Another marble clacked over the rocks and disappeared over the edge. It was like putting a penny in one of those funnels at the mall, Rila thought to herself, that no matter how wide the journey, it always went to the same place. The ocean was only a hole, but also bottomless and forever wide. The casting of it always nothing to the caster.
Rila pinched another glass ball between her fingers. Here was another far off sky, like the one above, with people working and sleeping under it. To them, it was endless and ponderous; to her, it was a mere bauble.
She had never lost one of the marbles, not one time since her grandfather had gifted them to her. She knew he had wanted sons, and then grandsons, but was cursed with two girls, and one female grandchild. He held off in giving the marbles to anyone until she was, at age six, clearly the only grandchild he would ever have. Rila never saw anything boyish or girlish about them. They were orbs of glass, small and hard and elegant and easily possessed. The tall mason jar was full to the brim of marbles, always had been. Grandpa had never lost one, and neither would she.
Rila released the next marble from her fingers, and it shrank before her eyes before making its meager noise on the rocks and going away. A world was not lost that was intently cast out. This was of her doing, and there was no carelessness about it. Grandpa had taught her that every marble in the jar was a crystal ball, not into the future, or the past, or some love we missed far off, but into a dream more far than any far off we could otherwise know, a land within the eye of a dream in a pocket. In a single marble she witnessed a whole world, little to her, great in itself. It was too much to pass on, with no direction as to what one could or should do with it.
But it was how the marbles had been given to Grandpa.
She thought it was only a story. He had always doled out little stories, bits of his childhood and other tales he himself might have been told. At first they were all the same, and Grandpa was merely from an old time of myth and magic, but by the age of four she could decipher that some stories were all made up by looking at the wideness of his eyes. There were his normal stories, and then there were fanciful stories, as if Grandpa’s life was not enough to entertain a child, so he had to think off the cuff to entertain her. It was with such luster that he told her of how the angel had given him the marbles.
“People always think that angels look like men and women with white robes and a halo and wings and all that,” he told her, “but far from it.” He shook his head and swallowed so that she could see his Adam’s apple dance. Then his eyes enlarged for full effect. “These angels were not from our sky, not even from some neighboring sky. I think they were from the furthest sky.”
“What do you mean?” she asked. “Heaven?”
“Oh, Heaven,” he said. “The Bible says there are many heavens. And you will see many of them if you so look. Gorgeous heavens. Terrible heavens. But these angels were from the heaven of heavens. They were tall and blue and they had six triangular eyes that glowed orange, pink, and white like petals falling from a tree in the sun.”
Rila giggled. “Grandpa.”
“It’s true! I’d never seen anything of the like. Angels with seven fingers on their hands. Have you ever seen a thing with seven fingers?”
The angels appeared to him when he was six. His father was mending a boat on the shore near their ocean cottage, and he wandered off toward the rocky bluff where the waves met with the rocks as if it was their first time colliding.
“There was when I saw them, three of them, standing there waiting for me, and they had something to give me.”
“What did they say?” asked Rila.
He shook his head. “Nothing. They had no words in our language. But I knew it to be a gift. An offering? No. They were mightier than us. They had parted so many clouds to arrive. But they wanted to give me those marbles, every one of them.”
“Why?”
“Child, I do not know why, but it was a gift.” Grandpa stirred in his chair, quivering and gazing at the mason jar on the wall. “I know you’ve seen them before, and never asked about them, because they look like ordinary marbles.”
She had seen them before, and indeed had never asked. They had caught her eye each time she visited, but not since her pure curiosity as a toddler had she even reached for them in her mind. They were things in a thing on a shelf. Now they were everything to look at, but she was scared to ask, and only listened.
Grandpa leaned in to her as she sat on the floor. “The angels bestowed the marbles to me, without saying why. They gave them to me, and I took them to show to my pa, and then when I took him back to the spot, they had vanished. He didn’t believe me, of course. He thought they had washed up. But I was on the bluff, and not the beach. I know they were given to me.”
When he told the story, Rila suspected that finding them on the shore was the real story, having herself discovered a few artifacts at the ocean cabin that had washed up—shells, bottles, a shoe, a hat, the carcass of an umbrellafish. She learned how anything in a sealed container could either float or be rolled across the ocean floor to her. She had never thought of it as a gift, but always a discovery.
“They never told me what they were for, or what I could do with them,” said Grandpa. “But I did discover one day what they really were.”
Glass skipping over rock, then nothing. Glass silently sailing over the bluff, then nothing. There was no matter to the marbles, and one day they could be found again, maybe. It wasn’t that she was blindly gifting them, but that she was releasing herself from them. They were so many, so small, and yet so vastly beyond her.
The day Rila received the mason jar she did not believe Grandpa’s story until he showed her the kaleidoscope. It was a brass, triangular stick of sorts, with a viewfinder and a wire catch at the end for holding a marble. Grandpa had gotten one as a birthday gift knowing it was for gazing into marbles.
“I ran immediately to my room,” he told her. “I wanted to look into these marbles like my friends the angels did. You see, I had seen through a kaleidoscope at a toy store and the truth of it all came to me. The angels do not see like we see. They have kaleidoscope eyes. The marbles were meant for looking into with kaleidoscope eyes.”
Grandpa offered her the kaleidoscope and she took it from his bony fingers. He placed one of the marbles in her hand and showed her how to put it into the wire frame.
Rila peered into the scope. She expected to see the usual firework display of geometric color, ready to verbalize how beautiful it was for a grandfather she was eager to impress. But when she turned the marble her view was of a wide and zooming bank of cloud parting slowly to reveal a deep and expansive sea.
“But how,” she said, after a long silence. “How did you do it?”
“I haven’t done anything,” he told her.
Rila continued to look. After the sea a continent arrived, green and lush with trees like none she had ever seen, a jungle covering the sand and rock of the world.
“Where is this?” “I do not know,” said Grandpa, “but it is not here. It is not our world. The angels gave us the gift. To us, to me and you. I don’t know how many others. They want us to see all these other worlds. We can’t go to them, but we can see them. We can look at them all day if we want.”
Rila put the kaleidoscope down. Grandpa was thin, rather frail, but full of delight. She imagined him spending all day at the window, taking turns with each of his big eyes at the scope, never stopping to eat or clean or go out anywhere. He was always a bit of a slob and a bit of a recluse, but not in the way that some were, shy for people and grouchy over company. He had long been busy with this device, drawing from it like some pipe for smoking.
“Did you show anybody else?” she asked.
Grandpa shook his head. “Nobody else would believe me, child. I’ve held on to this.” He stood rigid. “But no longer. My time is not forever. I will not hoard them. They are now yours.”
He put the mason jar on the table. The thing seemed so normal, and so did its contents.
“Never lose one,” he told her. “They are each so very precious.”
Rila found this to be so. When she rode home in the back of the car, she placed marble after marble at the end of the kaleidoscope and put it up to the light in the car window. In her eye was a feast of places beyond imagining, and she understood why each eye needed to yield its turn to the other. There was a land of the most astoundingly yellow sand where the winds blew it up in puffs that turned rust red and charcoal gray in the sky. Another land was blooming with green and red plants, their wide leaves covering one another, deep blue crystal rocks jutting out among their plumage. She held up yet another and her eyes entered a deep world of liquid and jelly, from black to blue to green, coalescing and repelling like oil and wax in a heated lamp.
Before long, after taking the jar of marbles and the kaleidoscope home with her, Rila made another fresh discovery. One marble held chrome-looking structures, rounded like the front of Grandpa’s car. She peered a little more and saw that these buildings were peopled with creatures, tall crablike beings with bright green skin and six legs. They walked about between their structures, conversing and trading and squabbling and making.
Not only a world, but a civilization.
In her surprise, Rila dropped the marble and its kaleidoscope. They clattered on the floor and she let out a gasp. Such a small greatness had fallen so easily out of her hands. But it was only a looking glass, was it not?
She pinched the marble delicately in her fingers and placed it back in the wire catch. She put her eye to the viewfinder. The world was there. The buildings were there, but they were stilted. The ground had broken up. The creatures, too, had broken to pieces, their limbs strewn about the earth of their once thriving place.
Rila moaned in terror and cupped the marble in her hands against her pillow. One graceless moment had shaken an entire land that would never know what toppled it. And she was at fault.
It was all Rila could do at first to try and rationalize away the consequence of her mistake. It was only a small world, and hers was so large. It was on a ball, whereas hers was a plane ever-stretching toward the frozen unknown, or the ocean wall, or whatever was at her world’s edge. Those beings were not like her, and maybe they were only like bugs. She had only collapsed an anthill. All the more besides, Grandpa had told her never to lose one, but said nothing about dropping one. Maybe such a world would repair itself.
That night she trembled over the cataclysm. She heard the clattering in her ears, over and over, and her mind’s eye filled with the buckling of those gleaming domes and the screams of helpless people who made them. The following morning she looked one more time, hoping that they could have survived and rebuilt, only to see the misshapen houses and the scattered limbs lying as still as the day before. She put it back in the jar and squeezed the lid on and tucked the jar under her bed. In a rush Rila slid boxes and clothes under the bed to hide the jar from her own hands. These worlds were too precious. She would not dare to touch them for a long time.
Rila moved on with her young days. She never forgot about the jar. It was like a hurt friend who slipped in and out from a door from moment to moment, whimpering but very much alive. The world that crumbled in an instant was but one, and the others, so much as she knew, moved on as she had. She balanced on her shoulders the guilt of her hapless error and the assurance that she was a dutiful protector of the cousin worlds gathered around it. Maybe their worlds would connect, and perhaps denizens of one could travel to another. More life could one day be found where all those had ended. And so she did not look. It was better not knowing.
In time Rila joined the scouting league, signed up to play plate ball, and discovered how well she could paint on a canvas and construct a science experiment. She filled her upward life with color and touch and wonder in ways that drew her attention away from one bewildering secret and into discovery of other ranges of vision. Binoculars looked outward, pointing to birds she could hear sing. A wood bat sent a leather ball wherever skill could guide it, possibly over the fence.
The limits of the possible were only in formulas yet discovered. Increasingly she saw the marble jar as a memory, then a myth, then a metaphor. She had imagined it all, right? It was best to treat it like a foothold for who she could be as she stepped on toward her tomorrow.
The girl was thirteen when her mother let her have a boy over to the house for the first time. They had popsicles and listened to music and talked about their teachers. This was a new land as well, one she had long been at the edge of entering, a confusing world that made her heart beat faster but also filled her with caution. Boys were strange, gruesome at times, but she thought of them too much to settle for avoiding them entirely. Dylan was a scout and a ballplayer like her, and these similarities overlapped to the point that it seemed like destiny had drawn them close. Even as she thought about it she knew it was silly. But he had hair that fell into curls at his ears and a smooth chin that stuck out kind of rocky like the older boys did. She wondered what he thought of her little nose and her comparatively puffy cheeks, if she looked to him not like a girl but like a squirrel.
Dylan gained her trust very quickly. All the pieces were there in a fashion that she had never felt before. It felt true, like knowing that a pillow was true when you rested your head on it, or that you were alive because your blood was warm in your face. A thought came to her to do what she never would have thought she would do, but her nervousness beckoned her to do it.
“Do you want to see something cool?” she asked.
Dylan tossed his head back. His hair swished to the side and settled. “Yeah. Show me.”
“I got this from my grandpa one year. You’re going to laugh, but it’s actually more than it appears to be.”
Rila hastily parted the clutter under her bed and retrieved the mason jar. When she showed it to him he nearly rolled his eyes.
“Don’t laugh,” she said. “This was the coolest gift I ever got, because it comes with something.”
She rested the jar on her bed against the wall and got the kaleidoscope off the shelf.
“What you do is you take one of these marbles, and you put it in here.” She showed him how to do it. “And you look into here.”
“It’s a kaleidoscope,” he said. “I had one of those. I had marbles too.”
Rila shook her head. “Not like these. Trust me. Just look.”
With quivering hands she put the kaleidoscope into his palm. Then she took out a single marble and put it in the wire catch. She felt the electricity of his fingers. He smiled.
“Go on,” she said.
Dylan’s dimples beamed. “Okay,” he said, shrugging. He peered into the kaleidoscope.
“You have to aim it at the light,” said Rila.
“Oh.”
He faced the window. His lips curled. His eye winked shut for a minute, then opened wide.
“How did you do that?” he said. “What makes it do that?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, I used to think it was magic, but now I think it’s some sort of illusion or something.”
It sounded unnatural even as she said it, like she had to say it for him. But as the words came out they were also firm, like she had been used to walking on them for a long time.
“Weird,” said Dylan, then set the kaleidoscope and marble down on the bed. His smile had become a well practiced fixture, as if he didn’t even know he was smiling. “But if I’m being honest,” he said, putting his hand over hers, “it’s nothing like looking into your eyes.”
Rila quaked from her toes to the top of her spine. It was the kind of line she wanted to hear, though she felt unprepared to hear it. When the boy leaned in to kiss her, she went for it as well. The motion felt new and terrible and fated. Her circle had expanded into a new geography of feeling in that one hour, and that circle was growing into an orb.
She felt his hand go to her chest and she retreated backward. The boundary was sudden, but was hers to draw.
Dylan’s eyebrows and mouth looked misshapen in surprise. “What?”
“That’s just real fast,” she said. “For a kiss, you know?”
He shrugged. “I mean it’s the next level.”
“But we barely started the first level. Just, you know, going that fast.”
She stood up.
“Things happen fast,” he said. “It’s like a roller coaster.”
“I don’t want my first kiss to be like a theme park,” she said.
He slapped his hands to his knees, then stood. “Okay. I get it. You’re still a little girl. You want to sit around looking at kaleidoscopes, or have the time of your life?”
Rila tried to face him and explain her reaction, but could not. She turned to the window, an ocean behind her face.
“Get out.”
“Fine,” he said. Just as she heard his steps across the floor, she heard the sound of something heavy hitting the carpet. A shuffle of glass on glass followed.
She knew just before turning around what he had done.
Rita yelled words at him she didn’t even know she had in her as she went for the jar. She scooped it back up in her hands and went back to the bed with it, cradling it in her lap.
“No, no, no,” Rita whispered to herself, cautiously opening the lid and taking out one of the marbles to put it to the kaleidoscope. The world inside was one she had seen before, a land of steep mountains and thick gray clouds, a world of small yellow creatures with large feet who built great forts on the tops of their mountains. As precarious as their lives looked, the fortresses still stood. But the small yellow people were scrambling. And in the distance, on one slender mountain peak, a castle had split in two.
She had gone and let it happen again. Her own search for wonder had broken what she thought she had tucked safely away. She had just enough heedfulness in the moment to set the objects on her bed and back away before taking up her scout book in rage and heaving it at her bedroom window. A small crack now filled the corner of the glass.
The mason jar went away again, and the kaleidoscope with it. It was a childish dream, a foolish pursuit, and she, being grown, was too much of a danger to touch it. She would protect it by burying it where it belonged, in the memory of stupid whimsy. The world she lived in was too real for all that. Hers would be hers, and would never overlap with theirs. She was too old for the scouts, so she stopped going. She played ball, but she learned to forget the joy of playing and bit her teeth into the competition for its own sake. She focused on her studies. What she learned was a matter of one fact after another. The sky had darkened, not in a measurable way with instruments, but in the way of looking up with a heart that had been stained in drab shades that would not come out.
Rila had gazed at the sky one afternoon after rising from a sleep and, seeing a cloud seem to bend with the sky over the sea, understood that her world was just as round as the many she had touched with her hands. No nation on earth had ever gone as far as the moon, and though all their scientists had concluded that beyond the dirt was a vastness of dark emptiness occasioned by celestial bodies—rock, ice, star, some other cloud of future discovery—there was not a soul who had witnessed the boundary beyond the skies. Her world, then, was a ball of glass, no different than any other. She could not yet prove it, but it was no more significant a world to believe in than any other that had been and would be touched with brutality.
Who held the marble of her world, and why had they let it go on for so long? She had read the history of the world’s people in books, and it had not been pretty like in the tales of her grandfather. Men had come and gone who leveled villages and towns, separated limb from body, broke up mountains and flooded valleys with cruel intent. She hoped that whoever it was had more sense than the sorry angels who passed on their responsibility to her grandfather, who passed them on to her. She had no one to pass them on to, and so they rested in a hole in her memory, swallowed up shovelful after shovelful, the way it should be.
She hurled yet another marble and it was gone like that. They were tiny, after all, and meant nothing. It was too easy to fling each one out and see it vanish before hitting the waves.
So what if they were little worlds? They were insignificant worlds, and what harm could be done that was not inevitable anyway? Rila never asked for them, and they should not have been hers to keep in the first place. In all the time that had gone by since she was small, she came to expect that it was her imagination at work, or some false memory. But if it all had been real, none of it should have passed to her.
She was seventeen when her mother was diagnosed. The disease gnawed away at her body from the inside, the medicine only softening the pain and slowing the time it took for her to die, but within a year her mother was so withered that she seemed half the person she always had been. By this time her father had already left them to fly across the ocean, because his job took him there, then another woman took him there, and then another life took him there.
Rila thought that her mother getting sick would perhaps bring her father back, that one night he would stumble through the front door and cradle the two of them in his arms on the couch, crying over his mistakes and their suffering alike.
But he never did.
It made it easier for Rila to come and see the truth hanging over them all. The hands that made the world never cared, and if that was true, the hands that brought her those much littler worlds did not themselves care, and would never come to give her account of her own caring. Deeper than this, in fact, was the truth that she had been treated most especially harshly by being handed empty secrets, and there was nothing greater than her she could rage at.
But she did have what was so infinitesimal and yet so weighty that it beckoned her to speak to the skies above.
She had retrieved the mason jar when her dying mother reminded her of her buried grandfather. For years it was easier in such a formative, quickly moving time to keep the silly marbles where they were, preserve them as a memory of fancy instead of pulling them out and proving to herself that all of it was an illusion. She’d cradled the jar in her lap for an hour, considering if it was worth it to try and find that kaleidoscope once more. Just see if it really all had been real.
And the rediscovery felt like a treachery. An affirmation. There were places beyond hers, secrets kept from her, angels from above who gave senselessly and took selfishly.
Why had she cared at all when she ruptured an entire world? And was everything that happened to her since then only retribution? Such a question did not pop into her head, but had stirred in the cistern of her heart with every disappointment of her youth. It was unfair that it had never been explained.
She chucked another. Over it went.
What were the little spheres gifted for? To mend what was already perfect? To learn from the storms within? To simply care for and protect them? Rila’s favored explanation for the longest time was that the visitors out of her realm had assembled all their most precious worlds as a gift for a girl that was most special in a world that was not that special at all. They had given it to her grandfather so that he could bestow it to her. But over time, even as she neglected the jar, she lost the appreciation for it, as if it was only in childhood imagination that the skies within danced in their color. All of their beauty, and given only to her. These had to be the throwaway worlds. Why else would the givers pass it down so flippantly? Their gift was a condescension, perhaps a dime a dozen, one hand-me-down forgotten among countless others.
Rila’s life was a speck in a trinket, a finite particle in an infinite collection.
She felt her heart sink with its own dumb treason as she scooped up a handful of the marbles of glass. They were hers, and with everything that had been taken from her, bit by bit, she wanted no strange gift as a consolation. She only wanted the things that had been taken from her in all her young life.
And so she had gone to the bluff so she could hurl her rage at the sea. Here, where it was supposed to have begun. But to make it last, and to ensure that every piece of that tormenting gift was given back broken as it should be, she plucked every single marble and sent it to the depths.
Click clack, click clack and another one down the rocks. It was so easy she felt like the most powerful woman ever. Every mad toss was a condemnation pronounced in pain. This marble, gone. This world, gone. Curse the inhabitants and all they’ve built. Curse their creators and whatever they meant. Throw another, she dared herself. Maybe, just maybe, they’ll come visit again. You’ll get some answer.
It was in some glint of the light from the rainy clouds, in a refraction known to her people to occur when the air was heavy with moisture, that a shapeless band of color beamed across her vision. It always reminded her of her kaleidoscope. No angels were showing up along with it. But it was there.
She took up another marble, like a stone for a sling. The jar was half full now, but this one felt extra heavy. She rolled it in her fingers and felt another helpless world turn. She was at its center and nobody knew. She brought her hand back like she did when pitching balls over the plate, and with a crack in her elbow she sent it headlong over the bluff.
Maybe it was the angle of the marble across the band of color from the sky, but its minute image seemed to project in front of her as it sailed off, only for half a second, and in that circle of a ghostly stamp in the air she saw the surface of that world’s upper hemisphere. It appeared and disappeared. A familiar world. Her world.
Click. Clack.
Crack. Crumble.
Something Grandpa never told her, but maybe had meant for her to discover another way.
Rila never could have foreseen the horizon of this moment, that the end of her world was a stone’s throw away. But as it all broke open, and the waters tumbled up from the ocean and into the expanse, she caught a glimpse of herself in the godforsaken stars.
