The box is heart-shaped, but barely, like an afterthought. It’s got a plum-colored surface decorated with tiny dots: pinpricks imitating stars. The top comes off easily and there they are—all the items she has saved from relationship after relationship. All the train tickets and club wristbands and stray buttons she’s collected over the years like some kind of deranged magpie.
There’s Ted’s hospital visitor badge (the whole thing was a big fat whoopsie, the tech misread a dark spot on the ultrasound and thought her stomach cramps were internal bleeding, can happen to anyone, anyway here’s your $1,400 bill for the ambulance ride). His features are gray fuzz in the picture but still handsome, and while she sweated and tore at her fingernails in that hospital bed, he was calm, so enviously calm. Even when he broke up with her, months later, he was still calm. Eyebrows barely raised, face smooth as undisturbed water.
There’s the strap of Greg’s watch, prized Italian leather, the one he was wearing the second time he cheated on her. The first time she only cried, but the second time—after he came back at two in the morning with dopey eyes and a giddy grin—she cut it up with kitchen scissors and kept the pieces.
There’s the 3D rendering of how she would look with the implants Ricky kept suggesting, printed out and carefully folded so the creases didn’t ruin the images. Two little sacks of fat and breast tissue filled up with silicone, only eight thousand dollars to repair whatever had gone wrong in her genetics and development. It was at that consultation that she learned she had a deformity. The surgeon scribbled type 2 hypoplasia and tuberous breasts on the printout. “Tuberous?” she asked. “Like potatoes?” “Yup,” said Dr. Cangello. She went home with her deformed little potato breasts and before she could decide to take the leap, Ricky had already moved on to F-cup Andrea.
There’s the x-ray of the nail she swallowed. Its slim white arrow, surprisingly solid against the ghostly shapes of her bones. All the ER people, the concerned social worker, and the puzzled technician, she told them that she must have done it in her sleep. But maybe she hadn’t. Maybe she had wanted to see some evidence of the hurt inside her: a tangible souvenir, not a scar or a shadow but something solid, something that could pierce her guts, could bleed her out if only given the chance.
AMY DeBELLIS is a writer from New York. Her writing has appeared in various publications including X-R-A-Y, Pithead Chapel, HAD, Write or Die, Ghost Parachute, and The Pinch. Her debut novel is forthcoming from CLASH Books (2025). Read more at amydebellis.com
