Story

A Thieves Warning

X looked ahead of their feet as they walked, manifesting her inner machinations on a toothpick before letting anything splinter from her lips,

“Look, Kid, I’m gonna tell you all this, but I gotta be clear, I don’t recommend you try it out. However, as I understand it, me not telling you about it ain’t gonna keep you from doing it, and I’d rather you’d go about it with a bit of wisdom amidst your wits. Now, we’re not going to take any short cuts so saddle up.”

The kid looked annoyed about being condescended to, but wanted the goods enough to keep it close to a glance.

“First of all, this is just my story. You gotta know that you aren’t me. I got good with getting away with this stuff by the time I was your age, but I was also allowed to think that so that I could get pinned with something bigger. I was good with cops and guards and ghost shoppers and attendants, but I was also allowed to think that so I’d be easy to catch. You are getting into this when recognition tech has got you down to a fine science. They’ll let you think you’re getting away with it too, but don’t fall for it, every haul you make will be logged and filed along with every move leading up to it and following it. It’ll be used to pinpoint you and other perps with invasive accuracy, and knowin’ won’t be half of what they do with that information. I can’t stress enough that I think lifting is a dangerous move. I have this mind that is constantly prepared to explain everything I’m doing. That allowed me to come up with a system that circumvented the loopholes in theirs. You’d do well to be running a contingency story in your mind as though you will be stopped. I think being stopped is better than when they get you on the run, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Just, if you’re going to do it, you gotta do it both like you will be caught and that there is nothing to catch… or better yet, just don’t do it. Fuck, should I be reverse psychology-ing this? Nah, don’t be one of those who acts like manipulation is the only language that speaks to them, or you ain’t ready for what i’m telling you, okay?”

“Yeah, alright.”, the kid was barely sure what she was agreeing to.

“Ah, I can’t expect you to know what you’re agreeing to. Just you gotta understand that this shit will bring a hex down upon you, er, whatever language you want it in. Psychology? Secret Service? Sin? Math? What’s your Dogma?”

“Uhm, I don’t know, but, okay it’s bad.”

“Yeah, it’s bad, but not for the reasons they tell you it’s bad. I had a code, yeah?

I restricted my liberation efforts to big corporate jobs. I had thought I had it down to a nearly victimless crime. See, I figured that these big stores were the biggest thieves of all, yeah? They steal from the people making the goods, from the people selling them and from the people buying them. They steal from the earth, from the water, from the sky, from all that lives, has lived and will live. It sounds too dramatic for real life, but it’s all there, they don’t even hide it anymore, there’s no honour amongst ’em. The only crime that weighed on me is the way it would damage the trust in humanity of the average worker, to whom I considered myself an ally. I had thought that this was their loyalty to their masters clouding their judgment and so it wasn’t so bad if I aggravated the issue a little. Came a time that the connective damage the average individual felt would become a very serious collective wound and weapon, and i would reap the rearing of it’s many heads when the thief hunt began to mobilize and automate. Then I became the thief getting robbed, no honour above, no honour below. I didn’t know I’d been set up and had been made a pretty little scapegoat for a side of this country that you do not want to see for yourself worse than you wouldn’t want to believe it. These fuckers are getting dispatched on apps to terrorize petty criminals. You don’t want to know what it is to not know how many lists you are on. So, it’s not bad because stealing is bad, in fact some times it’s the right thing to do and you’re gonna wanna know how to do it when it is. It’s bad because it’s fucking dangerous. You would pray for full prosecution once faced with the persecution that follows anyone who lets themselves get seen being too much of the wrong kinds of interesting under the current reich.”

X had this tendency for starting to speak carefully, getting carried away and then diminishing into her insecurities, her main inheritance from the family that groomed her. Alternating held and laboured, unconcious and concentrated breath, she scrunched her face in the wonder of what the fuck she was doing telling all this to some kid until she started to remember again. She pointed to a tattoo of a lit bomb on her calf,

“See that? It’s a thieves warning. “Be careful with me or I will smash your body to pieces and send your soul to heaven.” or something like that.”

The kid looked wide eyed. X couldn’t tell if it was shock, disbelief or overload as she estimated. It was usually one of those three as far as she could tell. Time to think was time to breath was time to digest. If you didn’t take enough you’d gap out, took to much and you’d likely never find the page again. X reorientated her course, headed in the same direction but from much further behind.ar

“The first time I ever stole was, well, the *first* time was at the dentist. I was 5. I couldn’t decide between a ring with a pink gem and a sticky hand. When he wasn’t looking I took both. When B2 found out, he excitedly told on me. I had told on him so much, he relished his opportunity and expected full retribution. I’d say he got it. I was brought back to the office to return it and apologize, but the real punishment was how I would be stamped as a “bad girl”, never again as trusted with every trespass I was caught for, and in those days I was caught for every one and then some. From that point on, the fear of God and the fear of the all seeing eyes that seemed to be upon me and all that I did seemed to develop a guilty conscious that would keep me from taking what wasn’t offered or allowed.”

X thought of Rimmer of Red Dwarf, “it seems as though God is an elaborate hoax designed to keep a primitive people in check. Some things real, the rest imagined, those imaginations make reality as much as what’s real. Surveillance is a continuation of this hoax, if it had not in fact always been a part.”

“ See, the important question that ought more oft be asked is “what do you do for control?” The answers can usually be found in common child behaviours, our first rebellions against what is done to children under the guise of “upbringing”, while in fact pounding them down. People might gain control from saying “no”, from taking, from adherence to rules, from controlling their toys, cleaning, from telling, from hitting other kids, from violating privacy and rules, they masturbate, whatever they can access and seems like reciprocal action against the power that had been taken. See, I could never say “No” and I was always too small and scared and usually ruled by obedience (formed from being constantly monitored and punished therefore usually seeking and finding control within the rules) to ever try to dominate anyone. I rearranged my room regularly, I followed the rules (except in exceptional circumstances), I told (oh, boy howdy, did I ever tell), and I did develop an inner world of secrets. Masturbating was a big one actually, been doing it since I can remember, but that opens a whole can of pedophilic incest that will take us too far from this part of the plot. In my inner world of secrets, I vied for any additional control I could get in that control home. I snooped, took the occasional treat when I felt like testing God rather than my will power, I masturbated, I prayed, I dreamed of escape. The point is that when a child or person is deprived of their own control, they will seek it however they can get it, as though a human need which must be fulfilled. When someone pinches your nose while you sleep, you learn to breathe through your mouth, whatever it takes to get the need met.

I was a good Christian kid through the following years. The “Voice of God” was strong within me and I obeyed reliably as the guilt of straying the path became heavy enough to qualify as it’s own punishment, even for thinking of doing the wrong thing. I suggest finding a copy of “The Convictions of Leonard McKinnley” by Brendan Macleod, he covers how this concept twists a child better than I’ve read elsewhere.

What broke my faith and my obedience along with it was when I was falsely accused at 12. Now, this is important. I had gone out shopping with a friend and her friend. I just wanted a Mother’s Day gift and it’s all I had money for, a glass hummingbird to hang in the window. I had a terrible pang in my stomachs that afternoon so I just followed them from store to store, finding a seat to assume an upright fetal position to wait for them with my head between my knees. We were stopped as we left The Real Canadian Superstore, and I was shocked and confused, I didn’t have a clue. We were brought upstairs and interrogated separately. I didn’t know what they had done or if they had done anything, but at least I knew that I was innocent, and trusted that the truth would save me, as it had condemned me so many times before. When I entered the office with officer Fazaan (police in Canada have this terrible policy of working without a partner so there is no credible witness to their misconduct after they discredit the civilian they enact it against) she told me they already knew and that I may as well fess up. I said I didn’t take anything, they could search me. She told me that my friends had already told her I was guilty. I said that either they were lying or she was, I didn’t take anything. She told me they had me on camera taking things. I said that she didn’t and she should check again to find me nursing a stomach ache at every store. She continued to try to scare me into a confession for a crime I hadn’t committed, it felt like I was in there for hours. They declined to search me, though they had searched my bag to find the lone hummingbird complete with receipt. They declined to search me, they had nothing against me as I had done nothing, but she nevertheless called my parents and told them that she had caught me stealing, a fate I estimated as undoubtedly worse than jail time. The home I would return to would never be the same as the one I left that day. I was only grounded for a few weeks, but the scolding and the defamation of character were the marks that I would bear permanently, as my parents were now humiliated and convinced that they hadn’t been hard enough on me. I had done the right thing, I was innocent, and it didn’t matter, I was being punished for suspicion dressed as confirmation. I didn’t last in the church long after this, after my mother scolded me for the sins I so devoutly and intently resisted. It didn’t just break my faith in God and the Law and my family, it broke my faith in truth. My family and internalized critic became so scrutinous of my every action after this that my control became althemore restricted. I could no longer find control in the rules, they betrayed me. It wasn’t long before I realized righteousness was a game of illusions, that ultimately nothing I did or didn’t do mattered compared to appearances. I began to steal little things from stores on occasion, since it apparently didn’t matter whether I did or didn’t, I found my control elsewhere.

There is an important phenomenon here that I didn’t know I was subject to at the time; when you accuse and punish a person for something they haven’t done enough, they will eventually be inclined to commit. If they are to pay the price anyways, why restrict themselves? The men who commit ritual abuse understand this phenomenon better than I do, and they incorporate it into their scripts. There were too many occasions to recall of uncle (the) Don, a man who ordinarily would not be caught giving me much of any attention but shorthand disgust and derision, arriving with theatric timing and delivery to call me a thief over anything he could(, which it turned out was anything), chortle, and disappear from the scene. Herein lie the hidden code by which I would eventually learn to quit, this was long game entrapment, but I’m getting ahead again.”

The kid looked a little dizzy trying to follow X’s trajectory but she seemed to be keeping pace and focus well enough to encourage X enough to persist. For X to call them a kid was almost a joke, for she would be the younger for much of the conversation, though looks they do deceive.

“What’s entrapment?”, the kid asked

“S’when someone gets tricked into committing a crime so it can be used against ‘em. Whole world seems to run on the shit.

Now, another important thing that story gets at is how victims can be easily lured into becoming perpetrators.”

“Isn’t that just another way of saying the same thing?”

X blushed, “Touché, you keep up better than I’ve gotten used to.

For the following year I went on a tear….”

She pulled a crumpled note from her pocket,

“This was written just near the end of the months long hunt, so my thoughts ,and further, my words, were scattered and hard to follow, I was so traumatized from trying to tell the tale that I was attempting to speak in the third person and mixed metaphors, heh…

“Once upon a time a boy had been beaten down to the point of bare survival and scant desire for it.
A boy began to get harassed at shops, bringing her to a discovery – people have been taught to profile the poor, broken-hearted, alternative and anxious as criminals and insane. Recognizing the corporations a boy could afford to be of the highest order of criminals, they reverse engineered the ill gotten concept of marking the divergent and disenfranchised for harassment.
Seeing the cracks in the system as she slipped to her near death between them, she took the discovery of an advantage as well earned for the price he had been made to pay in advance.
A boy resolved to be the thief of theives, a thief with a code, an aspiring robin hood.
All that A boy had to do was be an entitled middle class white lady who looked too “good” to break a rule. A little shape shifting but really not much.
It worked like a charm – the rage grew in relation to the efficacy of the tactics. The harvests were great and shared but always curbed within the code made for moral integrity and protection.
All until A boy made another discovery – why cops don’t care about petty under 500 and why she would not be playing his tricks back at the bullies anymore….
A boy went from harassed to hunted.
His retaliation used to confirm a bias against her, he bore the marks of being carved into the statistic slated for A boy from the start.
He should not have played the game the true criminals made and expected them to play fair.
A boy regrets thinking his little tricks would make his point rather than theirs
A boy was a fool, now he’s just a shell – shocked.”

A boy had taken the bait over time, as innocent as she was guilty”

February 10 ’26

“Want me to punch ya in the shoulder? It’ll make you forget all about the pain you’re feeling now.”

Some memories seared like spears through her while the rest remained faded in the frays of her relegated sensations.

“I want you to stand here, and read that out loud while you think about what you’ve done until we tell you to stop.”

“RAT” was graffiti’d on a wheel stop in the far parking lot of the Rutland Sports Field.

X stood between tears, obedient and resentful as ever, committing the term to memory. That’s what she was. That’s what a person who tells is. That’s what she always would be to them if she didn’t learn to lie. Being that they had never really believed her, it seemed, they thought she could lie and that she did it regularly and well. This would make it so, in their minds, that when she did tell the truth she would have to be quite deliberate about it. They seemed to think she would only tell the truth of them if she meant to do them harm. Her brothers didn’t know that she could not, when put on the spot, deny an authority an honest answer. She didn’t know how, she was too scared. She learned quickly that if she lied she would always be caught and it would always make things worse and she could seldom handle the notion of things being worse than being questioned over something she might fear enough to lie about. She learned to hide a lot. But not to lie. She tried on occasion and would get caught on every single attempt, earning herself a reputation as someone who must do it much more often. Her Brothers didn’t know when they left her to climb a wall into the equipment room of the local Y, that when an adult asked, “Where did your brothers go?” she would not be able to manage to do anything but comply and point her finger. She was too scared and couldn’t think beyond the moment to consider her fear of them.

One of those plastic rods for adjusting blinds come down over her at whipping speed and stops just close enough to feel it’s breeze on her face. No Touch Torture. When she whinces, B2 recoils in shock, “I can’t believe you actually thought I would actually hit you!” and continues to make a show of how betrayed he had been by this interaction. DARVO. Every part of her childhood all somehow seems like training to her now.

It seems as though in every memory of the beginning decade of her life, she is 5 years old, an age she is transported to regularly in her present adult life. Being 5 in this body sometimes feels less safe than it did in that body, but then they remember how much they forget.

She did learn to lie, in a complicated way and only under specific conditions. But she still can’t parse what were lies and what some part of her really believed at the time they said it. Now it would seem, in a chronic state of fawning, that she lies all the time, “It’s fine.”, “Okay.”, “My bad.”, “I’m working it out.” but often she believes that, too.

February 12th, 2026

Another subject of rumination was a tale told to her by a long past lover. He fancied it as his own fabrication, a fable, but it was too well fit to state of the world not to be a story of an elder origin. X supposed that every great story may be derivative of the same source in any case, so why bother holding anyone to it if not all?

The story was of a slave kingdom long, long ago. The King would stand high up in the castle balcony every day, looking over his subjects and their progress on his empire, dictating instructions to his heads, hands and other humans he regarded as his own reduced parts.

One day, the King happened to notice one of the workers below was markedly different from the rest – he was smiling. This first time he noticed the man, he told himself to think nothing of him. Perhaps the man was insane or truly happy to be of service, and why shouldn’t such a lowly creature be pleased to serve a higher purpose? But as more days passed, The King began to notice this Jester more frequently and grew more disconcerting on every occasion. When he began to notice himself losing sleep over this distant smiling face, he decided he ought follow the leads of his attention for an answer to his feelings.

The King devised a plan. He had his guards dress him down in common ragged cloth as a fresh import, and had them chain him next to this smiling spectre for the day. He spent the day silently side glancing at the man while pretending to work upon tasks designated for a feigned injury to protect his secretly royal sensibilities. To his frustration, the King found nary a clue as to the elated state of his chainfellow. As the sun began to set blood orange across the sky, kissing all it could illuminate, the King broke his bursting silence forgoing the grace that he did not think the role he was playing would possess,

“I have to ask, why do you seem so happy while the rest of us toil away? Do you have some sort of secret?”, asked the King

“No secret, actually I’m hoping for more people to catch on.”, the man plainly stated.

A raised eyebrow and widened eye relayed and beckoned response.

“It’s just that there are so many more of us than him.”, he continued, “And I know that it’s only a matter of time before everyone else figures that out. When that happens we can bring this all to an end. When that happens, we will be free men.”

The Kings perception of the mans smile shifted into a menacing grin. He felt a blood rage overcome him, compelling him to boom a kings command for punishment. But the king thought quickly enough of the consequences. Being that this treasonous tormentor was quite correct about his math, he thought best not to draw attention to the matter.

“Yeah, pfft, right”, the king lulled his speech as though rolling eyes, and muttered himself back into the task in his hands, continuing to serreptitiously scan for clues as to this unsavoury slave until the day concluded with the gaurds claiming the King for relocation to his proper rank and quarters.

The King held counsel with his advisors through the night, and by morning had prepared a proclamation to his subjects. The King stood before them presenting a wooden coin.

“You are all hereby free men.” the King announced, “Please go and attend to whatever lives you would choose. But know that you are welcome to stay and continue your work here for pay. Those who work will earn three of these coins per days labour. But the food, the water, the clothing and whatever else I had provided to you as your Master will now come to you at a cost. Your wages will cover these costs with enough extra that you might save this currency for whatever you wish.”

The gaurds came to unshackle the former slaves as confusion silenced the crowd to an implied murmer and then found themselves questioning their armour in a new light.

The King concealed his nerves and retired to locked chambers where he could await the outcome with little peace.

To his satisfaction, everyone returned to their exact stations the following morning, only productivity and morale were remarkably improved, and everything carried on as planned, under the rule of a new story.

…

“Isn’t that just like slavery with extra steps?”

February 12th, 2026

“The Perfect Victim” is a prime example of a phrase which has had it’s meanings split in a real bad way.

See, “The Perfect Victim” in terms of the standard people expect for them to extend compassion to a victim is a near perfect opposite to the perfect victim in terms of a prime target for victimization.

“The Perfect Victim” is small and pretty and meek and polite and pretty cries and begs you up. She speaks very little english and wears the evidence on a tattered white dress and fits easily into your arms as you carry her out of the burning building and away from the bad men. She’s consistent, she’s easy, she’s rewarding, she’s obvious.

The perfect victim is unlikeable, unbeleivable, unhinged and invisible. If anybody was listening, nobody would believe them. if anybody believed them, nobody would care. If anybody cared, nobody would know what to do about it. If anybody knew, nobody would be willing. The victim and everyone who looks upon them only believes what they see, a person who is lying, a person who is crazy, a person who deserved it, the truths of the perpetrator popping up in common conciousness.

X finds themself constantly frustrated by the consistent failure to properly preform their own position. It seems they would have to know what shows the viewer watches. They never get the role they are cast in.