Amoeba

How much was he going to take, Calla wondered as she waited and watched him move around the flat.  

Whenever he came over, he would take something. A single bowl from the cupboard, a CD (but not the case, for some reason) or an ornament. An item of clothing, a shoe. Always just the one shoe, so that she now had a row of unmatched shoes in the hallway. She was powerless to stop him. Since they’d split up, he came over once a month on the pretext of picking up some of his stuff. At first, she hadn’t paid much attention, but then she noticed things started going missing. Things of hers that she couldn’t possibly have simply mislaid. She’d missed some underwear at first, which was irritating but fairly typical, she supposed (after all, they’d enjoyed a normal relationship in that department and she didn’t begrudge him the odd souvenir), but then it was more unusual things that disappeared. A glove, a tin of baked beans, one of the lampshades. And eventually the shoes.  These were less easily explained. 

There had been no rancour after the decision to live apart was made. Yes, there’d been shouting matches leading up to it, when both of them realised they couldn’t live together anymore and they’d taken out their sense of self-loathing on each other, but once they’d agreed to break up, they’d started calmly drifting apart, dividing like an amoeba into two separate cells. They shared the flat for another few months. He slid from the bed to the spare room to the sofa and then he moved out completely.  

He had usually come while she was out, to avoid any unpleasantness, he said in his most reasonable voice. He hadn’t handed back the key yet, and she hadn’t really pressed him. And although she kept meaning to get the locks changed, she just hadn’t got round to it. In the end she’d felt compelled to ask him to come round only when she was back from work so she could keep an eye on him, but even then, after each visit, she’d check round later and find something peculiar missing. She wondered if she was losing her mind. 

But there was something strange, something passive-aggressive about this weird thieving, as if he was trying to split her in two.