An audio version of Amber Eyes read to you by the wonderful Keith Long.
The acid light of a midsummer sun etched the neighborhood in sharp edges, homes and streetlights outlined in yellow.
Sweat dripped down Howard’s back as he climbed the hill up from the grocery store, a carrier bag full of canned soup weighing down his left side and making him walk with a limp.
It was a fool’s errand, toting heavy cans this far during the hottest part of the day, then heating the house up when he turned on the burners to warm the processed sludge.
Howard was no fool, contrary to popular belief. But he was a creature of habit. He walked to the store at four every afternoon and he bought three cans of soup, one for dinner and one each for breakfast and lunch the next day.
Every day, no matter the weather, he walked. And every day, no matter what, he ate his soup.
When he opened a can, it was always with the same can opener. The one with the yellow handle. He turned the opener exactly five times. He lifted the sharp lid with his thumb, pressing just hard enough to feel it bite into his flesh, but not hard enough to draw blood.
Then he poured the chowder—corn, never clam—into the same pot, the one with the dent in it. He didn’t like to think about where that dent had come from, but he never got a new pot.
Then he’d sit down to his meal, the cream-based soup sliding down his throat like a slug. He knew what that was like because his brother had made him swallow one when Howard was eight and his brother was twelve.
On days like this that were the kind of hot that washes the world pale, he might allow himself a rotating fan, sitting on the table beside him, the slow back and forth calming in its negation.
Is this soup good? No, the fan shook its bladed head.
Am I good? No.
Should I do something about it? No.
Howard liked the fan’s consistency.
Sometimes, Howard would press his lips to the fan’s cage and sigh, relishing the way the blades chopped up his exhalation of breath.
Howard’s brother had shown him that trick. And then he’d dared him to stick his tongue in between the metal bars. Howard had tasted blood for weeks after that. Even now he’d dream about that iron tang, the remembered taste of it lighting up parts of himself he’d rather keep secret.
Howard shuddered, pushing the wrongness down deep, and kept walking. He slipped into the shade of the maple tree on the corner. The leaves hung listless, edges already curling yellow.
Howard’s pinkie fingered the third button of his shirt. He was careful not to touch the fabric itself. That was the rule. If he touched the fabric, that meant he needed to add one hundred more steps to his walk, and he didn’t feel like he had the energy for that just now.
The heat was getting to him.
When he passed the church on the next block, he listened for the children playing in the side yard, waiting for their parents to pick them up from Bible camp. He would be in their line of sight for seventy-four steps exactly. If any of them called out to him at any point during those seventy-four steps—and the chances were good, he was a strange man and the children were bored—he would knock his head against the lightpost that stood at step number thirty-six.
The children thought this was hilarious, and they would yell and scream at him. And the more they yelled and screamed, the harder he hit his head. Today he was lucky and the children were busy with some other spectacle on the other side of the playground, a dead bird from the sounds of it, and they left him alone.
He was glad not to have to disturb the yellowing bruise on his forehead from the last time he’d visited the thirty-six-step lamppost. He fought the urge to touch it. His brother wouldn’t have been able to resist pressing his fat thumb into that tender spot. It was his signature move, a way to remind you of what he’d done, what he was doing, and what was in store, all at the same time. If nothing else, his brother was clever.
Howard was almost home.
Another few blocks and he could set the carrier bag down and rub away the pain in his fingers where the plastic had cut off circulation. He didn’t dare switch hands. That’d mean he’d have to touch every doorknob in the house, which took an extra ten minutes, and he was anxious to eat.
“Lemonade?”
Howard jumped. The cans rattled in the bag. A girl, just this side of childhood still, stood in the shade of the old Johnson house.—Cross and uncross the pointer finger and middle finger of his free hand if the gate was open. It wasn’t.—She wore a tattered pair of overalls and a faded yellow shirt with a collar. Her brown hair was pulled back from her freckled face, and she stared at Howard with amber eyes.
Howard knew those eyes. Had gotten to know them well over the years until he’d finally had enough of the way they looked at him. Then he’d made sure they hadn’t looked at anything in twenty years. Seeing them again made his stomach clench and his brain freeze.
The girl gestured at the little folding table in front of her where a sweating pitcher sat. Two lemon slices floated on top, goggling at him from behind the glass.
Howard didn’t have a script for this. In all the summers he’d walked this road, he’d never once run into a lemonade stand. He cast around for something that would rescue him from the unexpectedness of it all.
“Fresh squeezed,” said the girl.
Howard wanted to keep walking, but his body demanded payment before it’d make a move.
“No—no thank you.”
The girl tilted her head. Her amber eyes narrowed.
“You sure? You look thirsty.”
The plastic handle of the carrier bag dug into Howard’s fingers. Something bad would happen if he left here without paying the toll in pain. Something terrible. Something like before. And he was still paying for that lapse all these years later.
But if he stayed—those amber eyes. He would have to close them.
The sweat ran down Howard’s back, collecting in the elastic band of his underwear. He should at least step out of the sun and into the shade of the Johnson house, but even that small movement was impossible.
“Six sips, then swallow all the ice in one gulp.”
“What?”
“That’s what you need to do.”
She smiled at him. Amber eyes could always see right through him. Always knew the best worst thing to say.
The girl pulled the top cup off a stack. She lifted the pitcher with both hands, one holding the handle, one finding purchase on the wet glass. Howard repressed a shiver. He hated seeing those perfect dew drops disturbed.
The yellow plastic of the cup gave just a bit under her fingers as she held the drink out to Howard. He took it with his free hand, brought it slowly up to his mouth. The sweet-sour tang of sugar and lemons hit him before he even took a taste.
The girl watched him. His fingers curled into the yellow cup, pushing the ice cubes against each other so they jangled. There were so many of them. He wondered if she’d done it on purpose, to make swallowing them harder.
Amber eyes always made things harder if they could. She’d wanted to see him suffer. But the thing is, he’d made friends with suffering a long time ago.
He took a sip. The dull knife of sweet citrus scraped over his tongue. He took another. His eyes never left hers. On the third sip he thought he saw something move behind her gaze. Four sips and he thought of his brother. Five sips and he tasted blood. Six sips and the world shimmered yellow.
The girl smiled. This time a dare.
Howard looked at the ice in his cup. Slippery, glistening cubes. Easier than a slug. Easier than soup.
He tipped his head back, let the ice slide in, clinking against his teeth as he opened his throat. Hard corners pressed against his soft insides for a moment, two, three, and then they were gone. It was nothing. Easy.
Challenge accepted, payment made, the concrete no longer held his feet and he could move. Howard set the empty cup down on the table.
“Take the lemons.”
The girl fished the lemon slices out from the pitcher with her fingers. Howard curled his lip at that. Amber eyes never did have manners.
He didn’t want the lemons. It was a ridiculous thing to offer. Just another test. Some other way to make Howard suffer. But these amber eyes were nothing compared to the ones he’d known before.
The girl came around the edge of the table. Howard held out his hand, but she ignored it and put the lemon slices on his face, right over his eyes. The sticky juice ran down his cheeks and into the collar of his shirt. It found every little break in his skin, the lemon astringent burning.
He wanted to reach up and swipe the slices away. To shake his head and send them flying, tiny yellow saucers in this lemon-tinged world. But the trick with amber eyes was never to show weakness, to play along, to slurp down the slug, the blood, the suffering like you couldn’t get enough.
So Howard opened his eyes, and the world was yellow.
The street was chartreuse. The rough bark of the trees ochre and their leaves a brilliant citrine. The shade of the Johnson house was a burnished brass and the sky a silken canary. Even the girl had gone gamboge.
But her eyes now were a strange pink. A pale puce. She kept smiling through saffron teeth.
“Yellow suits you.”
The juice of the lemon slices dripped into his eyes. His salty tears mixed with the sweet syrup of cold sugar, gumming up his lids. He grinned at her just to show that he agreed, that she hadn’t won, that the suffering was just fine. And then he turned and marched the rest of the way home, sweaty feet in his sunflower shoes.
At the foot of his driveway he should have swallowed three times. When he turned up his walk he should have kicked the first step once, skipped the second, danced across the third. At the door he should have knocked even if the only person at home could never answer another door. And once inside he should have turned to the hall mirror and recited all the names his brother had ever called him.
But with the lemons on his eyes he strode up the drive, jumped every step, flung open the door, dropped the bag of cans, and didn’t swallow once.
He wasn’t going to look in the mirror either, but he caught a glimpse of himself and stopped for a more thorough inspection.
The lemon slices made pinwheels of his eyes. Segmented juice sacs glistened with tumescent veins. On the right side, a single pointed seed wedged itself into the pithy center of the membrane spokes. Howard thought he felt it like a splinter to the pupil.
Lemon juice and tears leaked down his face. He lifted a finger and swiped it across his cheek, stuck it in his mouth, grinned at the taste.
Not quite amber eyes. But close. Close enough.
From the hallway he could see his kitchen, now drenched in mustard and butter. And in the kitchen was the stove and on the stove was the pot. The one for soup. The one with a dent in it.
It shone yellow chrome in the summer sun. Howard crept up on it like a living thing, grasped its handle like a tail and whipped it around. He could see himself in the reflection on its surface, succulent pinwheel lemons spinning. Howard thought about the girl with the amber eyes.
“You look thirsty,” he said to the man in the pot.
And Howard was.
He’d been trying to slake that dryness with habits, rituals, routines, prescriptions. Suffering to quench the want. But seeing himself now with his almost-amber eyes he realized the only way to snuff the burn was to finish what he’d started.
Up the stairs he went, dented pot clutched in his hand. Third door on the right.—If the floorboard squeaked bite the inside of his lip.—But not today.
He pushed open the door and the metronome beep of his brother’s bedside monitor greeted him. Twenty years ago he did something terrible. Twenty years ago he’d dented this pot. Twenty years ago he’d closed his brother’s amber eyes.
And he’d been paying for it ever since, by changing tubes, and dressing bedsores, and emptying bedpans. He’d kept his brother alive, and his brother’s shuttered amber eyes still tormented him with the demands of helplessness.
Over the hospital bed hung a still life in yellow. Buttercups and dandelions. A flaxen cloth, a goldenrod cup. The glass in the frame reflected Howard. Made his lemon eyes a part of the picture. He looked at himself there and grinned. He was thirsty.
Six sips. Six hits of lemon across his tongue. Swallow the ice down in one, all those sharp edges against those soft insides.
Howard raised the dented pot, the velvet shadow bleeding old gold across his brother’s face.
In the painting the lemon slices glistened. And Howard grinned.
Amber Eyes is part of my summer music series: horror stories inspired by songs from my youth. This one’s thanks to Yellow by Coldplay. May’s story, Holdfast, references Secret Smile by Semisonic. Stay tuned for Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden in July.
And if you enjoyed Amber Eyes let me know with a like, comment, or restack. My love language is words of afirmation so go ahead and melt my little black heart.🖤
Mesmerising. I had missed your writing.
“ The street was chartreuse. The rough bark of the trees, ochre and their brilliant leaves citrine.” OMG I truly found your use of color description delicious. What a wonderful read, great description!