Amy DeBellis Archives

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

June 17, 2025 · Interviews & Reviews

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 DeBellis:‘Purgatory’ –- a short story about a teen who becomes infatuated with a boy at her highschool who is killing animals. Soon he teaches her how to hunt and they start shooting animals together in the woods: deer, foxes, frogs. At one point the boy says: “Only ever point the rifle at things you are willing to destroy.” Then the story says: “She thinks of aiming it at every tree on her property, at her house, at her mother’s car. Into the open cavern of her own skull.” The story ends with them shooting the neighbor’s cat.‘His Body’ — a short story about a woman whose husband has caught an STD that causes incurable lesions to break out all over his body. The holes in the flesh never go away, until eventually his entire body is covered in them.We also published three micros by her:‘Yakutsk’ — about a woman who is getting ready to wander alone into the frozen taiga‘Wake’ — about a woman at her mother’s funeral. First sentence: “Morning: the sun smears blood across the sky.” And a micro titled: ‘Even My Fantasies Are Chronically Ill.’I spoke with DeBellis about her writing.

***

Chris Dankland: Hi Amy! Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me. Do you feel like your writing as a whole tends toward the melancholic, or does it only show up in certain pieces? Is that feeling something you consciously cultivate and lean into, or does it emerge naturally? Amy DeBellis: I do think it leans towards the melancholic as a whole. (In fact, it’s like the Tower of Pisa with how much it leans…) I’m trying to think of a piece I’ve written in the last couple of years that doesn’t have that darkness, and I’m coming up short. Even humorous pieces (“Upgrade” in HAD, for example, or “Persistence” in Roi Fainéant) have elements of darkness in them—it’s just that that darkness isn’t played straight the way it is in the majority of my writing. Yeah, it’s in everything. It emerges naturally. I love beautiful things—for me, in many ways, the written word is the ultimate form of beauty—but I also believe you can’t have beauty without something to contrast it. That discordant note. That, to quote Donna Tartt, “little speck of rot”. Except for me it’s a little bit more than a speck. CD: To me, your stories often feel physically heavy. Sometimes I get a weird image when I read your work of a stone sinking in water. You are very good at embodying emotion and describing it in a tactile way. Your stories feel like they live in the body: grief shows up as fatigue, sorrow has weight, dread feels like muscle tension. Is this a conscious part of your craft, this physical translation of emotional states? AD: I love the image of the stone! And that’s a huge compliment, that my writing could give you this mental image. I’ve always believed that the body is the seat of memory. There’s this wonderful Stephen King quote: “Art consists of the persistence of memory.” So the body and art are inextricably linked, being as they are both holders and representations of memory. And since the present runs continuously into the past, almost everything not held by the future is already a memory. I personally feel emotions very strongly, so no, it’s not really conscious that this comes across in my work. I mean, of course I try to choose the best descriptors for a feeling of dread, but the translation of emotional states to the physical—I believe it’s the most powerful way to get across emotion to a reader who might not have experienced the same thing that’s happening in the story. Let’s say there is a story about a grieving widow. Not everyone knows what it’s like to have lost a husband, or even to have lost a close family member, but everyone knows the feeling of grief. Describing it as a physical sensation is a way to bring the reader into their body (not their mind, where they’re thinking Oh but I was never a grieving widow) and force them to feel the emotions of the piece. CD: I feel like the three main characters in ‘All Our Tomorrows’ are all stuck in a depressive rut at the beginning of the book. The characters are isolated in the sense that they are always wearing some sort of mask around most people. They don’t feel a real human connection with others, and this only starts to change near the end of the book when the characters meet.For most of the book, each character seems trapped in their own depressive logic, their own sealed inner monologue. Was it challenging to bring them out of that headspace and allow for genuine human contact?AD: It was a bit difficult, but it was also really fun. I massively enjoyed describing each character from the viewpoint of the others—it allowed me to view them from the outside looking in, for once. I am not one of those writers (no shade to them though) who says that their characters are speaking to them in their head. But for the scene where they all meet—particularly the second one where they’re all together—I kind of just let the words flow. My characters took the reins more than ever before. I truly had no idea what Janet was going to say when [redacted]*, for example. Or when Gemma figured out that [redacted]*. It was truly magical seeing their personalities come alive on the page. *I am keeping everyone safe from spoilers. CD: I feel that climate change is mostly unstoppable. I have little to no hope that humans will solve this problem, and I believe that things are only going to continue to get worse from here on. Humans are survivors, but I think that the Earth in which humans will have to live, 200 or 300 years from now, will be so degraded that it won’t be all that different from hell. I don’t feel hope for the future, in the long run. The existential threat of climate change is a worry hanging over the heads of all three main characters in ‘All Our Tomorrows.’ How do you personally feel about climate change?AD: Sadly, I agree with you. I think we’ve all seen over the past few years that even if humans could solve this problem, we wouldn’t want to. And by “we” I mean the people who run the world, the CEOs of megacorporations, the billionaires who wreak the most environmental damage. It’s my opinion that they are almost uniformly psychopathic in their behavior and their lack of empathy. No normal person would want to do the things they’ve had to do in order to gain their position—and I believe that if a normal person did find themselves with that much power, they wouldn’t remain normal for very long. On the one hand, I truly enjoy my laptop, and my phone that allows me to contact my friends overseas. And parasite-free, running water. And medicine! But I also believe that our modern way of life is an aberration, a blip, almost a wrinkle in the way things are designed to be on earth. We are not entitled to live this way, it is not sustainable, and we are paying the price. People forget that for the overwhelming majority of human history, we lived in hunter-gatherer tribes. The Neolithic Revolution (when humans first began to farm) happened only ten thousand tears ago, which is around 3% of the time Homo sapiens have existed. And the Industrial Revolution, which gave us our industrial capitalism and modern infrastructure and nearly everything we feel entitled to as a part of “regular life,” happened so recently that only about 0.08% of human history has occurred after that. It’s mindblowing that we’ve caused so much damage to our planet in such a tiny fraction of time.And that 0.08% is what we think of as normal. Our own lives are so short in comparison that, looking back along the eight or so generations that have lived since the Industrial Revolution, it really does seem like it’s been forever. There’s a part in All Our Tomorrows where one of the main characters is thinking about the spiral drawing that’s mean to represent all the eras on earth — something like this, but colorful. Most of it is blue and green. Only the very newest end of the spiral is a different color. To quote my book, that’s “the Anthropocene, a slice so tiny you could easily miss it, a fingernail sliver of rust-covered gray. If you zoomed in enough you could see minuscule buildings, cars, an airplane, all hovering precariously just at the edge. To Anna it looked as though anyone standing on that edge was about to fall off into nothing, into the timeless black that surrounded the spiral.”I fear I’ve gone into a bit of a raving tangent, but I’ll wipe the froth off my mouth, do some deep breathing, and attempt to answer your question more succinctly: I don’t feel hope for the future in the long run, either. Climate change is multi-pronged, as it gives rise not only to fires and floods but also ancient pathogens thawing out of permafrost, mosquito and tick-borne diseases moving further and further across the globe, and so many other things we simply aren’t prepared for. CD: In a past interview, you mentioned that you were “gearing for a not-so happy ending” with ‘All Our Tomorrows’ but ultimately felt like the novel needed a more hopeful ending because you didn’t want the book to “leave readers feeling like the novel was a bunch of pointless doom—we get enough of that from social media and the news.”Are you concerned that readers will misread the darkness in your work as nihilism? How do you feel about nihilism? What do you hope that readers are left with after reading ‘All Our Tomorrows?’AD: I’m not really concerned that they’ll misread the darkness in my work as nihilism. If they do, I don’t mind. I would probably mind if I branded myself as some kind of “Hope Coach,” but thankfully that is not a direction I have gone in. One of the phrases you used earlier to describe the feelings my work gave you—“claustrophobic doom”—made me smile. I love claustrophobic doom! (Writing about it, not feeling it.) But I don’t think that all of life is claustrophobic doom. Existence is multifaceted, and I choose to bring attention to the darker parts of it. They’re a lot more fun to write about, for one thing. But I also see a lot of toxic positivity everywhere. You get demonetized on social media if your content is too depressing, which admittedly makes sense from a branding point of view. But at the same time, I don’t agree with phrases like: Everything will be okay in the end, and if it’s not okay, then it’s not the end. It has its uses during a panic attack, I suppose, but on the whole that phrase never made sense to me. Like, what if someone is dying of a horrible disease? What—are you saying that things will be okay in the end because of the sweet relief of death? Well, okay, I guess that’s one way to think about it, but I don’t think that’s what that particular phrase is going for…The most popular type of nihilism seems to be that life is meaningless and has no value, nothing you do matters, and there is no point to anything (and, I can’t help reading this into it—that you may as well just shuffle yourself off this mortal coil sooner rather than later). Honestly, I think those nihilists are overthinking it. I don’t like to burden my small monkey brain with the overall meaning of life. Like, yeah, duh. Nobody knows the meaning of life. Maybe there is none. Where I don’t agree with nihilism is that life has no value. I happen to like being alive, for the most part. There is so much beauty to be found in life. There’s beauty in pursuing creative activities, in spending time with loved ones, in listening to your favorite music, in eating good food. I don’t care if it’s meaningless—I still enjoy it. And hey, maybe it’s all meaningless in the end, since we don’t live forever, and you and everyone you know will eventually die…but honestly, I think immortality would be so much worse. It’s the ephemerality of life that makes it so precious. (And, going back to the psychopathic billionaires, this is something that the most powerful people on the planet seem to have forgotten. I truly believe they can’t enjoy small pleasures anymore. They want to rule the world and live forever because they can no longer appreciate things that would make the dopamine and serotonin receptors in a normal, healthy brain light up.) Towards the end of All Our Tomorrows, it was a bit of a challenge to keep the story realistic but also have it not be totally depressing. The ending of Janet’s last chapter, as well as the ending of Gemma’s last chapter (which is literally the last sentence of the book) is probably my most clear and straightforward answer to the question that snakes through the manuscript, which is essentially “What are we supposed to do about all this anxiety, all this uncertainty, all this pain?”So, to answer your question, I want readers to come away from All Our Tomorrows with a sense of hope, with the knowledge that they can do something—even if it’s just something for themselves, and not something that saves the world, because that’s impossible—but something. Whether that’s spending time with family, or doing something creative you enjoy, or being with the person you love. Something that has meaning, and purpose, and value. And that is what makes my book incompatible with nihilism. Order 'All Our Tomorrows' here.

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HIS BODY by Amy DeBellis

June 16, 2025 · Fiction

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 the sink, spits out toothpaste, rinses with water. Then he turns and heads for bed. I’m still brushing, brushing, brushing. Still thinking about the spot. Hazily I wonder if, given enough time, the repeated motion of the toothbrush would eventually grind my teeth clean away. The news has been calling it SL-29. The SL stands for Spot Lesions: they resemble flesh peeled off in a perfect circle to reveal the raw redness of the meat underneath. Except they never heal. They never go away. Instead, they spread all over the body. The spots are often itchy, and weep a strange fluid—sometimes clear, sometimes yellow, sometimes black—that doctors have still not been able to identify. Sometimes they crust, like herpes sores, and then the pain is said to be immense.A better name for the disease would probably be something to do with pox, but that word would alarm the population, and the most important thing with any disease outbreak now is to avoid any alarm. After all, we saw what happened with the “Covid Crazies” and their masks, their stockpiling, the way they wanted to stay inside all day and sacrifice the economy for their delusions. The Vice President referred to them as “Gollums” the other day, and his fanbase (which regrettably overlaps significantly with the Lord of the Rings fanbase) praised him on social media with an avalanche of memes. The administration loves SL-29. It’s sexually transmitted, so what better punishment for the whores and sluts and single mothers than to have our loose morals branded on our faces forever? There are even rumors that the official SL title doesn’t stand for Spot Lesion at all, but for Scarlet Letter. Most people call them the Scarlet Spots. I finally rinse my mouth and head to bed. My tongue feels cold from toothpaste, a heavy slug resting against the slick backs of my teeth. My husband, facing away from me, seems to already be asleep, but that’s impossible. He never drifts off this quickly. Does he know I’ve seen his spot? Has he even seen it? Of course he has. For all the grief he gives me about admiring myself in the mirror so much, he could never miss something so striking. It really is scarlet. As I get into bed, he continues to breathe slowly and deeply. The steady rhythm remains uninterrupted even as I fluff my pillow and lay down, as though he truly is asleep. But he could be faking it. He could be praying I fall asleep without asking anything. But they don’t fucking disappear, my love, I think, clenching my jaw as I glare at his shape in the darkness. Are you going to shellac your bangs to your forehead? Use foundation so I never, ever see?And what about when the spots start spreading? What then? Yes, the only trouble with the spots is that men get them too. That’s why SL-29 is at the top of every STD screening test. Before chlamydia, HIV, gonorrhea, and everything else that can, in some way, be managed or treated or cured.

***

In the middle of the night, when I’m sure he really is asleep, I creep to the bathroom. I close the door quietly, flick on the lights, and examine every inch of my body. I have to use a hand mirror for the more hidden spots, but after a while, I conclude that my skin is SL-29 free. For now, at least. My mouth tastes rank, like I’ve been licking the floor and my own armpits. I go back to bed and try to sleep but my dreams are hallucinogenic, liquid, slipping through my brain like slick poisoned water.

***

Monday morning. Subway car rattling uptown, my sleep-blurred eyes, that odd gnawing hunger that always comes with not getting enough sleep. I brushed my teeth before leaving—alone, this time; my husband goes to work an hour later than I do—but my breath is stale inside my mask. I’m one of the few who still wear them, and my husband would be ashamed of me if he saw, ashamed and angry enough to shout, but he’s not here right now. Just a few other early-morning commuters, still mostly mired in the fog of recollected dreams, who couldn’t clearly give two fucks about my mask. Across from my seat, there’s an ad: “One night with Venus, a lifetime of SL-29.” Next to the bubbly words is a cartoon of an embarrassed man, face covered in red spots. I wonder how many people will catch the centuries-old reference to syphilis. When the subway gets to my stop, I stand up and walk past the sign, glancing at it one last time. Now that I’m closer, I can see the vandalism I would’ve caught earlier if the vandal had the presence of mind to use a Sharpie instead of a pencil. The word Venus has been crossed out in thin, barely-visible graphite. And above it, scratched deep into the shiny plastic, as if he could already tell that the pencil wasn’t going to be sufficiently discernible: A WHORE.

***

As soon as I sit down at my desk, the fogginess leaves me. It’s a sudden, destabilizing rush, like coming down out of the clouds on an airplane at night. Suddenly you’re seeing civilization spread out below you in all of its greedy, multiplied glory: city lights glittering like insect shells, spangling clear across the globe like earthbound stars. At least my resting bitch face comes in handy today. I’m left in peace as I boot up my monitor, open my email, scroll through my new tasks for the day. I don’t actually read any of it. Instead, I’m thinking of my husband. His way of saying “Only with you” when I ask him to do something he doesn’t really want to do—clean the bathroom, sign petitions, scrub the crusted stovetop. It’s true that there’s some romance in the teamwork, in both of us bettering our living space side by side. Once, we made eye contact over our flooded bathroom floor, flashed each other twin grossed-out grins: We’re in this together.The way he promised, using almost the same language, that he’d always be mine. It was just after he proposed, and he was holding my hands carefully. Like they were birds, hollow-boned and nervous, that might at any moment fly away. Most men make a big deal out of a woman being theirs and only theirs, but my husband seemed to find the idea of him being mine equally scintillating. At the time, I found it touching. Now I wonder if it was something he read online. One of those tricks guaranteed to lower the female guard. I think of my husband’s wide, toothy, childish smile. His complexion is so pale that even his teeth, which are actually fairly white, look yellow. Soon the spots will cover his entire face, astonishingly bright on his skin—not melting into one another like confluent smallpox, but just barely managing not to touch. So that each spot preserves its own perfect roundness. Almost as though it’s intentional. I once saw an interview where a doctor squinted at a patient’s face and pronounced them “the most perfect circles I have ever seen in nature.” He even took photographs, and other people measured the circles, confirmed that they were indeed mathematically perfect. “The good news is it’s not fatal,” the doctor said as he concluded the interview. “The bad news is it’s not fatal,” I muttered to myself, watching, because the suicides were rising by then and have continued to increase ever since. What the fuck do I do now?I check my wrists and forearms again. I fight the urge to march to the bathroom and strip down in a stall, twist until my body is covered in sweat and I’ve pulled a muscle in my back from trying to see every inch of my skin. I can’t panic. Panic won’t make any of this any better. According to the guidelines, the disease is 80% transmissible before any spots appear—that’s why we need expensive SL-29 STD tests, rather than a simple strip search. But once a spot has appeared, that person’s transmission rate climbs to 100%. Anyone they have intercourse with will get the disease too. And once a spot has appeared on someone you’ve been having sex with, you have forty-eight hours to see whether they’ve infected you during their asymptomatic phase. Forty-eight hours from last night. I just need to make it till Tuesday night, and I’ll know. For better or worse. And then I can…then I can…At this point my brain stops. Like a webpage that won’t load. I simply can’t think of what I’m going to do after the forty-eight hours is up. Almost with relief, I recognize another problem: I can’t know how long that spot has been there. Was it there the day before yesterday? I can’t be sure—I barely glanced at my husband all day on Saturday, preferring instead to read and separate myself from him and his video games, the way he cursed at the screen whenever he made a mistake. A flat red spot hiding behind his bangs would have been easy to miss. And of course there’s the question of how he got it. Where he got it. Who gave it to him. Only with you. I feel like I’m breathing through a rolled-up piece of paper. A hollow plastic cylinder. A straw. The ad from the subway flashes back into my mind. The slogan, the humiliated cartoon man, the crossed-out Venus. And then that other word, etched into the plastic, with such determination and fury, like a scar. Earlier, I thought of the vandal as a man. Now I no longer do.

***

My husband gets home an hour after me. His bangs are perfectly in place, and he’s smiling: his teeth the color of weak chamomile tea, his lips stretched and rubbery. “I got your favorite,” he says, holding aloft some bags from the nearby Korean restaurant. “Excited?”I blink at him. Does he think that he can use bibimbap and glass noodles to, what, bribe me to stay with him? That, supposing I’m clean, I’ll willingly let him infect me so that we can be scarlet-lettered together? Ha. Only with you, babe, right? Red circles clustering on our faces and then trailing down across our bodies, so bright we can’t cover them even with the thickest foundation. Maybe he’s even dreaming that I’ll come with him to live in one of the communities where the SL-29 social outcasts live as shut-ins: spending their worst days soaking in cool water, spending all the other days hiding behind thick curtains. Only venturing outside in the darkness, like suicidal, hideous vampires. I almost laugh at the idea. He takes my sardonic grin as a sign of pleasure. “I knew you’d be! It’s always better when it’s a surprise, right?”“Oh yeah, definitely,” I say, trying not to let the sarcasm seep too deeply into my voice. “Surprises are always better.” Only twenty-four more hours to go, I think. And it’s now that I decide. If I don’t have any spots on my body by tomorrow night, I’ll get out. I’ll tell everyone the truth and leave him to pick up the pieces by himself. It doesn’t matter that I can’t divorce him—I’ll run. And if I do have a spot on my body by tomorrow night….But the thought of that turns my guts into snakes. It makes my head so heavy that that I have to bow over, gripping it in my hands, and the next thing I hear from my husband, coming close and speaking in a voice that I could swear is more fearful than it ought to be: “Is everything okay?”In bed, he reaches for me. “Sorry, babe, not tonight,” I say, trying to sound as regretful as possible. “My stomach’s cramping…I think it’s from eating too much spicy food.”“But you love spicy food.” His hand is on my waist, stroking gently but insistently. I fight the urge to jerk away from him. “Yeah, but I’m not used to it anymore. We haven’t gotten from that place in a while. Or any of my favorite restaurants, for that matter,” I add, unable to keep the resentment out of my voice. “We’ve mostly just been eating the bland American food you seem to constantly crave.” In the silence that follows this, I hold my breath, letting it live high and shallow in my nostrils and the tops of my lungs. But, finally: “Huh, okay.” I can hear the shrug in his voice. I never rebuff his sexual advances unless I’m on my period or have a migraine, but he just moves to the other side of the bed. My body relaxes in relief. At the same time my mind spirals, trying to determine whether he’s given up so easily because he knows he already infected me last week, or because he thinks he’ll have another chance tomorrow.I want to ask Who was she? Was she hot? Did she refuse a test, or did you just not care enough to even ask for one?I want to ask Was it worth a lifetime of spots marring your whole body? Flesh pepperoni peeking out all over your cheese-curd-colored skin, skin the color of milk gone sour, skin like that of a corpse just before it stiffens and turns blue?But I don’t want to make him angry. Ever since the Domestic Violence shelters have all been closed down. Ever since the Domestic Assault hotline has been disconnected. Ever since calling the cops on your husband is the quickest way to get yourself dragged down to the station for “inciting the violence” yourself. Ever since new, privately funded studies came out showing that women are indeed the more emotional sex and that their manipulation can easily be used to paint good men as “abusive.” Ever since no-fault divorce was eliminated. Ever since. Ever since. Ever since. Ever since the dawn of fucking time because men have always been physically stronger than women and always will be.

***

In the end, I don’t even have to wait forty-eight hours. The spot is there on the back of my knee when I go to the bathroom the next morning, peeking out at me like a knowing eye. I stare at it like I’m waiting for it to wink. Heat unfurls across my body—a panicked rush of blood, a silent roar. My vision goes black at the corners, as though smoke is closing in, and I curl forward over my knees, muffling my wail in my hands. A crazy idea flashes through my mind: cut my leg off. But that wouldn’t work, not even if I took it off at the hip. The disease has already spread throughout my body. It’s like mold: glimpsing a little bit on the surface only means that the roots have long since claimed what’s underneath. There’s no stopping it now. The panic gives me tunnel vision, and I’m standing up now, staring into the bathroom mirror, staring at my face which is now unblemished but which will soon—who can say how soon—show a spot. Maybe with me, the disease will creep upwards. My husband’s will progress downwards, and mine will follow the reverse course. We’ll fit together perfectly.I turn the shower on full blast and scream into a towel. Swallowed up by the terrycloth, it’s more vibration than sound, and it shudders through me, shakes my arms and legs until I’m a trembling strand in the corner of the bathroom, looking towards the door with wild eyes, praying he didn’t hear anything. Because…because…Why? Why the fuck not?To get my answer, as I always have, I need the clarity that comes with pain. So I step into the shower. I gasp; the cold is a physical force, ripping the air from my lungs. Needles of icy water rain down on me, shocking, splintering me into a million particles like television static. A numb buzzing in my brain. Pain, pain, pain—And then, clarity. I slam the shower closed, panting and trembling. The facts are simple, clear as ice as they march out before me: He fucked someone recently. He got SL-29 from her. He returned home. By now he’s sure, by now he must be sure, that he is infected. He hasn’t told me. I’m infected too. Probably from when we fucked on Thursday or Friday. I’m in the same boat as him. We’re in this together. But it’s not a boat I’ve joined willingly. It’s a boat he’s dragged me into, without my knowledge or consent, a boat that could bind us together for a lifetime. If he were more possessive, I’d even suspect he’s done this deliberately, binding me to him so I can never escape. But he’s not like that. He’s never been possessive. And he loves himself far too much to ever destroy his appearance just to have me by his side for the rest of our lives. I clench my fists on the shower wall and get myself back to the row of facts. Okay: yes, I am infected too. I skip to the next one before my legs can start shaking again, quickly, onto the next fact: he needs to be punished. My husband can do so much to me. He can cheat on me. He can put his hands on me as many times as he wants—smack me across the face for speaking in the wrong tone of voice, pinch my lip between his sharp nails as a punishment for accidentally stepping on his foot—as long as there are fewer than two witnesses. He can stop me from voting. He can even impregnate me and force me to keep the baby (although what other option would I even have? a coat hanger? a handful of toxic weeds?). Although, in his defense, he has never done that last. He doesn’t want children either. It was one of the things we agreed on at the very beginning, one of the things that bound us together in a world where other couples were constantly fighting and breaking up over the issue. We simply looked at each other and said, “Nope.” Smirking, like we were in on some grand inside joke. A secret held like a jewel between the two of us. Funny how it’s always the wives who are paraded like a spectacle for bringing the Scarlet Spots into their homes. Sluts infecting their unsuspecting husbands. Funny how it’s never, ever the other way around. I think again of the ad on the subway. The original saying was One night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury: a phrase intended to sway young men away from prostitutes, because syphilis was treated with mercury in those days. But what about the phrases to sway young women away from the Johns who would later pass that disfiguring disease onto them? Those phrases did not exist. They never do.I step out of the shower stall, run the shower hot for a few minutes, and then emerge from the bathroom. Using my weakest voice, I tell my husband I’m coming down with a cold. “I just took a steaming hot shower,” I say mournfully. “I think I’ll take it easy in bed today.”He gives me a sympathetic nod and tells me to feel better. Before he leaves, I notice another spot, just below his chin. He turns away from me quickly, not wanting me to see. I want to tell him that I already know. But that would ruin the surprise. And surprises are always best, aren’t they, love?

***

As soon as I hear the elevator doors close in the hallway, I fly into action. I have to get everything set up perfectly by the time he comes home. As I walk to first one hardware shop and then the next, and then a chemist’s shop, and then a kitchen-wares shop, I try to let my thoughts wander. But they don’t want to wander. They keep coming around to tonight’s plan, like a fierce, certain arrow. And I smile. I keep smiling even as I’m aware of that spot on the back of my knee, that barely perceptible itch. What’ll happen tonight, what I’ll turn my husband into…it’s almost enough to make the infection worth it. Almost. I spend the rest of the day setting things up. He’s only got two red spots, but I can add a few more: early ones, surprise ones. Maybe I’ll take some things away, too. I think again of why I didn’t want to make him angry when we lay in bed that night. Yes, on the whole, men have always been physically stronger than women and always will be. But that’s assuming no other factors have been introduced to alter the equation. And a sedated man bound to a bed, tied in five-point restraints like they use at the hospitals for hysterical women—well, all his strength will be useless. As useless as the nipples on his chest. Maybe I’ll start with those. No one’s coming to help him. After all, the Domestic Assault hotline has been disconnected. Tonight it’s his body on the bed. And—finally—my choice.

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3 MICRO PIECES by Amy DeBellis

December 2, 2024 · Micros

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 the taiga. Try to forget your face and its smiling cruelty, the soft malice that always comes with power. Try to forget how you uploaded your consciousness into the cloud and cheated death, how you turned the ouroboros from a snake to a mute circle, a faceless loop: a splotch of ringworm, a spreading bulls-eye rash, a scrawled zero. Try not to wonder, a hundred years after I am dead, how much of this forest too will be gone.The wall of trees yawns before me. No fresh green breast here, no—here is a frozen emerald heart, holding within it no ability to nurture but only to embalm, to write my body like a stone carving, immersing it gemlike in years of snow. I step forward and the trees swallow me. They are tall and green and endless, speaking of everything I have forgotten how to say to you.

Wake

Morning: the sun smears blood across the sky. My mother’s body is as white and long-stemmed as a lily, a flower in its velvet casing. I’m drenched in black like I’m trying to melt into the shadows around the walls. Like I’m trying to camouflage myself from every distant relative—their exhalations sour with coffee, their smiles oily with false sympathy. I think of the last time I saw my mother smile: at the sea, the last place we traveled together. Inside my head I say Mother. The word flutters, dark and silent, on my tongue. I remember the green endlessness of the ocean, how we lay back on the sand and let the sun bleach the water from our bodies. Brine and salt in my mouth. The waves rising, cresting, falling. Time a noose around our necks.

Even My Fantasies Are Chronically Ill

Ringing in my ears like the seconds after an explosion, except it’s constant and unending, shrill as silver, and there was no explosion. Only days, soft and slow. I try to stand and my body fails me. A collection of diagnoses accumulates like a layer of filth on my skin: mast cell activation, dysmenorrhea, chronic urticaria. I try to stand and my body fails me. Craniocervical instability, hyperacusis, photophobia. My windows are shuttered; the layer on my skin is permanent. Postural orthostatic tachycardia, myalgic encephalomyelitis. The words of my diagnoses grow longer and longer until they might not even be real anymore, just syllables contorting themselves into agonized, impossibly labyrinthine shapes. My body keeps failing me forever, an endless loop of standing up and crashing back down again. My legs grow thin and brittle like matchwood. The ringing in my ears now more like a screaming. Lying in the soundless dark, I picture everyone who’s ever doubted me crowded around my bedside. I imagine them emptied of all the Have you tried and I don’t think and Are you sure, their throats cleared of all words, their esophaguses silent and moist. I imagine seeds sinking into the damp flesh there, weeds sprouting from their mouths, finally blooming into bright fistfuls of flowers: a perfect copy of the garden outside my window, the garden I can no longer see.

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PURGATORY by Amy DeBellis

July 11, 2024 · Fiction

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 of the girls in Renaissance paintings. She wonders what it might taste like. Rust or moss, maybe, blooming in dark secret places where no one looks.One evening she sees him walking into the field behind their houses. The slim rifle, straight path into the woods, and then a shot. Venison on the neighbors’ table for dinner. He sees her seeing him. On the path between their properties, into the narrow space between their bodies, he says, “I can teach you, if you want.”It’s that sliver of a pause, that hesitation before if you want, that decides her. Because for a second, before he thought to add those words, he didn’t even consider that she might not want it. And in that second she was ready for anything. She wants to live in that second. She wants to pull that second over her like a cloak and walk so far in it that she can’t find her way back home. ___ The next day, in the forest, David stands very close to her. He has to, in order to show her how to hold and load the rifle. There’s a metallic odor seeping from his skin, as though he’s chewed up a bunch of rounds, gritted them to dust between his teeth, digested them and turned them into sweat.“Man, you’ve never even held a gun before,” he says in wonder. “What planet did you come from?”“Some sheltered girl planet, I guess,” Julia replies, and then feels like an idiot.But he doesn’t seem to mind the distinction she’s drawn between the two of them. “Make sure you’ve got it pointed away from your head. That’s the first thing you need to learn.” He’s grinning, his teeth small and chipped in the crescent moon of his smile. He teaches her the anatomy of the rifle, demonstrating with his rough woodblock hands: “This is the action. This is the safety. This is the trigger…” He makes her recite every part until she’s got it memorized as well as the topography of her own skin. Only then will he let her hold it. He says: “Only ever point the rifle at things you are willing to destroy.”She nods seriously. She thinks of aiming it at every tree on her property, at her house, at her mother’s car. Into the open cavern of her own skull. ___ When he lets her start shooting, he stands next to her, as though he can guide her shots just by his presence. She misses and misses until finally she doesn’t. It’s a rabbit, small and delicate when it was making its way across the grass, but when she picks the body up it’s ugly, heavy, waterlogged with death. Nothingness spreads through her. It’s after her first kill that she learns what David tastes like. Not rust, or moss, or even metal. He tastes like what you might find at the bottom of a pond. Like something that was once green but slowly turning liquid, falling apart to rot. She doesn’t hate it. There’s none of that artificial bubblegum flavor she’s tasted on other boys, no chemical chapstick taste, no spearmint mouthwash. It’s realer than life. As real as death. It draws her in, makes her reach out for more, and he pulls away too soon—smiling, knowing. He teaches her how to bring down deer. They’re fast and shy, but a single buck can feed a family for months. Their slim bodies, so elegant in life, lose all their grace at the moment of the bullet’s impact, and what was once a whole animal splinters into a collection of fractures: spasms, synapses blindly firing, intricate circuitry torn apart. Every kill earns her a kiss. The loamy warmth, the taste of decay, is addictive. The nothingness spreads through her like poison or wine. They go to the forest more and more. They take turns, passing the rifle back and forth between them: a deer for Julia, a fox for David. Julia’s mother doesn’t notice her absence because she doesn’t notice anything anymore. Except the TV, and her cans of beer, and cigarettes that she smokes with fingers that grow increasingly thin and whittled down, like brittle sticks of wood. David doesn’t talk about his family, but she knows that he knows about hers. He pulls her close as they hunt frogs in the ponds, not wasting bullets but crouching low to the ground and trapping them in coffee cans, listening to the frantic thump of their bodies, the sound like wet beating hearts. “Should we name them?” he asks. “What’s the point? We’re killing them anyway.”She can tell he’s not fooled by her casual tone. A twinge of disdain crosses his face. “You mean, you could never kill anything with a name.” ___ In the evening the fields turn leaden gray like the skin of her parents. Like her mother with her fingers that will soon be the same size as her cigarettes. Like her father dying sunk full of morphine, painkiller rushing silver through his veins, hospital walls closing in around him like an artificial womb. They stop by the edge of the forest. The wheat is as tall as it will ever be. David is by her side, the cool pale of his eyes reflecting the sky. There aren’t any deer here, just a neighbor’s cat, not even thirty feet away. “See her?” Julia asks. She is the one holding the rifle.“Yes.”The cat doesn’t notice them. Her name is Luna, Julia remembers. Luna or Lulu, something like that. Her tabby pattern blends in with her surroundings, melts her into them like a stripe of paint blurring into a stone-colored background. She slinks through the wheat thinking herself unseen. “Lulu,” David whispers, soft as a thought. Soon she will disappear into the woods. Only a few more steps until she’s in; only a few more seconds left for Julia to make a shot. “Your turn,” David says.The feeling of her own heart beating is what makes her raise the rifle to her shoulder. She aims, stares down the barrel. She thinks about how they both have hearts, her and David, her and Lulu, her and all the things she’s killed. How everything with a heart is fair game. The trigger like a bone under her finger, and then the crack, the nothingness blossoming outward from a central point.The two of them stand motionless in the algal gloom, in the murky raucous dark. David smiles. And although it’s ostensibly an expression of openness, of transparency and warmth, something about it makes her think of a trap twisting shut.

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