SARAH BOYKIN HARDY

Theft

It started out simply enough: a brick thrown through the window of your husband’s truck, your briefcase stolen, your papers scattered by thieves along the road. What followed was an hour of searching through wet ditches in the summer heat to find lost things: a gradebook, pages of an article you had almost finished, your favorite old copy of Mrs. Dalloway with the cover they don’t make any more, now soggy and exploded into white leaves stuck to the grass just off the country highway.

Also lost was a blue thermos, a CD of a friend singing Appalachian ballads, your date book, a bottle of ibuprofen, a plastic headband the color of your hair, a nice pen, three pencils (one with a butterfly eraser), two paperclips, a hand mirror, an umbrella cover, a half-eaten roll of breath mints, and a flash drive that could hold up to four gigabytes’ worth of work. These things were not in the ditch where the papers were found. You offered a reward in the newspaper for the flash drive and you called the police every week for a while and for the rest of the summer you told everybody the story of your loss and your friends were very sympathetic.

A few months later you purchased your friend’s album online, and she sounded even better than you remembered. You bought more mints; you collected more pencils. Each time you replaced something from the briefcase you felt uneasy. You sensed that your butterfly pencil was out there, taking down notes for someone else. Another person was checking her lipstick in your mirror. The thermos was carrying someone else’s chai, or maybe French press coffee, and it was delicious. Then you read a student’s paper that you knew you had seen before. It seemed just like one you had graded a year ago, but it was better somehow, as if the student had anticipated your comments. You attended a conference and heard a paper on a topic you had once proposed. You went to a funeral and cried during a eulogy that was almost exactly like the one you had written for your grandmother three years earlier, though the person being eulogized was not related to you.

You began to understand that it was your fate to watch your own life, forked and doubled, from a distance. You tried to rewrite the article, but this time around it was not as good. When you submitted it to a journal, the editors informed you that they had just accepted an essay on the same subject. They questioned your academic integrity and threatened to write a letter to your dean. You withdrew your submission. You were afraid to put yourself up for promotion, but the person who published the article on Mrs. Dalloway was promoted to full professor the very next year.