THE TAP DANCING CAT BURGLAR TAKES IT ALL

the tap dancing cat burglar sees the contradictions in his calling and sets his clattering tap shoes upon them, drumming floorboards with his soles, magnetizing valuables into his quiet gloved fingers; dance calls and crime answers; crime calls, he vanishes, dancing; and through it all the tap shoes of his destiny he wears, size 11 LaDucas; the binaries of his avocation unite it; he is a tap dancer and cat burglar both or he is nothing, means nothing; his careful hands foist jewels while his tap shoes slap the granite falsity of a lakefront loft; he descends fire escape ladders like each rung is a gong to be footingly percussed; he pours sand beside a jimmied window, and swishes Sandman Sims rhythms to imagined bebop; 

weighted with his nightly pilfering of posh households, he scales rooftops at 88 beats-per-minute and his mask turns red and blue in the siren lights he nimbly eludes; enshrouded in this blackness, he ambles, keeping mum his speaking voice, but tapping out all matters of meter, the poetical clattering necessary to his nefarious enterprise; he dances not to justify, but to sublimate, his crime; subtract the artistic boldness from the crimes he assays and he could never win your trust, your involvement, your forgiveness—above every currency he steals, the most valuable thing he takes is your forgiveness, a dispensation of grace towards the miraculous nuisance of him, a win for his miraculous villainy; noises from his feet fall as holy upon these rainy Cleveland streets as the tintinnabulations of monastery bells; he conducts himself monastically in his devotion to a divided life, but the tap dancing cat burglar is no monk;

you’d like to think your defenses sound against the seductive noises of tap that would invade your life, altering your heart’s every rhythm, but in you, jeweled away, lies a heart that would love to fall in love with a dancer like him: a user, a swindler, a cat burglar unrepentant of plangent, terpsichorean break-ins and the sinful glittering loot that swells his duffel; that’s not to say you’ll be forever taken; as love fails between you and he, your reason returns to you like a safe remembering the combination to its own breached lock; perhaps, choosing a better way of being, you cue the tap dancing cat burglar offstage from the show of your life, you no longer yearn to feel him plummeting from cables through your soul’s smashed skylight; you move on, perhaps, marry squarely, birth a daughter you warn about musically-shoed men elbowing through the vents and descending from the ceilings; may this strength of will carry you far, because old feelings can strike again, can compel you to set sub-woofers in the windows and play Big Band numbers to summon the tap dancing cat burglar back onto the stage of your life;

it happens like this: one evening your jewels disappear and then, days later in the quiet of your therapist’s office, you imagine you hear the spectral tap of his vanished shoes and recall suddenly the jazzy thrill his gloved hands gave caressing the necklaces off of you; perhaps you rebound more fully; perhaps when he arrives, you’ll ask him to steal you away, tape your mouth, bind your wrists, pack you up, and slip you in his duffel far away from whatever gilded cage contains you, travel you to the mysterious endpoint of his vanishings, the place where the music ends and he removes his shoes; it is strange but it can happen; people are complicated, but robbed of their complexities by love’s thrills and crime’s delights, they simplify; but even then the dance goes on, simplicity proves insufficient, the music fills with noise; happiness with a tap dancing cat burglar never lasts; eventually, every elegant thief reduces to a mugger, just as every rube coughs up the loot, yields to love’s bracing rhythms, and has to awaken one day and count the losses, even if they feel richer for them; 

yet those who remember their time with him will say there is nothing more compelling than the vision of a handsome thief tapdancing well, and if you should you ever see it, you’ll know; you’ll drop every pearl you’ve ever clutched; your bracelets will liberate themselves from your wrists; your earrings depart their lobes in swift balletic leaps;

SAMUEL J ADAMS

Samuel J Adams is the author of stories that appear in The Sun, DIAGRAM, Monkeybicycle, The Arkansan Review, Ruminate, and elsewhere. He works at a land trust and lives in Northern California with his partner Jenny and their cat Monte.