THE AMBER ROOM by Marina Merryweather (1st place, Flash, Nov22)

“Remember the Amber Room?”

“Sorry?” He looked up from his phone, in equal measure disoriented and disgruntled.

“The Amber Room.” She wondered how long it had been since she hadn’t needed to repeat something she had asked him. She pulled her knees in for comfort. “I took you when we last went to St Petersburg. In the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo.”

She drank in his appearance desperately, feeling her eyes widen as she did so – his gangly frame, too long for a single glance; his tightly-wound black curls; his eyes, dark as chestnuts; lips that were at once pillowy and perfectly defined. She watched the semi-permanent line in his forehead deepen as he pored over his memories, hope rising in her chest. Maybe this time he would show the emotion she was looking for.

“It’s exactly what it says on the tin, right? Just full of amber,” he said flatly.

“That’s it. Floor to ceiling.” She swallowed, her optimism already crumbling, and tried to suppress the emotion wresting control of her face.

“They all blur into one, to be honest.”

He shrugged and went back to his phone. She blinked, noticing her lashes were wetter, before retreating into her fringe to dab at them briefly.

“I just … I think it’s amazing how they reconstructed it from scratch. They had enough drawings to make an exact replica.”

He was quiet. Her heart hammered, as though it was chiselling its way out of her chest to get closer to him. She went on.

“People are still looking for the original, you know. They keep thinking they’ve finally found where the Nazis hid it. But they never do.”

She thought about that afternoon, the one they had spent wandering the surrounding gardens, the sun shining brighter and the colours becoming more vivid as each scene replayed in her mind. His hands felt extra soft in her memory, their fingers so tangled it was hard to tell whose were whose, his smile as ripe as an autumn melon. Someone had asked her once what love felt like, and his presence, so full and vivacious and overflowing with adoration, as she showed him the last of the palaces that she had visited every summer since she had learned to walk, was the one thing she had wanted to put into words to describe it. Nothing else she had experienced could come close to the way his lips  grazed her forehead, the smooth velvet of his words in her ear telling her he would die for her, before translating them into Russian to show that he meant it.

His response brought her sharply back into the present. “Is there a reason you’re telling me this?”

She took her time before she looked him in the eye, now ignoring the tears rolling down her cheek.

“You couldn’t tell that it wasn’t the real thing, could you?”