The Other

You forget that you’ve made her the background of your phone until someone asks, Who’s that? When you lie and say My girlfriend, the word rolls around in your mouth, unwieldy in its rotundity, curling up under your tongue like a little worm. You hate bars but you’ll take any excuse to leave your apartment these days, your apartment and the man there who has removed parts of you plank by plank, copy-pasting in fragments of porn and centerfolds and exclusive subscribers-only-content until you no longer recognize yourself. He has left only your name and the hollow behind it. But when you look at the woman on your phone, when you zoom in on her nose and freckles and hairline, you feel the empty space inside you filling up. When the man in your apartment fucks you, you almost say her name into the hollow of his shoulder, the word shuddering into silence. It makes sense, then, that when you finally see her in person, in a noisy bar on Greene Street, you don’t recognize her. Time has turned everything fractured and prismatic, the mirror behind the bar holding no reflection, the music dark water lapping at your ears.

Amy DeBellis is a writer from New York. Her debut novel is forthcoming from CLASH Books (2024). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including The Shore, Pithead Chapel, Maudlin House, Luna Luna Magazine, and Anti-Heroin Chic.

A Song for Amy