Fuck making sour dough starter and learning French, Agnes Potter was going big. She would exit the pandemic a new woman. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes. That was a thing— wasn’t it?

It didn’t exactly start big, it started with Zoom, on Zoom. Suddenly Agnes Potter was looking at herself talking to other people all day and she did not like it. She did not like the way her light brown bangs curtained her forehead. She did not like the way she laughed every time Brain Lambert made a stupid joke. She did not like the bookshelf behind her, or any of the books that it held. She watched herself talking and talking and she thought That’s not me. But it was.
That was the beginning of the pandemic when everyone was posting about all the things they would accomplish. Agnes Potter had friends, it wasn’t like she was friendless, or even all that lonely, and they all posted the things they planned on doing: writing novels, learning to walk on their hands, learning sign language. And Agnes wanted to do something too. She wanted to make a change. She lay in bed one night, thinking of what could be different. “I want to be a different person,” she heard herself whisper.

She ordered a box of hair dye from Instacart and left it on her porch for twenty-four hours before she touched it. It was blonde, as blonde as it could get, almost white. When it was done, when she had stripped the color from her hair, dyed it, blown it dry and styled it around her face, she looked in her bathroom mirror and hissed back at herself.

She waited for her co-workers to be surprised during the first Zoom meeting the next day, but no one said anything. She checked to make sure her camera was on. It was. They all made little cooing noises over Mindy Watt’s new puppy though. When Agnes hear herself beginning to laugh at one of Brian’s jokes, she stopped herself.

The next day she saw an article online about how Zoom was leading many people, mostly women, to plastic surgery. She wondered what it would be like to change her face. It wasn’t that she didn’t like the way she looked, she did, but was that a good reason not to change it? She wasn’t sure.

She took a week off of work. She had accrued that and more. The plastic surgeon seemed confused about her request to change her nose, he kept asking her what she did not like about it, but in the end, he acquiesced and also suggested making her lips look fuller. “Why not?” she said.

While she was recovering in bed, face swathed in bandages, it occurred to her that she did not really need to go back to that job. She had saved up some money. On the day she was scheduled to be back on Zoom, she just didn’t. She ignored the emails and calls. The bandages came off and she spent hours in front of the mirror examining her blond hair and new face.

She considered her body next. It was a fine, serviceable body. Brian had even told her she had a nice ass once at a work party when everyone had drunk too much chardonnay. She started watching fitness videos on YouTube. She did push-ups and sit ups. She did jumping-jacks and had a jump rope and a hula hoop delivered. She felt muscles pushing up on her arms like two continents coming together.

When she was not working out, she was learning how to make counterfeit identity documents. Once she had figured out how to access the dark web, she was astonished by the number of things that were accessible that she had never known about. One night she ordered cocaine and a young man with dark glasses delivered it to her front door. She spent all night awake. She resisted the urge to clean her house. She danced to music she had never heard of before and at about two in the morning she sprinted naked up and down her street. Her new physique made her fast.

She made herself a new driver’s license. She had very expensive printing equipment delivered, and she made herself a new passport. Rivka Milliken was her new name.

She started looking at apartments for rent all over the world. She spent hours looking at all the places she had never been: Rome, Berlin, Hong Kong, New Orleans.

She began corresponding with a guy from Madrid named Alejandro who bragged he was in the business of stealing fine art. Business was terrible just now, he explained, because of the pandemic obviously all galleries and museums were closed, but he expected things to take off as soon as Europe opened up again, and he thought he could probably use help then. He sent her pictures of the things he was planning on stealing.

She began brushing up on her high school Spanish and ordered a cat burglar kit. She learned to cut a circle of glass out of a window without making a sound or shattering it. On Alexandro’s advice she went to a gun shop, which inexplicably was still open and bought a handgun. She took it out into the forest and shot at the trees.

She watched flight prices and flew to Croatia in the spring. She made her way to Madrid by bus and train, and even by foot, sneaking over the border into France when it closed because of the fourth wave. She had already secured an apartment in Madrid, as different as her old condo as possible. A decaying stone gargoyle from the neighboring cathedral looked right into her bedroom window.

Alejandro came over late one night. He had floor plans and schematics of a small museum in a hill town. They examined them side by side, masks on. There was a small painting of the Madonna he said was very valuable.

As soon as the museum opened, they would steal it. In the meantime, Agnes-now-Rivka slept during the day. At night she practiced walking the tight rope she had strung between her window and the gargoyle. She became steadier and steadier.