Illustration by Alivia Cooney
When Natalie woke up, she texted her ex-boyfriend Good morning! and a smiley-face emoji. He hadn’t asked her to stop texting him recently, like he used to, which she took to mean that he was now okay with it. She checked the weather app on her phone and saw that it was supposed to rain. Forecast says rain, don’t forget an umbrella! On her walk to work, she saw an old woman walking a dog. She texted him: I just saw a dachshund. He looked so happy! Remember when we used to be happy?
When she got to the office, Doris, her only work friend, brought her a cup of coffee.
“I never trusted him,” she said, taking a seat on the edge of Natalie’s desk. “His name was too short. People with only four or fewer letters in their name have poor character, because they never had to struggle with learning to spell their names when they were kids. Experience of early hardships is good for developing character.”
This was only one of Doris’s theories about why the relationship hadn’t worked out—in all of which he was at fault. He was a latent sociopath. He was a latent homosexual. He believed in homeopathy. He had no patience and no work ethic. His hair was too thick. His mom was French. He had an undiagnosed thyroid condition. His apartment building had two elevators. He drank New York City tap water unfiltered.
“You’re right,” Natalie said. “I’d never thought of it that way.”
On the train home from work, she sat next to a businessman who was playing a game on his phone where he drove a tractor trailer down a two-lane highway. All he had to do to win the game was not hit other cars and not run out of gas. She tried to think of something witty to text her ex-boyfriend, something about irony and late-stage capitalism, or maybe the irony of late-stage capitalism, but couldn’t come up with anything.
She cooked spaghetti for dinner but made too much. Instead of putting the extra into a container to save for later, she used it to set a place for him at the table—a full plate of spaghetti, two napkins, and a fork—and ate next to it. She threw everything out when she was done eating, even the plate and fork.
She went to bed early but couldn’t fall asleep. Her bedsheets were scratchy. Her ex-boyfriend’s bedsheets had always been so soft. She texted him, What’s the thread count on your sheets? Thinking of getting new ones, and then moved onto her left side and hugged her pillow. She thought about the time that she’d helped him pick out a mattress and how they’d laid down on every single one in the store.
Sometimes I think I miss your bed more than I miss you.
She fell asleep an hour and a half later.
The next morning, she slept through her alarm clock. Bleary from lack of sleep, she put on the previous day’s clothes and rushed out the door. She walked fast and crossed the street even when it wasn’t her light. It was just as well—she was almost an hour late, at least if she got run over she’d have a good excuse.
As she was walking into the office, she almost knocked into her supervisor who looked at her watch and pursed her lips but didn’t say anything. A lukewarm cup of coffee sat at Natalie’s desk. Doris was on the phone with her mother. Doris was almost always on the phone with somebody—she had a large extended family, so there were many people she could call. She didn’t do much work, but she occasionally used the photocopier, although it usually wasn’t work-related. She mostly used it to make flyers for her missing cat. It had run away almost a year ago, but she remained hopeful that he would be found.
“I have a lead on Mr. Mittens,” Doris told Natalie after she hung up. “I got an email to the tip line. Someone thinks they saw him eating garbage out of a dumpster on 34th Street. I’m going to take an early lunch hour and check it out. Can you come?”
“I have a bunch of emails to respond to.” They worked in the customer service department of a medium-sized online retailer. The job mostly consisted of responding to angry messages and issuing refunds.
“Okay, then. Wish me luck!” Doris grabbed a pile of flyers and walked away.
Her supervisor walked over, lips still pursed from earlier. “Where is Doris going?”
“She went to get lunch.”
She looked at her watch. “It’s 10:30.”
“She’s really hungry.”
The supervisor pursed her lips harder and walked away.
In the time that Doris was away, Natalie was able to send fifty identical emails assuring customers that the quality of their products hadn’t declined even though they had and issue fifty different refunds to those same customers. Doris came back without the flyers and without the cat.
Natalie took out her phone and typed: Update on Mr. Mittens. Still missing. Unlikely to be found.
The rest of the day passed uneventfully.
She walked home. On the Brooklyn Bridge, a tourist couple in sneakers asked her to take their picture. She gave them back their camera when she was done instead of throwing it into the East River like she wanted to. They thanked her.
She went out of her way to walk by her ex-boyfriend’s studio apartment, even though he was probably still at work. The lights were off.
Just passed your apartment! she texted him, looking back at its darkened windows. Remember how it was gonna be our apartment?
For dinner, she ate a bowl of Frosted Flakes while watching a true crime documentary on TV about famous serial killers. She noticed that Ted Bundy’s first name had only three letters and wondered if Doris’s theory was right. She texted him: Does thinking Ted Bundy was hot make me a bad person? It was a Friday night. She fell asleep in front of the TV.
She woke up at noon the following day and went to the grocery store in her pajama pants. She got microwave popcorn, powdered donuts, and a rock-solid avocado. Her ex-boyfriend never used to buy unripe avocados. He never had to wait several days for them to be ready to eat. He had no patience, but she had patience. She could wait a whole week for a single avocado to ripen. She had strength of character.
In the express checkout lane, the cashier asked her if she’d found everything she was looking for. She didn’t know how to answer, so she left the store without buying anything.
Walking home, she sent another text to her ex-boyfriend: A really unripe avocado would make a decent weapon. Then, worrying he might misinterpret her, I mean, theoretically. I’m not going to try it.
She stopped at a farmer’s market to pick up another rock-solid avocado. Walking home, she held it so tightly that it was soft by the time she got to her front door. She cut it open and ate it with a spoon with the skin still on, like it was a cup of yogurt. It wasn’t really ripe yet so it tasted all wrong, but she forced herself to eat it anyway, opening up the back of her throat and letting the avocado slide slowly down her esophagus.
She started doing a yoga video she found on YouTube, but the instructor’s voice was so calming that she passed out a few minutes in. When she woke up, she ordered a pizza.
I’m having a party. It’s a pizza party and only I’m invited.
She played a song by the Everly Brothers while waiting for the delivery guy. “Whenever I want you,” they crooned, “all I have to do is dream.”
When the pizza finally came, she picked off the cheese and ate it, then threw out the rest.
She drank a bottle of pink wine, then put on Alanis Morrissette and yelled along to every lyric. A neighbor banged on her door and told her to shut up. She stopped and took out her phone.
I have an enormous wedgie. Please send help!
Then she had an idea.
Nevermind. I took off my underwear. Problem solved!
She got a text back a few minutes later. It said, what r ou doing rihgt now?
What was she doing right now? She was leaving her apartment. She was locking the door behind her. She was calling a cab. She was ringing his doorbell.
His sheets weren’t as nice as she’d remembered them, but the sex was about the same.
He fell asleep almost immediately after, but she couldn’t. He was breathing loudly through his mouth and it was keeping her up, just like it had many nights before. When they were together, he’d told her that she would be able to sleep if she stopped looking at screens an hour before bedtime, stopped drinking coffee after three o’clock, started drinking tea instead, started exercising more.
And she’d tried. She put her phone away every night at ten, stopped drinking coffee after three o’clock. She started drinking green tea instead, then herbal, then nothing. She went running four times a week.
No, she’d told him, it’s your breathing.
No, he’d told her, it’s you.
Unable to sleep, she stared at the back of his head instead. She took in its familiar markings: the chicken pox scar from when he was eight, the five freckles that together looked almost like the big dipper, and the two moles that she’d covertly monitored for abnormal growth since the beginning of their relationship. It was all just the same as she’d left it.
Absentmindedly, she started to run a hand through his dark hair. He flinched at her touch. She jerked her hand away, surprised that he was awake.
“We’re not doing that,” he said quietly, without turning around.
She got up to use the bathroom. She opened the medicine cabinet, emptied his bottle of contact solution into the sink, and filled it with water.
From the next room she heard the faint creak of bedsprings. She returned to find him with his eyes closed, still as a log. She watched him for a moment, thinking how peaceful he looked, before remembering an interview she’d read with an actor who’d said that pretending to be asleep on camera was surprisingly difficult. You can’t just lie there, he’d told the interviewer, because it looks too fake. You’ve got vary your breathing. Maybe make small movements, like pulling the covers closer or nuzzling the pillow. Her ex-boyfriend wasn’t doing any of that.
In the dark, she fumbled for something on the kitchen counter. Her fingers closed around a ripe avocado. She threw it, overhand, aiming for his face but instead hitting the headboard where it ricocheted onto the bed and then rolled off onto the floor. Her ex-boyfriend continued to pretend he was sleeping.
She grabbed another one, not so ripe this time and surprisingly soft to the touch. She threw it again, this time at close-range, and hit him on the shoulder. It splattered open; brown and yellow against the white sheets. He’d waited too long to eat it and now it was rotten. What was wrong with him? Why would he only buy perfectly ripe avocados if he couldn’t even eat them on time?
Her ex-boyfriend started to yell, but she didn’t stay to listen. She grabbed her things and ran.
There was no cup of coffee waiting for her at her desk on Monday morning because Doris had been crying into it. Between sobs, she told Natalie that she’d called a plumber to fix a leaky pipe and he’d found Mr. Mittens instead. The cat had been in her house the whole time.
“He was in the basement, under the boiler,” she said, violently wiping her eyes. “Probably got trapped under it and roasted right up. He looked like beef jerky.”
Natalie handed her a box of tissues.
They fired Doris a few hours later.
She tried to argue with their supervisor. “Listen, her cat just died.”
“If we don’t fire her today, we’re just going to fire her tomorrow. She was no longer being productive.”
“But—”
The supervisor sighed. “It’s not fair, but it’s business.”
Natalie helped Doris clean out her desk and load her things into a cab. As it drove off, she watched as it got smaller and smaller until she couldn’t see it anymore.
She would have to learn to make her own coffee.
Later that day, she was at her desk eating a salad when an email appeared in her inbox that was like all the others: a customer saying he’d bought one of the company’s products and it fell apart within a month, that he’d been buying things from them for years and never had any problems until recently, that the quality had really declined. She pressed reply and told him he was right. The quality had declined, but she was just a customer service representative and couldn’t do anything. They’d recently switched production to a different country that had looser labor laws and fewer worker protections, because it was cheaper. She could pass along his concerns, but their margins had increased dramatically this quarter so there was little chance it’d make a difference. It wasn’t fair, but it was business.
As she was leaving work, her ex-boyfriend texted her, Please stop texting me. I have a new girlfriend.
She hadn’t texted him in several weeks. In that time, the email that she was so sure would get her fired had only resulted in a two-week-long probation, which was already over. Doris’s replacement had been hired. Sometimes Natalie made her coffee.
Cool, she wrote back. I have a new couch.
Her walk home that day took her across the Brooklyn Bridge, where she pretended she was a tourist and asked a stranger to take a picture of her. When the stranger handed her phone back, she saw that she had received another text message from her ex-boyfriend. She’d already responded to one of his texts today and didn’t want to make a habit of it, so, without looking to see what it said, she threw the phone, overhand, into the East River.