On the morning of a “personal day” that she’d decided she deserved, she woke up in Leonard’s apartment after he’d left for work. She put the kettle on the stove to heat water for coffee and went to the bathroom to brush her teeth. On close examination, she was pretty sure that all of her teeth were rotting out of her gums. She emerged to the sharp smell of burning plastic. On the stove, the base of the kettle was on fire, its black, oh, shit, plastic melting like a hallucination into blue flames, smoke flowing enthusiastically toward the ceiling. She grabbed it by the handle and threw it into the sink, breaking the plate that had been waiting there patiently to be cleaned. The flames went out when she turned on the tap, but the entire apartment now smelled like a burned-down chemical plant. At least, she observed at a glance, the smoke detectors had been unscrewed; she saw one dangling by a wire above her head. She recognized now that she had, by lighting it on fire, destroyed what had until recently been a serviceable electric instant kettle. Cool, great. This was a very cool, great thing to do in one’s newish boyfriend’s apartment.

She went to the website of a monopolistic corporation that sold and quickly shipped objects for very low prices and found the same kettle in a slightly different color from the one she had ruined. It could be at the house later the very same day if she paid just a little bit more for it. So she did! She felt good about her decisiveness in tackling this problem. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been so decisive. Even if the kettle arrived before Leonard came home and it looked exactly like the previous one, she told herself, she was not going to be sneaky and pretend it was the same kettle. She would admit blushingly to her mistake, but she would be funny about it, normal. “And it turned out they were selling the same one online for, like, zero dollars, basically!” she’d say. “Good thing you don’t have expensive taste in kitchenware, ha ha!” She waited in the apartment all day for its arrival, watching from the window like a cat. When it arrived, in the late afternoon, she was disappointed. It was some kind of updated model that did not remotely match the picture on the website. She placed it exactly where the previous one had been but still planned—really, she wouldn’t have a choice when he saw it—to tell Leonard what had happened. But a riddle for the ages unspooled over the subsequent weeks: