Amber Light

The room is unfamiliar. I don’t know how I got here.

The floor is like hot coals on my blistering fingers. My breath is labored, becoming viciously apparent to me as the oxygen floods my lungs and so does the pain. Like sharp, metallic teeth, the agony bites down hard on every inch of my quaking limbs—and yet slowly, I lift my trembling and triumphant head.

Staring back at me is a young woman. Her pale skin is cracking, dry, and caked with dirt or ash. Her mousy hair is stringy and hanging in her face. The strands billow as her breath exhausts sharply.

It takes me a good few seconds to realize that girl is me.

I bark out a laugh. Good God! I certainly hadn’t looked like this fucking disaster last time I laid eyes on my reflection.

But the smile trembles to a tight-lipped, pinching scowl. The ground beneath me is still hot. The walls around me still press heavy suffocation on me.

The room I’m in is on fire.

And now, sitting here as I burn, I remember—this room is not unfamiliar. I’ve lived here half my life.

And in five minutes, I’ll be dead.

The mirror in front of me cracks with the pressure of the heat. I gasp out, coughing in the thick and blistering air. Panic sets in like a hardened memory. My arms shake as I attempt to push myself from the floor, but I’m weakened beyond belief.

Instead, my head cranes upwards, and I stare at the ceiling like a manic as the flames devour the wallpaper in black curls.

“Hell,” I rasp, my body lurching as I wretch dry nothing into my palm. Blood seeps from the cracks in my lips. “I’ve been here before.” My panic and calmness is confusingly clashing. Instinct tells me to run. Memory tells me there’s no point.

But instead of quieting my hysteric delusions, the burning roof above me tears away wallpaper curls to reveal a Face.

He’s not quite human. He’s not quite creature.

I’m burning alive, and all I can do is turn my head like a dial. All I can do is stare.

You have, indeed, been here before, He says, his lips and eyes scrutinizing details that occur in the orange embers of bleeding flames. Now tell me, Amber Sloane… who set your room aflame the night you died?

My throat empties what little was left. A hot, dry exhale. It feels like I’m already crumbling.

“I…” I begin, my mind whirling like the unruly flames around me to find an answer. “It…”

Dread digs knives into my gut. Pointed and visceral, I’m hollowed to the bone in useless pursuit of the answer.

Because I don’t know.

“I-I don’t remember,” I rasp, my head lulling limply back to the hot ground. The rug beneath my fingers is a rugged sort of familiar. Burning now, but for years before, a fragment of the things that made up my childhood bedroom. I’m back home for the first time in years. Why?

I turn to look back at the Face, but he’s practically bursting from my caving, flaming ceiling.

A shame, he snarls, the ember teeth beneath his curling lips turning into fangs. I shudder in fear and perplexity as he reaches out a long, spiraling hand. Claws blackened and glowing pulse with the heat of embers. Flakes of debris flutter around my useless body as he reaches for my face, a blistering mess of claws, fire, and madness.

The room is unfamiliar.

I don’t know how I got here.

I’m standing in my parent’s living room. The lights are out. They usually are. There are cold candles that are everywhere—she collects the useless lot of them. It’s the first time I’ve seen them not being burned. The walls are that once-white color, now so stained you probably couldn’t tell they were once an almost-blue.

But she’s a smoker. A bum. There wouldn’t be much wondering as to how the walls got so soiled, as the smell would give it away. Vile cigs. Cheap liquor.

But I’m back anyway.

And I hardly recognize the place I used to call home.

My feet are only steady because of the firm leather boots I always wear. Maybe one of the only things that’s lasted me this long. I have a backpack, but no suitcase. This wasn’t supposed to be a long vacation.

My fingers are chilly from the winter air outside. The door gapes open behind me, a hole in the stale warmth of this broken house, but I’m scared that if I close it, I’ll be locked back here for good. Like it’s the key to self-imprisonment and I’m the fraud.

I open my mouth. Being the kind of person where what usually follows is useless nonsense, it’s aching that no words escape me now.

It’s like I’ve lost the seven years I spent escaping and I’m back in captive hands.

So I close my damn mouth, careful not to let the cold air in. I shove my hands in my pockets and venture further into the house, trying to remember my mission.

I always said it would take death to bring me back here. I just hadn’t imagined it wouldn’t be mine.

Amber, Amber. I hear her already. You’re letting the cold air in.

Let it in, I argue back in my mind. Let it burn you.

I stop in my tracks. My hands go clammy all over again, and my shaky inhale is a shudder that echoes across my entire body.

Well. There she is.

Her arm drapes over the side of the sofa chair, a limp thing that only proves to be alive by the slight twitching in her fingers as she slowly rolls a cigarette between them. The end is blunt and cold, but she’s silent. Her hair spills like gasoline over the beige leather couch, red and grey and blonde in a swirling illusion of one color.

My eyes fall on the TV behind her. It’s black. Empty.

I know she’s heard me.

But neither of us talk.

At least, not at first. But I know it’s my responsibility after all these years, so I drag my unwilling feet in their worn red boots to face her. The woman I’ve drowned my mind to try and forget.

“Hello, Mom,” I say, quietly.

Her chin lifts, her eyes not as much. Her sullen gaze is trapped on the bridge of my nose, as if she can’t quite seem to meet my gaze. A scaly huff of laughter escapes her.

“And I thought I’d never see either of my children again.”

Her voice is raspy, like her words were held up to a grater and the scraps fell out in sentences. And yet. The malice I spent years malicious towards, the pain I spent hours neglecting—it’s all the same.

Everything is the same.

That makes the anger in me curdle sour.

Mom arches a brow, her gaze falling straight ahead, as if I’m a ghost too. “You left the front door open. Cold air is getting in.”

“Matthias is dead, Mom.”

When I played this scene in my head, I thought she might cry. That a cut of emotion would bleed from her for once in our lives. But she doesn’t move. She’s as still and stale as the goddamn smell in this house.

“He’s dead,” I spit, unable to be anything but angry. “Y-you were supposed to watch him. That’s why he was still living at home. To stop him from getting hopped up on coke and to save what little was left of him. You couldn’t do that,” I almost scream. “You couldn’t save the little left of him?”

She doesn’t move, and doesn’t speak, and I have enough of this. I go to the kitchen. I turn on the light, throw my bag on the island, and shove aside the wrappers and garbage that’s accumulated.

I pace back and forth, my breathing labored.

Just so angry.

Matthias had always been a fragile kid. As his older sister, I spent plenty of my time protecting him from bullies, making late night trips to CVS to pick up the next cure to his coughing. So when he got addicted, just like everyone else in our broken family, I tried to save him. Of course I did. But he only wanted Mom’s rescue.

But she didn’t know how to catch him when he fell.

My eyes are wet with tears, but I don’t want to feel that part anymore. I spent enough time crying on the train just to get back to this awful place. I’m about to abandon the kitchen, but then he just appears there, and I don’t know what to do.

Matthias Sloane is standing in the doorway to the kitchen.

I want to scream. I want to run.

I just shatter.

“Mattie?” I choke, convulsing like a flower in a breeze. “M-Matt—”

The heat is rushing back. He holds a lighter.

“Tick, tick,” he whispers, dark tears rolling down his sunken cheeks. “Too late, Amber.”

The flame ignites.

He drops the lighter.

The Face reaches out with his Hands and he angrily shoves me to the ground.

I cry out in pain, my back hitting something cold and hard. But his Face, all twisted in embers, indistinguishable as any other, seethes ash down my throat.

Memory is so fickle… Tricky thing, he says, spitting flames that blister on my face. That’s not how it went.

My eyes are wide, but I’m back in the living room in front of mom.

It’s too familiar.

I know why I’m here.

“You couldn’t save what little is left of him?” I’m saying, the words rolling from my tongue in memory.

Because that’s what this is.

A sick memory.

Mom’s face skews, her features rippling with agony. Her cigarette falls, and for the first time, she meets my eyes.

She’s so broken. She’s so furious.

“M-Matt wanted you to come back,” she rasped, lifting her thin arm to point an accusatory finger my way. “He may have said he wanted me, but all he seemed to do was sum up what I gave him as something of yours. So curse on me for being the world’s shittiest mother. But he died crying the name of the one who raised him.”

My blood boils.

I’m terrified.

“Seven years,” she croaks, blue eyes withering to slivers as her cheeks spread for a yellow-toothed smile. “You spent seven years away, thinking I was the only one who ruined his life?”

“I gave him everything,” I whisper.

“Yet you couldn’t save him either.” She scowls again. “Now you understand how it feels to be me.”

“I’m not you,” I choke, my hands shaking. “I-I didn’t know Mattie was struggling so badly—no one thought to fucking call me every once and a while! I ran for my own sake, I ran from this infested—”

“Well, you ran in a goddamn circle!” she screeches out, seething through her teeth. “You’re back again! And you missed it, Amber. You didn’t save him. Neither of us did. Guess who’s the bad guy?”

“I didn’t kill him,” I force out, a heavy deadweight that falls at my feet.

“No,” Mom rasps, hatred leaking in the veins of her voice like poison. “You let him die.”

I turn, running from the room. The walls are becoming dizzy around me. My anger is rattling me.

The stairs are narrow and the wood floors are slippery. I almost fall running to our room, where our two beds must be. We grew up sharing. All I want is to share with him now.

The room smells like smoke. Mom has a candle burning in his remembrance. It’s orange and melty, sitting on a china plate above his bed. The window is cracked to let the smoke escape, but I still cough on the thick fumes.

Tears are melting down my face like wax droplets, but I still cradle the hot glass of the candle in my shaking hands, hoping, hating, crying.

Mom and her stupid candles, I think, sobbing. Mattie would hate this damn candle.

I didn’t remember dropping it.

But somewhere in my misery, the glass shatters on the floor, and the flame is not killed. It devours. And I watch it do so.

I’m staring into the flames as they make a mirror of my pain.

Who set your room aflame the night you died?

The prophecy of this memory is occurring. It’s now.

It’s me.

My knees buckle, narrowing avoiding smashing into glass. But that’s hardly my biggest triumph as the flames crawl, closer, hungry, and I do nothing but wait to be eaten.

And this is it.

This is how I died.

Breathing raggedly in the dense smoke, my fingers curled numbly onto the existence of nothing as my room crumbles into ash.

Looking into my reflection that sits destroyed like me in a mirror across the room.

It shatters.

The room is unfamiliar.

But I know why I’m here.

The floor is cool to the touch. Metallic.

My eyelids crack open, and the whole of me is thawing, as if I’ve been preserved for hundreds of years in ice.

He sits right in front of me. The Body for the Face.

His claws tilts my chin, and I stare at that mess—as if a thousand horrible faces had become one and stood in front of me.

Now that you remember your fate, he says, simply, as if dying was simple and remembering was too. You can be judged for what comes next.

I want to argue, but I’m numb. I want to question him—but I know.

“By who?” I barely manage to spare.

By the monsters you killed and the monster you are.

His Face warps into a lesser kind thing.

My mother. Her lips curl into a smile.