The Things We Take

by Eric Scot Tryon

I’m stealing from the married man I’m sleeping with. Not money or anything valuable. Little things. A dress sock off the pile of couch laundry, a pair of scissors from the junk drawer, a magnet off the fridge, in the shape of Oregon—Keep Portland Weird! it said. I keep it all in a box under my bed. My friend Jenna says I do it to gain some kind of control. My therapist says deep down I want to get caught. But I don’t think it’s either. Sometimes I just get a little lightning bolt of irrational impulse. Which I guess is how I wound up in John’s bed in the first place. 

Last Sunday, it was a book off  their floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. How many years will pass before someone notices The Artists’ Way is missing? Maybe I like that my impact will be felt far after I’m gone. The week before, I took an unopened box of Land O Lakes unsalted butter. I lay in bed that night imagining the conversation: Honey, didn’t you buy more butter the other day?/ Sure did. Top shelf, door in the fridge. / It’s not there. My name not on their lips, yet there I am.

Today, as I make the familiar walk down the hall, away from John’s shrinking penis and towards my self-loathing regret, the impulse to take hits me harder. I want to take something that tilts their universe a few more degrees. Something they can’t simply shrug away. And there, on the entryway table, is a fishbowl housing a beautiful iridescent beta, lacy fins like the psychedelic colors of an oil slick.

I grab a large Ziploc bag from the drawer next to the stove, fill it with tap water, and find a little green net next to the fish food. As I chase the frightened fish in circles and figure-eight’s, I fantasize about the confusion that will bloom. Will they think the fish just—poof!—vanished from the world without leaving so much as a scale? Or maybe they’ll wonder if the fish had packed up its things and left in the dark of night, hitching a ride to Cedar Rapids or Santa Fe. Would they blame the fish? Who doesn’t dip into that fantasy?

Finally, with the fish securely Ziplocked, and me adequately amused, I am but steps from the front door, when the knob turns, clicks. In the brief second it takes for the door to swing open, I truly see myself: a sad, pathetic cliché about to be embroiled in some trite domestic spat over a man who still has an AOL account and doesn’t know where my clit is.

But when the door opens, I don’t see the pleasant-faced brunette I had glimpsed on John’s home screen. It’s a boy. About twelve. Hair shaggy, face flushed, standing with a duffle bag and a pair of muddy cleats as an SUV drives away behind him.

We stare at one another. An old fashioned standoff. Me, the fish, and a boy I didn’t know existed, all three of us trying to process new information while John is in the shower, vigorously scrubbing away all the pieces of me.

The boy’s eyes move to the watery bag clenched in my fist. “Why do you have Calypso?” he asks, but his voice is not a curious one. He sounds scared. If I am taking his fish today, what will I take from him tomorrow?

When I see his eyes swell with tears—so fragile, not yet privy to the pain adults are so adept at causing—I panic. I hurry to drop the bag into the fishbowl and make my getaway, but it bounces off the rim, off  the table and onto the tiled floor. The bag opens, water spilling, expanding, running like rivers in the grooves between tiles. Calypso writhes and flops about. I scream, and the boy and I both scramble to our knees. Survival mode. A mode I know too well.

And so here we are—this strange new boy, this soccer player and son of the married man I am fucking, and me—whatever lurid description blankets me like a skin—on the wet floor together, desperately grabbing for all the things I am trying to take and all the things I will now take for years to come, desperately grabbing for a beautiful dying fish that despite its own best interest, keeps eluding our grasp, keeps slipping from our palms.

Eric Scot Tryon is a writer and editor from San Francisco. His debut novel I’m the Undertow is forthcoming from Central Avenue (May 2026). His short work has appeared in over 50 literary magazines, including Mid-American Review, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Florida Review, Glimmer Train, The Los Angeles Review, and others. Eric is represented by Carleen Geisler at P.S. Literary Agency. He is also the Founding Editor of the literary journal Flash Frog. Find more information at ericscottryon.com.