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{the purse snatcher} thomas cooper Here’s Logan, high out of his mind and loitering in the Municipal Museum of Art. Take a look and he’s the picture of elaborate nonchalance, eyes checking his wrist for a nonexistent watch, scuffed Doc Marten tapping time on the marble floor. Take another longer look and he’s a different man---going gray around the eyes, boyish good looks carving away to baleful boniness. Heroin chic is what the magazines are calling it these days. In actuality, Logan’s searching for his next victim and here she is, the old woman with the white hair and blue velour sweatsuit, face tipped up to admire the impressionistic oil painting. Logan used to know the artist when he was a kid, but now he can’t remember. Now he could give a fuck less, honestly, because take a look at that purse, big enough to carry a bowling ball. He asks the old lady for the time, almost comically polite---pardon me, ma’am?---and when she lifts her arm that certain angle, he rips it away. There goes Logan in a mad scramble down the stairs, shrieks following him through the lobby and out the museum’s glass doors. At the motel, Logan sits Indian-style on the bed and empties the purse. Tissues, aspirin, a flip phone, one of those little black canisters of pepper spray. Seventy dollars in the red leather wallet. Not as much as he hoped for, but enough to get his rocks off for a day or two. Prescription bottles for Prozac, for Xanax, and for some drug he’s never heard of called Arimidex. A scrap of pink ribbon, appointment reminder cards for three different doctors, a sterling silver medallion of the Virgin Mary. There’s a life to be read right here if he bothered, a whole history to be divined if he wasn’t so goddamned high. Then Logan sees it and his throat catches. The Christmas list on age-yellowed construction paper, written in shaky purple crayon. A real magic wand. A real magic cape. A real magic hat. Maybe he really is losing his mind from all the drugs. Why else would he be seeing this list, right now? Why else could he have sworn that old lady was yelling his name as he ran out of the museum? Why else would he be crying, crying like this for the first time in years? The flip phone rings and finally, with trembling hand, Logan reaches. |
