Amber Ken
Listen to read story
When Lily goes between the years, she’s sucked into what could easily be a blackout room at an artist’s exhibition, except strings of numbers and DNA helixes move through the air in all directions. What most people wouldn’t expect is that they even go through her sometimes. Everyone likes the idea of being a time traveller until they’ve felt a particularly pointy number 4 behind the eye. I’m off to hack the mainframe, Lily tells her husband before she heads to start a new assignment. In reality, all she has to do is stand there. Which is very useful now that she’s eight months pregnant and there’s a puddle on the floor, in which she can see all the numbers that make up the universe. Fuck.
Speaking of the floor, which she’s now meeting properly for the first time, it’s warmer than expected. She supposes this is the kind of job where a few years in, you might as well still be a rookie. It was a role she’d fallen into, quite literally. She’d been driving at the time when she and her Polo fell through a notoriously egregious pothole on Latimore Road. Lily doesn’t remember anything past the feeling of being on the world’s worst rollercoaster, until a man in Lycra congratulated her and told her the news that changed life as she knew it. Nobody expects time travel managers to wear Lycra, either. But then no one expects to have to deal with managers in the time travel industry, it’s true.
Lily feels something within her other than ripping, another layer of sensation deep in her guts. Fear. When starting this assignment, she’d been in 2016. She was now headed to 1963. Where would her baby be born? In a year where everyone and their dog is using the… dog ears Snapchat filter? Or a year where her husband isn’t even allowed in the room, where care for mothers in labour barely extends past warm towels? A ripple of nausea rolls through her. She’s having a daughter, and even that’s a concern. In either year.
Lily tries to calm herself by thinking of the Baby Born doll she’s kept since she was six years old. She’s recently taken to carrying it – her – around for practice, mixing the sachets of powder with water to fill the bottle; changing nappies that somehow still stained brown. She can do this. She knows how to love. No matter the circumstances. No matter the year.
A contraction takes hold that’s so strong she feels the world move. The strings of numbers blur. Lily forces out two short, quick breaths to bring herself back. And then, there’s a pulsing through her head and her heart. Wait. She recognises that sound.
Her sight disappears for a flash, and she’s on her bedroom floor. Her husband is shining with post-shower dew, a towel around his waist, and he’s dancing to Closer by The Chainsmokers. He’s always had terrible music taste. She’s never been more glad to hear it.
Amber’s prompts were: During a Birth, a Time Traveller, a Doll
Amber Ken (she/they) is a writer of fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction from the UK. Her work typically centres around trauma, nostalgia, and the bittersweet.
Connect with Amber
Read more from Amber:
1.
2.
TRASH CAT LIT 