Amy DeBellis

Amy DeBellis is a writer from New York and the author of the novel ALL OUR TOMORROWS (CLASH Books). Her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, has appeared in the Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist, and can be found in X-R-A-Y, Uncharted, Write or Die, Monkeybicycle, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and elsewhere.

ALL OUR TOMORROWS: AN INTERVIEW WITH AMY DEBELLIS by Chris Dankland

Over the last year or so, Amy DeBellis has been one of my favorite newer short story writers. Now she has a new novel, ‘All Our Tomorrows,’  published by CLASH Books, which is one of my favorite books of the year. Her writing is so skillful: the language, the plots, the pacing, the characters. But I also love her writing because I find many of her stories to be dark and bleak. To me, her stories feel steeped in depression, menace, and a kind of claustrophobic doom.  I want to present the reader some examples of stories we’ve published by…

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HIS BODY by Amy DeBellis

We’re brushing our teeth side by side at the sink, like we do every night, when I see it. A spot of bright red on my husband’s face, peeking through the bangs that have been out of fashion for years, but which he refuses to grow out because I adore them. It’s no bigger than the tip of my pinky. But it’s definitely not a pimple. It’s flat and even and there are ripples in the skin around it, like the imprint left by a tiny elephant’s foot. I get less than a second’s glimpse before my husband bends over…

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3 MICRO PIECES by Amy DeBellis

Yakutsk Temperature dropping like a dive off a cliff. My lungs full of winter air, clear and sharp as ice. After the airplane and its stale box of other people’s exhalations, each breath is like mainlining oxygen. When I rub my lips together their skin is as dry as the snow beneath my boots. The salt of this morning still furs my tongue. My hands tremble brittle in my coat pockets, and my fingers rub the edge of a ticket, a mint, an obsolete coin.  In only a few moments I will put my memories behind me and walk into…

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PURGATORY by Amy DeBellis

Julia starts noticing David when he kills the fish in their bio classroom. The class finds it on the floor when they come in, stranded in a too-shallow puddle of water, tiny mouth open in a last desperate gasp. Like everyone else, David wears an expression of puzzled sorrow, his pale eyes wide with sympathy, but nobody besides Julia notices the spots of water on his sleeves. The thin trapdoor of his smile, flickering in and out of existence. So Julia starts noticing other things, too. She registers the curve of his lips, the cupid’s bow as pronounced as those…

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