Green in Amber
By E. H. Warrington
July 15, 2023
July 15, 2023
Maybe she’s dead. Our philosophy professor never talks about his wife, but the wedding ring’s there.
He paints a picture for us of Einstein in a classroom smudged with chalk. He tells his students that space has no absolute value. You’re never where you were three seconds ago. You’ll never again be where you are right now.
I remember the looks on the kids’ faces. “You mean, I’m nowhere?”
The professor leans back into the lip of the chalkboard. He’s a 1960’s draft dodger who never returned home, an ex-pat Californian with an accent and ginger hair. Dust draws white stipples on the navy-blue corduroy of his pants: a constellation of stars, on his ass.
“Yep.”
Teddy calls me, asks me what I’ve been up to. I tell him I’m stuck in the hallway because there’s a wasp in my room. I’m afraid of getting stung.
“I’ve got a story for you,” he says. Teddy is full of stories. “There was this hideous bug crawling around on my things in the car and it was really gross. I would have just killed it, but it had these enormous pinchers and wings. Some kind of flying ant thing. I was doing something with rubber cement, and I dropped a glob on him. I let him dry a little and then took him out of the car and stuck him to the wall. He’s still there, on the garage wall… in a glob of goo. Immortalized.” I imagine him touching the gold bit of hair right above his ear.
“I was thinking,” he says, his voice casual. My chest tightens. “I’m going up to the cabin for the weekend… wanna come?”
His mother, Carol, brings Sherman. He’s a none-too-bright Rottweiler-Lab cross. She steadfastly insists he’s part Boxer. He’s not. Before Sherman, the family had a real Boxer. Not too much in the way of cerebral accomplishment but adored by everyone in the family. When she passed, Carol tried to replace her with Sherman, but Sherman loves only her. Case in point, when her husband leaves town on business, Sherman sleeps on his side of the bed, with his ass on his pillow, just to prove a point.
“It’s impossible to look at him,” Teddy says one day while explaining his father’s complicated relationship with the canine. “I used to be able to look at him. Back when he had his balls. But not now.” I don’t have the heart to ask whether he’s referring to the dog or his father.
Carol’s friend, Katy, owns the cabin, and the property. Teddy confesses on the way up that he wishes his father had married her, instead of his mother. Both Katy and Teddy’s dad used to be professional drivers. Now his father owns a fleet of dump trucks contracted by the city and he cheats on his wife. Carol responds with violence: she throws dishware. But not at her husband. Teddy received a black eye as a child. He got a coffee mug in the face.
I tell him about the man I sometimes imagine my mother could have loved better than my father: a small man with a gap between his two front teeth and thick glasses. Do all children have imaginary parents, the illusory would-have-beens of their parents’ lives? Or is it just us? I don’t ask Teddy.
He tells me Katy was on vacation when she totaled her minivan driving into a moose. It was like a wall. The entire front end of the van crunched like an accordion. He smashes his hands together when he tells me. He lives it.
In the possibility of these shadow-pasts we bond over memories we don’t have.
We’re doing dishes together, Katy and I, in her cabin. I watch Teddy out the window. He’s on his back beneath the car, trying to reassemble the muffler. The woodland sunlight, so thick it tastes like gold, lights the white of his T-shirt flat against his stomach. I imagine the gold hairs on the musculature of his arms. The muffler fell off when we hit a dip on the direct access road, and he’s got only duct tape and what looks like a wrench. MacGyver.
Katy watches him, too. And I think, for a fleeting moment, maybe our would-be parents are the ones who see us the way we want to be seen. But then she says, “He’s a good kid.” It’s not a compliment, not something you say to someone’s girlfriend. Because I’m not. Does she know? That he hasn’t? That we haven’t? Do they all know?
I look back at the car and he’s standing now, swearing at it.
Kathy says, “You’re welcome to come back here anytime. Even if things don’t… even… by yourself.”
My face burns.
In memory, I see his hands on the steering wheel, crumpled jeans. The car rumbles, a vibration foundational to conversation, floating before sucking us into the earth, turning us to liquid. He looks at me, across a tabletop in restaurant lighting, vivid blue eyes between gold lashes, his hair like silver-dust. He’s nervous, he restrains a laugh, honey, the wind against fevered skin. I call him on the phone, and he says, breathless, “I’ll be there with bells on.”
I cannot come here by myself. Not ever.
“Sure,” I respond.
The outhouse walls are made of stolen road signs. I try not to look too closely at the spiders hanging in their corners. I squat over the toilet seat. Cool air and the subtle scent of urine burns my nose as I tell myself to breathe, close my eyes and count backwards from ten.
Once I’ve peed, I go to open the door when there’s a noise.
The main cabin sits across a clearing. Not within shouting distance. There are cougars out here. And bears.
It’s a scuffling, a rustle of brush. It could be anything, anything large. Visions of having my head crunched, or my face mauled, flash and my body goes liquid loose, filled with white.
My heart races and I try to decide what to do, adrenaline making my legs weak. But I am my father’s daughter. I didn’t go camping every summer of my life to be murdered on my first overnight with a boy.
I slam my foot on the hollow boards of the outhouse as hard as I can and smack the door open.
There’s a panicked flurry of movement.
I’m prepared to retreat, my hand fast around the handle to pull it shut.
It’s Sherman.
The hideous Rottweiler stands in the middle of the trail, looking over his shoulder in case whatever I’m scared of creeps up on him in the dark.
When he realizes there is no implacable enemy, his rear end starts gyrating in pleasure and he bolts towards me.
I grimace, holding his heavy slobbery head away from me.
It’s impossible to be angry with him as he trots back to the cabin in front of me, his ridiculous little nub of a tail wiggling from side to side. Beneath the nub: an empty space between his legs where his balls used to be.
The first night there, it’s dark. It’s ink, cold, and we are alone, our breaths like hallows. The coolness sucks at my skin. His car door sounds loud, the creak of leather as he digs his knee into it.
Though I can’t see them, I know the trees reach with their withes, their encompassing thickness and the black of their needles, their fronds, like a flickering faint in corner of your eye. It’s quiet. Nothing moves. We’re the only two people here and we breathe quietly and laugh loudly because we know there are things in the woods. I feel like a kid, like we’re playing a game.
He pulls a watch from the car to show me, the one he got in the States, a seven-hundred-and-fifty-dollar Seiko. It came with a leather box he didn’t want to give up, but you can’t sneak a watch and a box across the border. He ripped apart his father’s Peugeot and put the box on top of the gas tank. All that work to avoid paying a thirty-dollar duty fee. He shows it to me like it’s a treasure, like he found it at the bottom of the sea. He hands it to me in the dark. It’s warm in my hand from his skin. The closest we’ve been, physically.
When we get inside the cabin, it’s freezing. The old light fixture highlights grooves in the used mattress, and the musky smell of untouched armchairs and abandoned magazines permeates the room.
Teddy takes the Seiko back and plunks it on the table, like it’s a witness to this, to our first night away together. The clank is loud, and I jump.
He walks past me, toward the wall, and throws open a set of tall cupboards.
This is the moment we have both been waiting for, the moment I know he’s been dreading, but not why. Why won’t he touch me?
It’s a Murphy bed.
It’s loud as it hits the floor.
There are two mattresses now.
Two beds.
I pretend to feel nothing. Pretend. I press my knee into the corner of the bed, listening to it squeak while I look anywhere but at him.
Teddy goes out into the dark and leaves me alone, the slam of the screen door loud.
We’re playing house. It’s supposed to feel good to pretend.
It’s killing me.
I take my eyeglass spray and clean his watch for him. It’s thick metal warms in my touch. I put the watch back exactly as he left it on the table.
Stolen intimacy tastes like a tarnished spoon.
The heat lamp melts my chair leg, leaving a puckered red welt next to the white of my calf muscle. The cat lays against my bare legs as I dig my hands into her hot belly fur.
Teddy sprawls on the couch, the tops of his boxers just visible above his jeans, an arm thrown up over his hair like a child. He’s just finished explaining torque converters, how they’re like snails’ shells full of liquid. They translate movement across mechanisms.
I tell him about my aunt, Vera, my father’s brother’s wife. She’s categorically a little person because she’s so short. She’s from Malta. Because this is what we do. We tell stories.
“She smokes,” I explain. “And she’s allergic to pine trees. So, she didn’t come to Christmas—and my family always has this big Christmas thing, every year—my dad’s side is French Catholic, so you’ve got like seven kids and they all have kids and it’s a whole thing—anyway, my aunt Vera doesn’t come, because my Aunt and Uncle had a Christmas tree. So, she comes to New Year’s and they’ve removed the tree, but it had been in the dinning room, originally. The moment she walks in, and I shit you not, she grabs her neck, and says, ‘is this where you had it? Is this where you kept the tree?’ She starts wandering around the room, clawing her little chicken neck, going, ‘I can feel it. I can feel my throat closing. The doctors told me: one more attack and I’m dead.’”
Teddy sucks his lips in, trying not to laugh.
“That’s horrible. You’re horrible.”
We both know it’s a gauntlet.
He clears his throat. Challenge accepted. I watch his jaw tighten. “My friend has this cat. It’s like a… it got hit by a car and it now has really stiff front legs, like some kind of Franken-feline. It behaves like a dog now. It licks people and is all nice and sycophantic with strangers.”
The words come out of my mouth before I can stop them: “Is that why people think cats are smarter than dogs? Because they don’t want love?”
His hand closes above his head, a reflex, and he rights himself, sitting up.
That dawn, that first morning, birds sing, their voices echoing in convalescent crescents, rounded strings of melody. I live there forever when that red sunlight races through the treetops, lighting the hilltops like fire.
There are no absolutes in space, in time.
Teddy and I sit on the porch swing, watching the hummingbirds. They sound like toy race cars as they light on the electrical wires, lancers of the air, buzzing near our heads. We rock, gently, in concert.
The ghost of a tree can kill you.
In the future, I dream dreams that are filled with the brightest of colors, colors so vibrant I can taste them in my mouth, alive on my tongue, emerald-green sour candy. I wake up and for a second, for the moment it takes the veil of my eyelashes to clear, I can taste him, taste him still, taste his color, with my eyes.
In the dawn, after sleeping in separate beds, he’s standing there, at the end of my mattress, placing my slippers on the floor. He's there in the grey shadows of dawn, standing with his shoulders curled in the cold, shivering in his boxers, and smiling at me when I meet his eyes. He’s braved the uninsulated plywood floor in his bare feet, so I don’t have to.
“Were you cold?”
His eyes, lake-blue, meet mine.
I shake my head and smile. And I lie. “No.”
We drove up in the dark, only the pool of the headlights against black and green to guide us, the little stippling sound of rocks bouncing off the bottom of the car, the crunch of tires on gravel.
A part of me lives in that cabin, on that morning, forever in green, because years later, I understand something I didn’t then: we can’t choose who we want; we can choose who we take with us.
Intimacy is the sound of a hummingbird, and the heaviness of a watch.
He paints a picture for us of Einstein in a classroom smudged with chalk. He tells his students that space has no absolute value. You’re never where you were three seconds ago. You’ll never again be where you are right now.
I remember the looks on the kids’ faces. “You mean, I’m nowhere?”
The professor leans back into the lip of the chalkboard. He’s a 1960’s draft dodger who never returned home, an ex-pat Californian with an accent and ginger hair. Dust draws white stipples on the navy-blue corduroy of his pants: a constellation of stars, on his ass.
“Yep.”
Teddy calls me, asks me what I’ve been up to. I tell him I’m stuck in the hallway because there’s a wasp in my room. I’m afraid of getting stung.
“I’ve got a story for you,” he says. Teddy is full of stories. “There was this hideous bug crawling around on my things in the car and it was really gross. I would have just killed it, but it had these enormous pinchers and wings. Some kind of flying ant thing. I was doing something with rubber cement, and I dropped a glob on him. I let him dry a little and then took him out of the car and stuck him to the wall. He’s still there, on the garage wall… in a glob of goo. Immortalized.” I imagine him touching the gold bit of hair right above his ear.
“I was thinking,” he says, his voice casual. My chest tightens. “I’m going up to the cabin for the weekend… wanna come?”
His mother, Carol, brings Sherman. He’s a none-too-bright Rottweiler-Lab cross. She steadfastly insists he’s part Boxer. He’s not. Before Sherman, the family had a real Boxer. Not too much in the way of cerebral accomplishment but adored by everyone in the family. When she passed, Carol tried to replace her with Sherman, but Sherman loves only her. Case in point, when her husband leaves town on business, Sherman sleeps on his side of the bed, with his ass on his pillow, just to prove a point.
“It’s impossible to look at him,” Teddy says one day while explaining his father’s complicated relationship with the canine. “I used to be able to look at him. Back when he had his balls. But not now.” I don’t have the heart to ask whether he’s referring to the dog or his father.
Carol’s friend, Katy, owns the cabin, and the property. Teddy confesses on the way up that he wishes his father had married her, instead of his mother. Both Katy and Teddy’s dad used to be professional drivers. Now his father owns a fleet of dump trucks contracted by the city and he cheats on his wife. Carol responds with violence: she throws dishware. But not at her husband. Teddy received a black eye as a child. He got a coffee mug in the face.
I tell him about the man I sometimes imagine my mother could have loved better than my father: a small man with a gap between his two front teeth and thick glasses. Do all children have imaginary parents, the illusory would-have-beens of their parents’ lives? Or is it just us? I don’t ask Teddy.
He tells me Katy was on vacation when she totaled her minivan driving into a moose. It was like a wall. The entire front end of the van crunched like an accordion. He smashes his hands together when he tells me. He lives it.
In the possibility of these shadow-pasts we bond over memories we don’t have.
We’re doing dishes together, Katy and I, in her cabin. I watch Teddy out the window. He’s on his back beneath the car, trying to reassemble the muffler. The woodland sunlight, so thick it tastes like gold, lights the white of his T-shirt flat against his stomach. I imagine the gold hairs on the musculature of his arms. The muffler fell off when we hit a dip on the direct access road, and he’s got only duct tape and what looks like a wrench. MacGyver.
Katy watches him, too. And I think, for a fleeting moment, maybe our would-be parents are the ones who see us the way we want to be seen. But then she says, “He’s a good kid.” It’s not a compliment, not something you say to someone’s girlfriend. Because I’m not. Does she know? That he hasn’t? That we haven’t? Do they all know?
I look back at the car and he’s standing now, swearing at it.
Kathy says, “You’re welcome to come back here anytime. Even if things don’t… even… by yourself.”
My face burns.
In memory, I see his hands on the steering wheel, crumpled jeans. The car rumbles, a vibration foundational to conversation, floating before sucking us into the earth, turning us to liquid. He looks at me, across a tabletop in restaurant lighting, vivid blue eyes between gold lashes, his hair like silver-dust. He’s nervous, he restrains a laugh, honey, the wind against fevered skin. I call him on the phone, and he says, breathless, “I’ll be there with bells on.”
I cannot come here by myself. Not ever.
“Sure,” I respond.
The outhouse walls are made of stolen road signs. I try not to look too closely at the spiders hanging in their corners. I squat over the toilet seat. Cool air and the subtle scent of urine burns my nose as I tell myself to breathe, close my eyes and count backwards from ten.
Once I’ve peed, I go to open the door when there’s a noise.
The main cabin sits across a clearing. Not within shouting distance. There are cougars out here. And bears.
It’s a scuffling, a rustle of brush. It could be anything, anything large. Visions of having my head crunched, or my face mauled, flash and my body goes liquid loose, filled with white.
My heart races and I try to decide what to do, adrenaline making my legs weak. But I am my father’s daughter. I didn’t go camping every summer of my life to be murdered on my first overnight with a boy.
I slam my foot on the hollow boards of the outhouse as hard as I can and smack the door open.
There’s a panicked flurry of movement.
I’m prepared to retreat, my hand fast around the handle to pull it shut.
It’s Sherman.
The hideous Rottweiler stands in the middle of the trail, looking over his shoulder in case whatever I’m scared of creeps up on him in the dark.
When he realizes there is no implacable enemy, his rear end starts gyrating in pleasure and he bolts towards me.
I grimace, holding his heavy slobbery head away from me.
It’s impossible to be angry with him as he trots back to the cabin in front of me, his ridiculous little nub of a tail wiggling from side to side. Beneath the nub: an empty space between his legs where his balls used to be.
The first night there, it’s dark. It’s ink, cold, and we are alone, our breaths like hallows. The coolness sucks at my skin. His car door sounds loud, the creak of leather as he digs his knee into it.
Though I can’t see them, I know the trees reach with their withes, their encompassing thickness and the black of their needles, their fronds, like a flickering faint in corner of your eye. It’s quiet. Nothing moves. We’re the only two people here and we breathe quietly and laugh loudly because we know there are things in the woods. I feel like a kid, like we’re playing a game.
He pulls a watch from the car to show me, the one he got in the States, a seven-hundred-and-fifty-dollar Seiko. It came with a leather box he didn’t want to give up, but you can’t sneak a watch and a box across the border. He ripped apart his father’s Peugeot and put the box on top of the gas tank. All that work to avoid paying a thirty-dollar duty fee. He shows it to me like it’s a treasure, like he found it at the bottom of the sea. He hands it to me in the dark. It’s warm in my hand from his skin. The closest we’ve been, physically.
When we get inside the cabin, it’s freezing. The old light fixture highlights grooves in the used mattress, and the musky smell of untouched armchairs and abandoned magazines permeates the room.
Teddy takes the Seiko back and plunks it on the table, like it’s a witness to this, to our first night away together. The clank is loud, and I jump.
He walks past me, toward the wall, and throws open a set of tall cupboards.
This is the moment we have both been waiting for, the moment I know he’s been dreading, but not why. Why won’t he touch me?
It’s a Murphy bed.
It’s loud as it hits the floor.
There are two mattresses now.
Two beds.
I pretend to feel nothing. Pretend. I press my knee into the corner of the bed, listening to it squeak while I look anywhere but at him.
Teddy goes out into the dark and leaves me alone, the slam of the screen door loud.
We’re playing house. It’s supposed to feel good to pretend.
It’s killing me.
I take my eyeglass spray and clean his watch for him. It’s thick metal warms in my touch. I put the watch back exactly as he left it on the table.
Stolen intimacy tastes like a tarnished spoon.
The heat lamp melts my chair leg, leaving a puckered red welt next to the white of my calf muscle. The cat lays against my bare legs as I dig my hands into her hot belly fur.
Teddy sprawls on the couch, the tops of his boxers just visible above his jeans, an arm thrown up over his hair like a child. He’s just finished explaining torque converters, how they’re like snails’ shells full of liquid. They translate movement across mechanisms.
I tell him about my aunt, Vera, my father’s brother’s wife. She’s categorically a little person because she’s so short. She’s from Malta. Because this is what we do. We tell stories.
“She smokes,” I explain. “And she’s allergic to pine trees. So, she didn’t come to Christmas—and my family always has this big Christmas thing, every year—my dad’s side is French Catholic, so you’ve got like seven kids and they all have kids and it’s a whole thing—anyway, my aunt Vera doesn’t come, because my Aunt and Uncle had a Christmas tree. So, she comes to New Year’s and they’ve removed the tree, but it had been in the dinning room, originally. The moment she walks in, and I shit you not, she grabs her neck, and says, ‘is this where you had it? Is this where you kept the tree?’ She starts wandering around the room, clawing her little chicken neck, going, ‘I can feel it. I can feel my throat closing. The doctors told me: one more attack and I’m dead.’”
Teddy sucks his lips in, trying not to laugh.
“That’s horrible. You’re horrible.”
We both know it’s a gauntlet.
He clears his throat. Challenge accepted. I watch his jaw tighten. “My friend has this cat. It’s like a… it got hit by a car and it now has really stiff front legs, like some kind of Franken-feline. It behaves like a dog now. It licks people and is all nice and sycophantic with strangers.”
The words come out of my mouth before I can stop them: “Is that why people think cats are smarter than dogs? Because they don’t want love?”
His hand closes above his head, a reflex, and he rights himself, sitting up.
That dawn, that first morning, birds sing, their voices echoing in convalescent crescents, rounded strings of melody. I live there forever when that red sunlight races through the treetops, lighting the hilltops like fire.
There are no absolutes in space, in time.
Teddy and I sit on the porch swing, watching the hummingbirds. They sound like toy race cars as they light on the electrical wires, lancers of the air, buzzing near our heads. We rock, gently, in concert.
The ghost of a tree can kill you.
In the future, I dream dreams that are filled with the brightest of colors, colors so vibrant I can taste them in my mouth, alive on my tongue, emerald-green sour candy. I wake up and for a second, for the moment it takes the veil of my eyelashes to clear, I can taste him, taste him still, taste his color, with my eyes.
In the dawn, after sleeping in separate beds, he’s standing there, at the end of my mattress, placing my slippers on the floor. He's there in the grey shadows of dawn, standing with his shoulders curled in the cold, shivering in his boxers, and smiling at me when I meet his eyes. He’s braved the uninsulated plywood floor in his bare feet, so I don’t have to.
“Were you cold?”
His eyes, lake-blue, meet mine.
I shake my head and smile. And I lie. “No.”
We drove up in the dark, only the pool of the headlights against black and green to guide us, the little stippling sound of rocks bouncing off the bottom of the car, the crunch of tires on gravel.
A part of me lives in that cabin, on that morning, forever in green, because years later, I understand something I didn’t then: we can’t choose who we want; we can choose who we take with us.
Intimacy is the sound of a hummingbird, and the heaviness of a watch.
E. H. Warrington’s writing has recently appeared in Writer Shed Press and Black Scat Books. In her life beyond the page, Warrington shares her love of literature with her students. She resides with her husband, her daughter, her cat, and her fish, in beautiful British Columbia.