AMBER

If his father had access to the internet in 1929 he would have seen that Amber was trending towards being a girl’s name. To him, it was less of color and more of a feeling. It was his sister’s hearth outside of Lancaster, PA and it mother-in-law’s kitchen in the exurbs of Wilmington. It wasn’t what he had in the brick square that held his family’s stuff. He’d set off to build a family, but so far it just felt like four walls and a few heartbeats. Amber would change all of that, he’d light up the walls of the cave.

Amber also had a feeling. It wasn’t so much warm as bright and hot and red and it was sticking right into his back shoulder as he stared up at the sky.

He’d grown up with a girl’s name in the midst of a World War. Reading was for girls, sitting on Dad’s lap was for girls, behaving was for girls. He graduated from ‘golly-gee’ straight to ‘shit’ bypassing ‘damn’ altogether. He would eventually join the Navy looking to fire off some weaponry and take it to the Japs, but first he’d climb. He knew that the could out climb the jeers, the “sissies” and the incessant “Amber is a girl” chants. So he’d pick the biggest tree and the biggest kid in the neighborhood and start heading up. He wasn’t fearless. His hands would pick up sap, bark and dirt because they were soaking wet with his nerves. He just had more to prove. His trick was always climbing just ahead of the other boys and getting to a point where the tree would start to gently sway. If he could reach it to that point he could control the movements and stop the other kids in their ascent. 

Next was the Navy where swearing, climbing, drinking and forearms tattoo were just the passport stamps on the roundtrip you got from the Pacific. While onshore on some dank, mosquito-infested, postcard looking island, Amber mastered the palm tree climb, which was really different than the beech, ash and basswood trees of his youth. Here the challenge was greater, you had to use your entire force against the tree and shimmy you way up, but instead of respect, you won camaraderie and fruit. No one cared or knew about Amber’s name here, it was his last name people called when he’d drop coconuts down to the beach. Trees were a way to make friends, not respect.

Amber came home, like they all did. And like everyone else who came, he knew how to sleep through a storm and had an esoteric skill that would only be relevant if someone was hiring to man a battleship. While his wife headed into operating rooms, scrubbed up and handed the Doctor tools and syringes, Amber started climbing and cutting. His operating theatre wasn’t sterilized, but he liked it that way. It was full of beetles and bark. He couldn’t tell you the difference between cholesterol and calories, but he learned about the emerald bark borer and mountain pine Beetle. He knew the right spot in an elm to cut in a dry year and the telltale signs of eastern ash moths and how to get ahead of an infestation. He kept climbing. 

Staring a bright blue June sky, in the shade of a Linden tree, that red-hot color pulsing through his back faded to amber, until it faded finally to gray.

‘Amber’ a short story | Sean Poole