InsaneJournal

Back at the apartment, Antigone moved quickly. On her bed she dumped the things that she’d retrieved from the trunk of her car – hardy gloves, a headlamp, a crowbar. She’d changed clothes, black activewear leggings and the shoes she only wore for crime. Her hair braided tightly down the back of her head. A hoodie shoved into her backback to change into when she got closer. No phone. Only cash.

Antigone knew she was breaking the law but the law that supported billboards like that was one that needed to be broken. She wasn’t afraid to go to jail if she got caught, but she wasn’t going to try to get caught.

Romeo caught her coming out of her bedroom. Though the sun was setting, Romeo was just getting up. Circadian rhythms were, apparently, beneath her. She looked at the crowbar sticking out of Antigone’s backpack.

“I have to ask,” she said, eyebrows raised over her coffee cup.

“Might be best you didn’t,” Antigone said.

“Where are you going?” she asked anyway, leaning against the kitchen island like she was waiting for a story.

“Out...” Antigone shook her head and slipped past her, pausing at the hallway that lead to the door. “Can-” she said, and stopped, but Romeo had straightened up, very interested in where that sentence was heading.

Reluctantly, but not as reluctantly as Antigone would have expected herself to be, she said “Can I call you, if I need bailing out tonight?”

Romeo laughed with the kind of delighted laughter that did not seem becoming, for a muse of love poetry.



It had been dark for a few hours when Antigone reached the billboard again, and started to carefully climb her way up the frame. The streets were still full of people, but that was always going to be the case, and at least this time of night, with several bars in the area, people probably weren’t looking up. And the chances of police getting here before Antigone scarpered – even if someone called them straight away – seemed minimal.

She stood precariously balanced on the thin ledge that ran along the bottom of the billboard, and swung her crowbar up and over her head. The hook of it bit into the billboard with a satisfying crack, and Antigone grabbed it with both her hands, and pulled.