had a six and a half in the pink ones, because the only ones in my size were blue. So while I was waiting—patiently, I might add—I decided to try them on so when he brought out the pink ones, I’d know they fit and could check out right away.

But he never got off the phone. I sat there with the blue ones on for 25 minutes—I timed it. And he never came over. I even called over to him. I even called him, “Sir,” when I did it, as if he deserved it. He turned away from me.

I called over to him for help. At the job where he works. Where he’s getting paid to help customers. And he turned around and stuck a finger in his free ear.

As I sat there, stunned by the audacity, I thought about going to the grocery store when I was a little girl. Every time we walked through the produce section, I would take some grapes out of their bag and put them in my pocket to snack on as we shopped. It made the trip go faster. I tried it with other fruit, too: strawberries, raspberries, anything I could pop into my mouth without my mother noticing. The moral ambiguity of the, “As long as I don’t get caught,” principle wasn’t lost on me, even as a child. Some nights I would cry myself to sleep thinking about the time I would do if the cops ever found out about the notorious produce thief that was wreaking havoc all over town.

The guilt caught up to me one day when I was crying uncontrollably in the cart while my mother picked out meat. She asked me what was wrong and I wordlessly held out a handful of blueberries. I never stole a thing after that, but I always thought about it. I always cased every room I ever walked into. It was like a reflex. What could I steal out of here? Who would notice what and and what moment would I need to move so they couldn’t tell what I took?

Stealing is so easy. It’s infuriating. I walk around every day with free things staring me in the face and the only thing standing between us is moral conscience.

At least, that’s what I was thinking while I was waiting for the rudest retail clerk in the universe to get it together. Automatically, I was scanning the room for security cameras, of which there were precisely none. The only loss prevention elements I could detect were those big convex mirrors in all four corners of the store and, of course, the single cashier who, at that exact moment, decided to take his phone conversation in the back. Break time, I guess.

That was when I realized it had never really been my conscience that kept me from shoplifting, but my fear of getting caught, and the rage and irritation that was rising up from the depths of my stomach was burning that fear to ashes. I slipped my brown sandals into the Adidas box, put it back on the shelf, and walked casually out of the store.

And now I’m sitting in the lobby next to a rubber tree plant chomping on dessert pretzels without a care in the world. I deserve to get caught, that I know. I’m under no illusion that what I did was wrong, that the clerk at the store will probably get in trouble for it, but I know I won’t be punished for this. It’s almost making me more angry than the poor service. How ridiculous. How do any of these stores even have merchandise left? I may deserve to get caught, but these arrogant corporations deserve to be stolen from just the same.

I finish my pretzels, throw away the cup, and, on the way out of the mall, take a necklace off the rack at the front of the Claire’s by the front door. RIP to my moral conscience.