He seems bored. He spends a great deal of time curled up in the water of her toilet bowl. She hates it when he does this. His body leaves long, thin trails of wetness across the apartment. She begins to wonder why she doesn’t have cats, like any other, normal single woman.

Mr. Green is back. She has not seen him for months, not since she let the snake out of his cage, but there he is one night, stepping out of her bathroom, the sports section of the newspaper in his dissected hands. She can see the progress that her class has made. They must be up to chapter seven. The chest has been removed, the ribs, clavicle, and sternum cut. The liver is exposed. The lungs fold gently over his heart like hands.

He grins at her, though his lips are gone, and she knows he is saying she has lost her charm. Soon there will be nothing left of him, and she feels the same peeling away inside, a hollowing out, a gradual emptiness. The kitchen clock is humming loudly. He opens the refrigerator and steps in.

She is thankful for her job. Thankful for the coffee, the good-mornings from her cubicle neighbors, the hum of her computer as the switch turns on. Thankful as well no one seems to notice that she is not doing any work. She is simply moving papers around on her desk, arranging them into folders and then taking them out again, stapling them together and then prying the staples out, standing by the Xerox machine and copying the same page, over and over.

The page is a spreadsheet. In small connected boxes it depicts the company hierarchy as if it were a family tree. With a glance over the chart, it is possible to know instantly who people are, where they belong, and what their relative power is. All of her coworkers have been mapped out, like stepping-stones. In the lower right-hand corner, underneath her boss, there is a thin line with her name attached.

Every few months this spreadsheet is revised to reflect promotions, demotions, new hires, and pink slips. It is a game board, and she has remained in the same spot. She has been too passive, she realizes. She has never worked to make more of herself than she is. It was the same in medical school. She remembers the sense of failure after removing Mr. Green’s brain. How it took hold of her with a wave of nausea and pulled her into darkness. When she woke up, the rubber gloves were still on her hands. They were wet and smelled of formaldehyde— the skin showing through. She took them off and her fingertips were wrinkled.