My mother had a large piece of amber the size of my hand. She held it up to the light and I saw an entrapped insect. An ordinary fly.
My mother said the amber came from Eastern Germany, from the Harz Mountains where she’d lived before the war. She said it came from the caves of old King Barbarossa, who sat asleep on his throne waiting for his nation to be reborn.
When at reunification he didn’t wake up, my mother said it wasn’t just about borders that the minds of the people had to overcome frictions before they could really become one. Like this, she said, and ripped off tiny bits of the newspaper and placed them in her lap. She rubbed the amber on her sleeve and dipped it in the newspaper scraps. They clung to the amber, hiding the fly.
Sylvia Petter, an Australian based in Sydney, writes short, long, serious, sexy and fun. She is the author of five short-story collections, one in German and another as AstridL, flash fiction pieces, a novella in flash, and a novel, All the Beautiful Liars, 2020, UK.
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