Now

On my walk I pass underneath a tree, and hanging from the branches, about twenty feet up, is a pair of shoes. It occurs to me that they look similar to a pair of my husband’s. Even in the dim light, I can make out their off-white shade and thin soles and navy stripes on the sides.

And now I start imagining that my husband has been killed and his sneakers hung up as a trophy. They look heavy, as though with blood. They don’t move in the wind that passes through the branches.

I ask myself how I feel, considering this possibility. I don’t feel grief or dread or fear. Instead, the word that comes to mind is empty.

All around me the sullen yellow light of the streetlamps. Below me the voiceless dirt path. Above the shoes, above the trees, the sky is violent with stars.

I come home to find my husband sitting on the couch, typing at his laptop. He still feels like he might be dead in some way, so I name his features in my head to bring him back to me. Here is your narrow nose. Here are your serious lips. Here is your stubbled jaw. I list the intricacies of his face until he turns to look at me and I feel the hollow of his gaze pushing at something inside my chest. Somehow the holes of his eyes erase and scribble over every other part of his appearance. He smiles but the smile is a mask and his eyes stay holes.

*

On Halloween we both wear Venetian carnival masks: mine speckled blue like the skin of some imaginary creature, his white and covered with gold stripes. We dance and drink, our eyes peeping from behind the masks like stars. My husband takes pictures of us and in each picture his eyes look different, as though someone else is switching places with him behind the mask whenever I turn my back.

When we get home I ask him to take his mask off. He hesitates, his shadow slicing blade-sharp through the white light of the hallway. Then he does, placing it facedown on the kitchen table. I look into the dark pits of his eyes; I tell him to continue.

He doesn’t get it, or pretends not to, but I kneel in front of him and bring him down to the floor too—my fingers laced through his, the gentlest touch exerting the most power over him. I reach forward and bring my hands to his face: my thumbs pressing at the outer corners of his eyes, my other fingers curling just before his hairline. I sink my fingers in deeper, and when I pull them back, his skin separates from what’s beneath. His face peels off in my hands, cooling as it does, and when it hits the floor it’s just plastic.

Without the mask, my husband looks the same. Except for his eyes. His eyes are just a bit bigger, and a bit darker, than before.

My throat feels like a dusty road. I ask, “Is there another layer under that one?”

He shrugs. He’s probably forgotten, I realize with a little shiver of disgust. He’s been masked for so long he can’t even remember how many he has.

So I reach forward and grasp his face, which turns into the edges of the next mask, and I pull. Again his face peels off, turning from flesh to plastic as it falls to the floor. Again he is much the same. The same face. Except: larger eyes, eyes more and more like holes.

I do it another time. And another. And another.

His eyes are huge now, large enough that I could put my fists through them. I feel a kind of gravity pulling at me from their depths.

“How far down does it go?” I ask him. My voice trembles like television static. “If you’re pretending not to know, stop pretending.”

He is so good at pretending.

He smiles, and it’s like no smile I’ve ever seen—not from him, not from anyone. It stretches all the way across his face like another hole. When he speaks, his voice reminds me of the recordings I’ve heard from outer space. Distant, silvery, burnt. “It goes down forever.”

“That’s impossible.” I reach forward again and again, peeling the masks of my husband’s face off one after the next, and even when his eyes melt into each other and form one massive hole, and even later, when there is no face left at all, just a face-shaped darkness, I refuse to give in, some part of me certain that my real husband is still inside there somewhere, even though the other part of me realizes that he never was, and the blackness goes down further than I can imagine, and in this night there are no stars.

__________

Amy DeBellis is the author of the novel ALL OUR TOMORROWS (CLASH Books, 2025) and the novella THE WIDENING GYRE (Lanternfish Press, 2026). Her stories appear in X-R-A-Y, Uncharted, Write or Die, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and elsewhere. Her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. Read more at amydebellis.com.