The willowy thief, long-legged and tactile, moved her hands across the aluminum shelves of the misty greenhouse. Her greedy nose moved towards a fully blossomed flower, which she didn’t know the name of. She took a deep breath in and out against its stems. She continued her routine down the aisles. On her shoulder, staining the t-shirt she wore, was an olive tree frog beside the nape of her neck. His large eyes were closed, looking as if he was napping as lazily as possible. The floors were completely covered with a thick soot. Underneath the dirt was a rubber mat which caused her already light steps to bounce slightly, and she welcomed the lack of gravity to the greenhouse. The thief had lived here for its protection, each plant providing its own form of nutrition. The garden was unattended, and if not for her slimy, cold shoulder companion, she would have sometimes felt as abandoned as the greenhouse was. She nourished the plants with her oxygenated ideas and the plants in turn nourished her with the chemical basics of our carbonic survival. She wore gloves, a thief’s commodity, but with a snicker, she brushed her fingers to the heavy leaves and gathered thick dewdrops. Then, she moved them on one round stone.  She forced the water on the stone to become thicker until it would eventually waterfall onto the floor, and this inevitability would always sadden her.

The frogs, the worms, the ants, and the flies had been cohabiting with her, and she often found herself talking with them. The frogs were always her favorite, for their wide faces and large eyes spoke more than she could, and she appreciated the honesty. She had only to tell them once why she had come to the greenhouse, that place of vitality and visceral independence.

She was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the afternoon and had moved some of the plants in a circular arena around her. Various frogs had joined in the geometry and rested in the soil of the pots. They watch her as she took a deep breath and said, “Where I come from, they call me a thief. Honestly, I think we were all thieves. What I did,” she paused here and took a deep breath, “was not right, I guess. I stole someone—I mean—something that didn’t truly belong to me, or to us. Something inhuman.” Her olive companion who usually stayed on her protecting neck hopped on the floor and turned to her, his big eyes asking What was it that is inhuman?

“The things that I’ve stolen were difficult to attain. It takes months to take things that aren’t yours. You have to do your research, you have to really think on whether or not you really need that part of someone,” She pushed back her thick hair and looked around at the frogs and the plants, “You see, where I come from, we all take something from people in order to create the person who you want to love forever. Everybody does it because it’s what everybody needs to do. So, for example, you may take from one person their sense of humor and from another, you may take their intelligence. Whatever you take is partially stolen, so it is important that you only take a single thing from a single person. In some ways it is counter-intuitive. Many things are partially stolen and we inevitably become “half-who-we-were” in a way. Half of our traits or more are suddenly taken from us. Sometimes, we can rebuild ourselves, but that takes time.

Anyways, because we are human, we can never fall in love with another real person. Not wholly. Nobody’s our “perfect.” So, what we do is take certain characteristics from people and we later build our perfect person.”

Some of the frogs made belching sounds that they understood.

“I was banned from my world and now I am here. When I created my final person, I instilled an ability to steal characteristics from other people. So in that way, my person is forever becoming something rather than being one thing. They are, in my opinion, evolving,” she smiled as she looked in the distance, noticing the fragment missing in the plastic walls, “Unfortunately, this is against the rules. When we create a companion, they are supposed to remain the same, never evolve. It is considered too greedy to expect our people to change. So I had to run, and I had to leave my person to their fate. My fate would have been execution. My companion’s fate, who knows, you know?” And at this, the thief took her little frog from the stands and went around to another side of the greenhouse, the one where the cactuses had long survived. She pricked herself on a leaf, and satisfied with that, she fell asleep in a softened layer of soil.

A few nights later after her honest speech, a mistake was made. Her black jeans had turned brown from the dirt and the mud, and she was sitting in a corner against the leg of one of the tables. Her hands were cupped horizontally and carefully she opened her palms as a clam does and revealed the miniature olive frog that had been her companion. As she opened her palms, the frog jumped at her face, and she shut her eyes automatically and smiled. She would then clasp him in her hands again and continue the game. Both enjoyed the nightly activity. This particular night, the winds outside were especially demanding, whirling their strong trombones and crinkling the plastic insulated walls wildly. Her and the frog were playing the game, she opened her hands, but a loud thunderclap distracted the frog and he jumped against the plastic walls, escaping through a small quarter-sized hole that had been pried open by the thief. She stuck her eye to the hole, the one she had made so that she could see how the outside world had functioned without her.

It was too dark, the rain had become fuller, and only the flashes of lightening showed how the rain fell even thicker. Rather than run after her friend, she waited for him to return because she had become scared of the world in that month in the greenhouse. As she waited for her companion, she blinked her own foggy eyes. Heavy water dropped onto this dry soil, making some muddy unwanted thing.