From the Thief to His Daughter
To be read upon the event of his arrest
Dear Isabel,
Here's a lie about thieving. You’ve probably heard it before.
A man in a suit wants to hang the Mona Lisa on the bare wall of his mansion. So he pulls together his closest friends, and they wine and dine their way into the museum; and elegantly—oh so elegantly—they lift the Mona Lisa from the exhibit. It sits in the mansion for the rest of its cold, still life, surrounded by chandeliers and gold leaf.
Here's the truth: the man in the suit doesn’t exist. Neither does his mansion. If you want to live the life—the real life, the heister life, my life—you have to get him out of your brain. Be ready for alternating periods of abundance and leanness, for a month working over a glamorous cruise ship followed by a month lying low in a leaky apartment. Prepare to leave behind everything you cannot carry. Prepare to run. You are not allowed the extravagance of thinking phrases like “coming back” or “going home.”
Here's the truth: You will be free—free of the constraints of society, free of the concerns of the world. But you will also be a marginal person. A ghost. A goner.
About the Creator
Emma Gardner
Emma Gardner is a classics grad student, an aspiring writer, and a BookToker (@theaceofbooks). She reads 200 books a year.
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Habitus. Runner-Up in Father's Footprint Challenge.
In the memory I am thirteen years old. It’s a cold night in September, a few months into what my dad and I call my science fiction initiation. I sit on the floor of my parents’ room, my back against the foot of their bed. My dad holds a mug of chai tea. His long legs stretch out on the floor. We stare at the TV that rests on my mother’s bureau and wait for it to warm up. It’s an old TV, the square kind with a curved screen I can rap my knuckles on to produce a satisfying hollow thunk.
By Emma Gardnerabout a year ago in Men
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Each day she watched through her window. Watched? Perhaps an exaggeration: a monochromatic nuclear aftermath remaining of the world, blurring into a blindness--loss of contrast and depth of field. Achromatic aberrations displayed a waste-scape stratified in grays.
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Comments (4)
Your use of letter structure sets this piece apart. Beautifully written!
This is awesome. I love that you wrote it as a letter. The whole thing was amazing. Congrats, I really enjoyed it
Ooh, I like this somewhat darker, more sober take on the challenge. Well done!
Haunting tale. Well done and congrats on your win!