The Amber Night
by Jack Barker-Clark
Once I overwrote evening. I banished opaque light. I’d been opening spreadsheets like Q3_Flash_86d552aa-4009-aa2f-3b0c20197752_revised(6) all afternoon and my eyes had absorbed all the hatred. I drew the curtains at six and sat in the rocking chair we’d argued over, a bruised shadow, while the luminous street lamp worked on penetrating the curtains, and car lights put strobes across our ceiling.
Soon there were fireworks, detonating in the field by our house; I wondered where we were on the calendar, and was forced to let in a wedge or two of amber light, a small splash to sate my curiosity. In the night, the sheep lit up briefly under the explosions, multi-coloured, they lifted and dropped darkly into the high-definition foliage. Their faces, I thought, shone out, little volto masks.
I remembered the fireworks that used to wake our boy, how all November and December we sat in dread over the baby monitor. He’d cry as the sodden explosions lit up his midnight room, indigo, yellow-gold, and we would go in to settle him. It was as if a pumpkin stirred in that nightfall cot, parallelograms of light on his orange trunk barrelling. I would rest my hand on his chest. We were so happy.
What would you do if you were chased by a snow-leopard? my wife would say, and we would imagine the ways we’d tear up the snow-leopard to protect our boy, oh the blood-stained snow, the blood-stained sledge. Trapped in an upturned carriage, then — an underwater cave, a burning skyscraper? We often tested each other’s commitments in the realms of fantasy — it was probably what broke us.
Now we piloted fantasies all our own. The fireworks sent gold motes that boated through the air and drummed on our boy’s central highchair, his throne, which appeared, as if drowned in currents of amber lake. I had been on the sofa for months, possibly years, and knew every relief, every hollow of that plastic chair. I rose now to touch it, stroked its back, its shoulder blades, and I thought of that snow-leopard. We had brought in other wild animals to outrun and conquer — bulls, panthers, a snake — but I could never get past it. We’d be torn up, eviscerated, it was so obvious, I thought now — we would so obviously be killed.
I turned on the floor lamp and flooded the room. Somewhere above, I could hear Cassandra’s bed creaking and wondered how heavily she was asleep, whether she was dreaming up more animals, more horror. The truth was that it mattered very little now — our boy had eclipsed us both, we were only a tired family held together by a little boy. But the little boy was a teenager now, had grown. There was no highchair. He was six feet tall, protected us. His throne was in the attic. I gazed around our lamplit room. I crossed the carpet, the sofa invited me. I turned in my sleeping bag. Our white plastic dining chairs were perched like egrets.
Jack Barker-Clark is a writer from the North of England. He tweets occasionally: @jackbarkerclark.
