What Do Fish Have to Do With Anything?

Both “Pets” and “What’s Inside” explore the difficulties of showing empathy in ambiguous situations. In “Pets,” Eve’s situation explores the boundaries that lie between love, projection, and dependence in the relationships that humans form with animals. At its core, the story examines the idea that excessive empathy can blur into illusion when emotions and expectations reshape one being’s perception of another. Specifically, although Eve lavishes care and devotion on her animals, her interpretations of their behavior often say more about her desires than they do about the pets themselves. While Eve imagines her cats to be companions who should return her love, their aggressive actions, such as biting, fighting, and demanding food, point to a more transactional relationship. The story’s reversal comes when Eve realizes that Angel and Shadow may have viewed her not as a caregiver or a friend, but as a servant whose role was to meet their needs. This idea upends her previous assumptions about the unconditional nature of pets’ affection.

The story also highlights the conflict between childlike belief and adult rationalism. Eve is convinced that Angel’s ghost haunts Shadow, and later, herself. Although her older brother Jeff dismisses the idea and aligns himself with the apparent rationalist stance of adults, the narrative never clarifies whether the hauntings are “real” or are merely products of Eve’s grief. Instead, Avi maintains a fine balance between the two perspectives, and this stylistic choice reflects the broader idea that children’s interpretations of the world often clash with adults’ insistence on logic. In this light, the ghost cats symbolize both Eve’s love and her fear; they embody her devotion, but their behavior also confirms her anxiety that the relationship was essentially one-sided.

The story takes an ominous turn as Eve falls ill and deliriously believes herself bound to her cats’ ghosts. As the story’s depiction of reality blurs, this feverish link mirrors the ambiguity of a love that demands too much of one participant. When the ghost of Chase drives away the cats, this surreal moment—whether actual or imagined—allows Eve to come to terms with her past losses and move beyond the cycle of projection and guilt that previously shaped her view of animals. By leaving a biscuit on Chase’s grave each year, she redefines the relationship in a healthier way and lets go of the need to live codependently with any pet.

While Eve’s version of empathy nearly destroys her, the narrator of “What’s Inside” uses his empathy to prevent the destruction of another, shedding new light on the novel’s multifaceted examination of Empathy as an Antidote to Cruelty, confusion, and despair. As the narrator is confronted with the dangerous situation of Danny’s emotional turmoil and suicidal ideation, the story uses images of light and darkness to mirror the two characters’ emotional states, symbolizing the contrast between openness and repression. Just as the narrator’s boxes must be crafted so carefully that no light leaks out when a flashlight is placed inside, the story suggests that people conceal their emotions just as securely, keeping their struggles and pain sealed away so that others cannot perceive a single hint of them. Danny aptly embodies this metaphor because he presents himself as being closed off, but he is really filled with a lethal level of despair and hopelessness that others cannot easily see. His suicidal impulse represents the extreme outcome of isolation, when no metaphorical light can penetrate the emotional darkness within his psyche. At this point, the challenge for the narrator is to understand Danny’s inner turmoil and to find a way to intervene and save Danny’s life.

In this ominous context, the boxes also represent the binary choice that Danny creates for himself: life or death. By asking the narrator to hide the gun in one of the boxes, Danny externalizes his struggle by making it a gamble of chance, and when the narrator disrupts this binary by keeping the gun out of both boxes, his act of intervention creates the symbolic “third option” that Danny could not imagine on his own. Instead of darkness, the boxes end up holding emptiness—an emptiness that paradoxically saves Danny’s life and symbolizes an expression of open-ended possibility. In this way, the narrator’s decision demonstrates that compassion and human connection can interrupt destructive choices.