We’re going to kidnap my mother. Tamara and I. 

My mother would say, “Shell, don’t go getting your friends into trouble,” before turning back to watch the World Series of Poker, a deck spread out on the coffee table to play along with. Maybe the mutter of, “And don’t disturb me,” as she juggles her chips, never once taking her eyes off the screen.

But she won’t be saying that with a sock in her mouth. Tamara says a sock will not do, that we will need duct tape. 

Tamara is my third roommate in as many months. The other two requested reassignment. They were cowards, and I expected the same from Tamara when I met her because she wears gingham headscarves wrapped around her oil-black ponytail, because she rarely uses contractions. 

That is what my mother would call an ass-sumption.

But we have to make them, otherwise we’d be too soft for the world—all of us, and maybe especially me—and have no chance of ever changing because an ass-sumption is a learned trait based on previous experience—that’s what Tamara says. She’s a Psych/Poli-Sci double major, and she isn’t offended by assumptions, and she’s not afraid of trouble. I’m studying Art History. Neither of us believes in college. There are much bigger things worth believing in, like Crime or Revolution.

We sit in our dorm room, cutting the words out of textbooks for a ransom note. We’re preparing. Tamara calls this praxis, and, at first, I think she’s developed a lisp. 

The language of the criminal is remarkably similar to the language of the revolutionary, she says. 

I don’t care a thing for words, but I nestle closer to her on our futon. I admire how she wields her scissors, how she cuts the letters. 

My mother has won the jackpot. I don’t know the figures, but it’s enough to steal. That’s not an ass-sumption, it’s an educated guess. It’s a working theory. And I tell Tamara we can use the money to distribute pamphlets and organize and arm rebels—it may be a bluff, but she bought it, and when she hugged me, her hair smelled like orange licorice, like a thing that doesn’t make sense because it’s so good.

Tamara says, “Revolution is obviously inherently criminal. If revolution was legal, it would not be revolution.”

She flicks a tatter of paper off the blade, digs in again.

“I’m not a criminal yet,” I say.

“What do I mean?” she asks, twisting her ponytail with curious fingers.

It’s categorical. It’s about definitions. These are things Tamara understands, the way a person understands the sun through a sunburn. 

And also, it’s about my mother.

See, crime isn’t crime without witness. If you’re not caught, it never happened, and I’ve never been caught. I was born undetectable, like luck, just a tingle or a sound that only dogs can hear. I was born like a secret and lived untold, which is the short way of saying lonesome and uncared. The last time my mother noticed me was the summer before last, when our power went out. We played Hold ‘Em by candlelight, and she said, How long have you had that thing through your eyebrow? It was a scar from my crib days. It was the oldest thing on my face. I shook my head, and she gave me a pair of wrap-around sunglasses to wear as she won hand after hand. Since then, I broke into Clanton’s pet shop, I raided the file servers of the city council treasurer, I stole the knob off the neighbors’ front door and buried it in the cemetery. Nobody knows. I’m ready for witness.

Tamara knows all this, but she doesn’t know what to call it, only believes in my belief.

See, I’m not aching for the feeling that people mean when they say they feel alive. I feel alive all the time, especially with Tamara.

Tamara wonders if I’m looking for the feeling of being dead. Or the pre-birth part of not-being.

I wouldn’t know. My words fall apart when I say them. These are my mother’s playing cards strewn around our apartment.

Or is it a revolutionary feeling? Like the world is soft enough to change?

Well, Tamara, keep cutting those letters. Take the “pain” out of “painters.” Take the “sever” out of “several.” Take the “numb” out of “numbers.” We’ll figure out the feeling, together.

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Vincent James Perrone’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Wigleaf, Split Lip, Catamaran, and West Trade Review. He is the recipient of the 2025 Phyllis Grant Zellmer Prize, a finalist for the 2025 Tusculum Review Fiction Chapbook Prize, and selected for the Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions in 2024. Currently, Vincent is pursuing an MFA in fiction at the University of Virginia, where he won the 2025 Balch Short Story Prize and serves as the fiction editor for Meridian. Find him at vincentjamesperrone.com