Eugenie Goddard did not look like a fine art thief, but she was about to become one.

The child was coy perfection. As tempting and soft as heaps and heaps of billowing just-whipped cream. From across the gallery he glowed, enticed, and drew her, almost on tip-toes, to stand before the painting, her lips parted, breath fast. She feasted on his pink-stained cheeks, and his feet—his feet!—had anything ever been as plump and new and pure as those baby feet upon the grass?

Betwixt; he was caught in the moment just before he let out peals and peals of milk-breath laughter, the moment just before his mother could no longer resist him and buried her nose and mouth in his dumpling belly or the warm burrow of his neck to nuzzle and whinny and inhale the scent of him. Mother and son were self-satisfied, self contained, a perfect world, a galaxy of their own two selves and the sun shone and the grass sparkled and the leaves of the trees behind them burned golden-green solely for them.

Eugenie burned as well, with jealously as well as perfect sympathy for the young mother in the painting: nearly as beautiful as her son, her nose and cheeks diffused with blood, flushing with the singular pleasure of being the only owner and keeper of the child she knew to be in that moment the most gorgeous living creature in the entire world.

Eugenie stood and stood and stood before the painting, caught up in a wild and quiet lust. Her eyes roving, famished for every little detail but always coming back to the face of the child, the face of the mother, the child, the mother, the thing unpainted between them.

Her family had moved on down the gallery, and had to circle back to collect her. She was slightly ashamed to be found there, but still. She did not want to leave.

“Come on, mommy,” her daughter tugged Eugenie by her forearm, and she felt betrayed, as the if the girl was rejecting the enchanted moments they too had spent like this, moments that had, at the time, seemed to flare and swallow up her entire life and, but now were gone and would never come rushing backwards at her as fast as a fist to the gut.

She forgot about the painting then, during the post-museum hours spent dining, the glass of red wine, but when she lay in bed that night on her side facing away from her sleeping husband it came at her as solid as a freight train: the sweetness and golden light and suspended joy and she found that she wanted that painting as intensely as she had ever wanted anything. She probed this want like a tongue to a bad tooth and found that it was unshakable and profound. She felt that she would do anything for that painting to be hers.

She had no idea how to procure a criminal gang, but decided that a bar would be the best place to start. She waited until her husband was in unshakable sleep before she got up. She put on clothes that she had not worn in years: black Levis and her old Doc Martens; she thought they had the requisite unsavory aspect.

She drove across town to the seediest neighborhood she knew of and then cruised up and down the streets looking for the seediest bar, entered, ordered a whiskey neat and surveyed the patrons.

A woman of a certain age was apparently a novelty, and before the half an hour was up she had, she thought, suitable accomplices. There was a thin man, a fat one, and one with a sinister scar. She bought them all glasses and glasses of whiskey and they quickly and easily fell under her spell; she marveled at this and thought that perhaps it was because she was a mother and they felt safe and cared for in her presence.

She had not considered how she would pay them, and when they asked, timidly at first, but then with more conviction, she determined that she would liquidate her retirement account if they did in fact bring her the painting.

“But if you bungle it…”she shook her head and looked both sorrowful and stern and they promised her on their oaths that they would never. The sinister one went so far as to kiss her on the back of the hand.

It was late when she climbed back into bed, her hair stinking of cigarettes because they had all become rowdy and sung sloppy, triumphant stealing songs in anticipation of their crime.

She wore a wig the day of the robbery, and grocery store glasses, and it was her job to cause the diversion. She was not nervous in the least and played her role fully. She fell to the parquet floor and gnashed her teeth and shrieked and even managed to froth at the mouth, a skill she did not know she had.

From her skewed position of the floor she could just see from the edges of her vision the six booted feet of her faithful thieves as they shuffled quietly out of the room. Slowly enough that she knew they carried something heavy and very beautiful.