The Stolen Thief

She showed me to her room where she had gathered, through time and fate and purchase, a vibrant collection of antique books and mythological figurines. I was especially struck by the wooden carving near her bed and strolling over to it and picking it up for a closer inspection, she remarked casually "Prometheus."
Yes-it was surely Prometheus! The little figure clearly held the stolen fire in his clenched fist, and somehow (miraculously in fact considering that the sculpture was made entirely of ebony) the sculptor had imbued the figurine's eyes with a magical almost electric glow. I stared deeply into them for a long moment.
"Ah yes, you've spotted the prize of my collection!" she cried out suddenly, her voice bubbling with delight. "Does it have a story?" I asked, knowing that it certainly did and hoping she'd indulge it. "Yes," she took a deep breath, "it does."
And she went on to describe the odd sequence of seemingly chance events which had unavoidably led her to the scene of a fire, a large antique store wreathed in destructive glow. Sirens blared and a crowd gathered across the street to watch the magic ballet of flames shuddering out of the growing inferno. The enchanting chaos of the glorious destruction and the whirl of silhouetted firefighters superimposed upon the bright holocaust seared the night with meaning and granted the fire an aura of a long to be remembered event. Unperturbed by the smoke of thinking, she'd inched closer and closer to the nexus of the hypnotic spectacle.
She described an odd magnetism which drew her towards a window on the far side of the building. Of course the whole area of the fire had been strictly cordoned off by the firemen who were actively engaged in containing the blaze, but as the profound poise of any immaculately certain person grants them a momentary yet immediate authority (she said she "belonged to the fate of the fire" and "God's dreams cannot be woken from"), she'd snuck through a gap in the line of fire-trucks, swerved past several firefighters and stepped to the sill of the window she'd felt so inextricably drawn to. Looking in she'd perceived that the enormous heat from the fire had caused the glass to shatter, leaving only a few shark-like shards to glisten along its jaw-like frame. Stretching her hand inside, carefully navigating the trajectory of her outstretched arm to avoid being impaled by the remaining shards, she'd maneuvered her fingers until they came to rest upon a singularly enticing object. She'd grabbed it and quickly pulled it out and placed it under her shirt without even looking to see what it was... calmly and stealthily she'd crept from the building and slipped back into the crowd.
Struck by an amateur thief's surge of panic, she'd ducked down a small alleyway and ran and ran till she'd reached the steps of her home. Dashing up the stairs she'd crept to her bedroom, taken a few deep breaths, and then shiveringly pulled out from underneath her shirt the object of her impromptu burglary and lo and behold! it was the object I currently held in my own now shivering hands: Prometheus!
"It was thus," she said as she seized me by the waist and pulled me onto the bed in a madly sensuous embrace "that I stole Prometheus from the fire!"

Lucien Zell

in Cafe Irreal: Issue number twelve, August 2004.

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Lucien Zell was born in Los Angeles. Born with a birth-defect, a missing right hand, he quickly turned to the performing arts as a means to express a face of beauty which he felt dwelling latent behind the mask of body. Just days before he was to attend Cornish College of the Arts on a full-scholarship, however, his brother committed suicide, and he left America on a ten year trek through Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, finally settling in Prague where his first volume of poems, The Sad Cliffs of Light, was published (by a Czech publishing house, DharmaGaia) and released in 1999. A second collection of poems, Eden's Midnight Playground, was published by DharmaGaia in December of 2003. The father of three children, Zell currently resides in Prague.