Willa had given Neil the fish for his birthday. Right away she regretted it. She worried he wasn’t feeding Freddie enough, until he demonstrated what he considered to be a pinch. An obese fish was not something she had previously considered. By the second week, the scuzz of the tank made her sick. She told Neil (she didn’t understand why she needed to tell him) that Freddie needed clean water to breathe, and Neil needed to be the one to give it to him. She lay in Neil’s bed and listened to the filter sputter, trying to churn out something like a habitat. Freddie was going to suffocate, trying to live in pesto. Willa despaired for Freddie’s slow smothering. She despaired to see evidence of Neil’s cruelty. Because it was cruelty, and how could Neil be so unbothered? It got to be that every time she went over, she couldn’t breathe either.
***
On what became their final day, Willa buzzed herself up and let herself in.
“We were going to go to dinner?” said Willa, at Neil’s perplexed reception. “You said you wanted to take me to dinner?”
“Sure,” he said. “Just let me…” And, rifling through some papers, he sat down to attend to them.
She idled around the room, making small talk with herself. It wasn’t her favorite quality, Neil’s need to make a show of his industriousness, but if her boyfriend had to be a comedian, at least he was an employed one.
She scanned the familiar titles on his shelf and braced herself slightly as she reached the corner where Freddie’s tank gurgled. Willa scanned for movement through the algal bloom. She leaned in.
“Hi Freddie,” she said, with a light tap of the glass.
“He’s not a dog. You talk to him like he’s a dog. Like he has ears,” said Neil.
“Where is he?” she asked, when another tap failed to stir movement.
Neil paused and Willa knew he would lie.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I don’t see Freddie. Did he—he didn’t die, did he?”
“No,” said Neil. “No.”
Willa continued to look between the tank and the curved back of her boyfriend. With a sigh of grave inconvenience, Neil approached. He plucked up the little green net and ran it through the murk.
“Weird. Hm. Fish sometimes jump out of their cages.”
“Tanks,” Willa said, watching him examine the carpet from a crouch.
“Weird,” Neil repeated, straightening once more. “He’s really gone.”
Willa refrained from accusation or laughter.
“Huh,” she said, and she went home alone.
***
Neil was cruel, and he thought she was an idiot. Willa couldn’t be married to a man who thought she was an idiot! Not that they were married, not even close. They’d been together two years. But now she knew they never could be. The next day, she made Neil cry in his favorite pizzeria so that he could never go there again without thinking of her.
Afterward, Willa thought she would get fantastically drunk. That’s what the movies wanted her to do. She unstoppered gin and became morbid. She sat before her gilded mirror and watched herself cry. Willa was an ugly crier. Her eyes spidered red. She went to the bathroom and applied mascara. She resumed observation. Black dripped compellingly down her cheeks. She looked more beautiful now. Not beautiful. Just more beautiful.
Willa swept her hair to front. It was thick and golden with cocker spaniel waves. Neil had loved her hair. Told her it was the first thing he’d noticed about her at that Chrismukkah party in Fort Greene. Said it looked “so sexy” when she swung it up into a ponytail just so. Braided it clumsily when she lay on his chest.
Willa bunched it in two pigtails and cut them off. Tried to. Their thickness prevented a clean snip; she sawed. The sound was like insects.
She put the ponytails in a gallon Ziploc. She would donate them to a six-year-old with cancer. This girl (Amy would be her name and she would wear light-up pink sneakers to the zoo for her birthday) would have Willa’s beautiful hair. She would feel so happy.
Willa watched her reflection laugh in the mirror. “Freshly shorn,” she thought.
***
The bodega man said, “You cut your hair!” Willa saw the effort in his smile. She sent a picture to her mother, who replied, “Oh!” These were not the comments one gives to a newly-revealed super model. She went to a salon and lost another inch.
In her bedroom, she took the hair out and laid it across her lap. She smoothed it with a comb. She affixed it to her stubbed ponytail with a thick scrunchie. It looked almost right. Willa put it back in the bag. She patted it twice for comfort.
“I am the dumper, not the dumpee,” she said aloud to no one.
***
When she knew Neil was at work, Willa let herself through his front door. She accidentally beelined for Neil’s desk and her fingers tripped onto the screen of his iPad. His most recent chat coordinated a Mother’s Day gift with his siblings. Good boy, she thought. She had made her mark, at least.
She would be missed, she knew, at his family functions and friends’ birthday parties. His mother had—on more than one occasion, and only some of them involving wine—proclaimed that she much preferred Willa to Neil’s prior girlfriend. She and Neil were Right. They were a couple that people said were “So good together.” Or they had been.
She typed her name into the Messages search bar. The only recent mention was from one of his friends, saying that he’d seen Willa at the pharmacy. She cut her hair, the friend said. Short short. Neil had replied, “Huh. Can’t picture.” That was it. The sum total of emotion, no follow-up questions about who Willa had been with or how she seemed to be doing. If a stranger had read it, they might take Willa to be an accountant Neil had employed last decade. How could this be the only mention, the only record that Neil had even thought about Willa since she’d (she had) ended things?
She imagined Neil telling his friends the news initially. Shaking his head, calling it a shame that Willa ended something so wonderful over a little fish he had never wanted. Willa was a saboteur. Emotional. Unreasonable. Too bad, man, she could hear them all saying. Too bad, buddy. Next one. The next one’ll be right.
Next afternoon, she strode to his fridge and sprinkled, into a half-empty carton, a pinch of her hair, cut to fine extreme. When she returned the following Friday, the juice was gone. In the Force Flex beneath the empty carton were the neon pebbles of Freddie’s old tank.
***
She cut the hair a millimeter more. She deposited these flaxen specks into Neil’s half & half, his minute rice, his jug of olive oil. She shook it and watched the glittering sink to the bottom. An infusion of Willa, she thought with satisfaction. She added a few snips to his garlic powder, to his Golden Grahams. She wondered how much he would have to ingest to form a bezoar. Quite a lot, she thought, and added a generous sprinkle to a jar of marinara. A fleeting worry—he might know it was her! Then she laughed. Neil would never think that anyone, that Willa, would do something so laborious, so diligent, so bizarre. He was sort of an idiot that way.
And anyway, the hair was cut so finely. It would not tangle, form a bolus in his intestine, cause a rupture. Incur such dramatic abdominal pain that he would have to take himself to the hospital, wishing all the while for her warm hand in his, for her to help him navigate through the hallways and ask, because he couldn’t, questions of the nurse seated behind the desk. Perhaps, in the waiting room, Willa would see Amy, awaiting treatment (Willa needed to mail that other pony!). Neil would have to account for the presence of the hair in his stomach. Uncomfortable, because he would not know the answer to why and how. Uncomfortable, because the medical staff would not believe him. They would assume he had a disorder, trichophagia or pica or a freaky little fetish. They would ask, then, additional questions to ascertain his mental status, decide whether he needed additional screening. Perhaps put him on a hold of some sort.
She was not putting him at risk of any of that. Not really.
She spent long afternoons following the sunlight around his apartment, lounging on his couch, slumping on a barstool at the grease-flecked island. Students asked her to stay after school, and she rebuffed them gently. Sorry, no, she couldn’t today. She had a meeting. An errand. An appointment. She was high on B&E. She drank all the Diet Coke from the fridge—she’d bought it for herself anyway—and caressed her stomach wistfully on his bed, thinking about the first time he, and therefore any man, had told her he loved her. She considered when, in the past two years, she might have left instead.
But Neil was the type of person who required an aggregate. Each of his flaws or infractions had felt insubstantial. She hadn’t wanted to be dramatic. Imagine, forbidding a man to love you because he didn’t know your shoe size. Because he couldn’t schedule an optometry appointment. She was, Neil always maintained with pleading, nearsighted eyes and a bashful smile, just better at things than he was. It never seemed fair to penalize him for his lack of ability to thrive. And his chipped front tooth was so damn charming.
She decided to feed Neil one entire pigtail, and then be done. After all, a person had to move on! The right pigtail remained intact. She would post it any day, off to little Amy. Just for now, it sat in her desk drawer. Except for when she sat stroking it on her floor, listening to songs that reminded her of being happy. She liked to probe those memories, to castigate herself for her naivete. He did care for her as much as he could care about another person, she thought. The tenderness in his hands couldn’t have been a lie. Still. It was not enough.
***
Neil remained mute. He didn’t suspect anything, or didn’t suspect Willa.
She stole from his closet the knit hat that still smelled of cigars from that one night by the water. She spun his wall-art slightly crooked. She turned all his sweatshirts inside-out. She cracked an egg underneath his bed. It was delightful, to give in to her least-considered impulses. How delicious it would feel when he came to her, confessing, “I think I might be going crazy.”
Willa stared into the toilet and imagined Freddie’s little body zooming along. Had he bloated with decompositional gases, floating for days before Neil had noticed? Or had Neil tired of the ever-present feeling of should and flushed him live?
Willa went to the Goodwill and paid eighty dollars for an assortment of clothes, dishware, books, and six VHS tapes. She packed Neil’s shelves with cotton balls, folded purple towels alongside his white ones. She added a maroon trivet to his kitchen counter, behind the stack of Polish cookbooks she’d deposited. She took frozen shrimp from the freezer. She unzipped his couch cushions and shoved handfuls inside. A little perfume, to remember Freddie by.
Every day that the door clicked open, her fury increased. Of course he hadn’t called a locksmith yet. Maybe she would do it for him.
She took the remaining pigtail from her nightstand and brought it to Neil’s. She braided it loosely, enough so it wouldn’t come apart, removed the drain trap that she’d bought for him, and stuffed it down the tub. Sorry, Amy, she thought, as she tested the flow of water. After barely three minutes, the tub refused to drain.
Who knew better than Willa that Neil required time to agitate toward anything? She left him alone for a week. Finally, she went, and she choked. The apartment’s bouquet was fantastic. The bathtub held three inches of murk. She had, as usual, done an excellent job. She consulted his iPad. No Google searches for plumbers, no messages to his landlord. Good lord, Willa thought, what did she have to do, burn the place down?
She bought some matches. Willa filled a cart with candles from the Dollar Store, tapers and tea lights, and spread them across all of his surfaces. She lit them. She went to the pizzeria and perched at the window to watch for Neil’s arrival. She observed him (fumbling his keys, as usual) and followed.
He opened the door and retreated a step in surprise.
“You really cut your hair!” he said.
“I did,” she said. “What are you, having a séance?”
She pushed over the threshold and surveyed her handiwork.
“Good god! It’s a biohazard in here,” she said. “How can you live in this stench?”
“That’s not fair,” he said. “You know I have a bad sense of smell.”
“Well, you’re fighting a losing battle with the candles, that’s for sure. No amount of them is going to cover this stench. You have to actually clean.”
“That’s not why I lit them,” he said. “I didn’t light them.”
“Oh? Was it a ghost?
“I don’t think they’re even scented candles.”
“I know,” said Willa. “Why did you buy so many candles if they’re not scented?”
“I didn’t. I don’t think I did.”
“Neil, I’m worried about you,” Willa said. “This isn’t a healthy way to live. It’s disgusting.”
“People have different standards of cleanliness,” he said.
“I think you need help,” said Willa. “Your guilt is clearly affecting you.”
“Guilt about what?” said Neil. “I’m fine.”
“You are not fine,” said Willa. “Not even a little bit.”
She blew out a taper, then another. They coughed together as the smoke spiraled.
“These are really cheap,” she said. “All sorts of chemicals.”
“Wait, stop blowing them out. They’ll set my alarm off.”
“That detector has never worked,” Willa said. “You never changed the batteries, remember?”
“Stop!” he said.
“I’m not,” she said, licking her finger and pinching out another flame. It hurt more than she imagined it would. In the movies, people never flinched. She tried not to either.
“I think you should go now,” he said. “You’re the one who dumped me. Why are you here?”
“I said the words, maybe, but you’re the one who ended things. You broke my heart, Neil. And look what good it did you.”
“Why are you here?”
“You told me to come by.”
“What do you want?” Neil coughed.
“Nothing at all. I just came by to see how you’re doing. I’m disturbed to see the answer.”
“I’m doing fine,” said Neil.
“Sure you are,” she said. “Well. I’ve got to go. I just stopped by to bring your box of stuff back.”
“What stuff?”
“I put it in the closet. And, by the way, you really need to clean your bathroom. I shouldn’t have to tell you these things.”
From the street, she watched his apartment. He didn’t bother to crack open a window. It’s remarkable how people will call someone crazy, rather than deal with their own issues, Willa thought. She turned to leave and spied the sewer through which Freddie had almost certainly traveled. She considered dropping Neil’s key into it. Instead she kept it in her pocket. She should hang onto it. Check in on Neil from time to time. After all, a person like that could really hurt himself.