His mother’s knees locked up and he could hear the amber in them crystalizing. Over the years, his ear honed to it. It crackled in her cartilage, growing and reaching to weave into more of her. Sink into the sinew and invest itself into the muscle tendon. It would continue to do so until she went rigid. She had told him one Tuesday in February that it was there and where it would lead and even then, he sat and stoned his face because this was the cost of having lived a life. Whether it be amber or breast cancer or a lightning strike, the bill always comes due.
“I’m fine. I’m said I’m fine! Let go of my elbow.”
When his mother was twenty-nine, she worked at a yacht basin and called in ships and fined the ones who lied about their footage. The captain said she was a firecracker. He tried to imagine her with her hair in a ponytail and her shoulders not beginning to permanently slump. Posed on the pier, her silhouette cutting against the setting Florida sun.
“I just want to make sure you’re okay.”
“Worry about yourself. You have mail sitting on the credenza if you don’t remember. I put it there, so you don’t lose it. Always losing things.”
His great aunt hovered above his mother like a storm cloud for most of her life. When she was twelve, she left Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in her aunt’s freezer before playing with her cousins in the backyard. When she came back in, her aunt sat at the kitchen table, slowly eating them.
“If they’re in my freezer, they’re mine.”
His mother tells him this story more than two-hundred and fifty-three times throughout the course of her life. Before the amber set in. She hasn’t mentioned it since. Things have been solidifying, the small details curving away and rounding out to leave a less refined, blunter edge. Her Panama Jack t-shirt, gone. All the paperbacks she read into boxes and then in the recycling. The hours and minutes on her iPhone usage tracker growing like its own infestation.
The amber begins to appear on her skin. First, it grows from her belly button around to her back in a crescent moon. Then it’s on her arms in spots. One day, she slips and lands hard on her knees, but pops right back up.
“Ma, are you alright?”
She just laughs and dusts off her pants. Then knocks on her knees. He can hear her knuckles bounce off the amber that’s taken up beneath the fabric.
“I guess it’s not all bad.”
That winter he shovels out his front sidewalk, buries it to the handle in the new pile, and plants his hands on his hips. He surveys the neighborhood, lets out a sigh, and understands that death is coming. That becoming his father who he used to watch do the same thing out their picture window when he was nine and twenty years seemed an impossible amount of time to ever pass means that he will also become what his father is now.
When his heart pounds in his chest at the realization, when the actual speed of it presses on the small of his back, he almost lets it sweep him up into the winter sky. What could be better than flying? Endless air. Everything still below you. You choose the angle of descent. Instead, he grabs the shovel handle. One day something will explode in his joints and the back stairs will become a mountain. Everything that makes him tall will turn against him and drag him back to the dirt. He keeps shoveling.
At Easter, he hears the amber scraping in his mother’s ears. It won’t be much longer. Near the end, she is three things. Semi-conscious, almost solid, and in pain. Only one bit of her face is left, and he strokes it from the hospital chair. The rest of her is amber. When it slides under his fingertips she is frozen with her face in a grimace.
When the paperwork is done and they finished smoothing her out, buffing the amber surrounding her until it shined, he sits on his couch with his now encased mother laying on the mantle.
“It’s different than if it was… I don’t know, breast cancer or something,” he says to his girlfriend. “She’s right there. Like, maybe she could open her eyes one day and come back.”
“You don’t have to keep her there, you know. A lot of people still do a normal burial.”
“Yeah, I know. Just. Not yet.”
She stays for four months. Finally, a burial service comes and takes her to the burial site.
“Will that be us?” he asks his girlfriend later that night.
“Probably.”
And it will be. Death is coming. If the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are in your freezer, they’re yours.
