What is it? She asked, turning the small yellow object in her hand.
Enjoy the downtime, he’d said. That was three months ago and still her muse was silent. Not just her muse but her will. Her interest. Her passion lay dead on the floor.
I think it was once a marble.
The yellow...thing...did now seem to possibly fit that identification but still it was misshapen for a marble. But yes, perhaps it was glass.
What am I to do with it?
Let go of the future. You cannot make or be held to a promise that is so dependent on other variables outside your control. They will all come to know that.
Besides, she added in her own skepticism, they have no doubt already forgotten. I have already become a joke, a part of their story. Remember that one teacher we had junior year...?
The silence screamed like fingernails on a chalkboard. There were no real thoughts. No dialogue. No characters pulsing with a life beyond this ticking clock. The dead heart beat still pounding out the passing of glorious and open minutes with no sound and no life and no impulse. Just fear. And rustling of leaves so green and voluptuous in this season of afternoon storms and searing sun.
You must lose weight. And get 8 hours of sleep. This will keep your memory working and your brain will get younger.
I want to lose wait, she quips silently back to the flat LED screen whose prophet is bald and wearing all black.
Seriously, what is this thing? She rubs it between her fingers and the tiny sphere’s odd pocks and markings are rough among the smoother surfaces. It is as if someone had blown a length of thick glass and while it was still warm, wrapped it into a ball.
You know what it is.
I know what it was intended to be. A kind of story device.
A beginning.
A place to start.
A ticking of the clock with something. Anything.
The threat of passing wakefulness empty of any story has shut you down.
The anniversary of her death approaches and she would say what to you today?
No, those are your words of futility. Your expectation weighs down the future like an anchor dropped through the glass bottom boat.
My words exactly. You are sinking.
We are all sinking.
But I can’t hear you speak. I find no voices only passing motors and whispers of all the green. Green upon green of mindless joy and vibrancy. Mindless pleasure itself growing and plump with the fullness of their intended being while I sit here in this stifling heat and wonder where my next meal will come from. My next story. This story. Two stories that lie flat. Unbreathing. Unmoving. And I ungrieving look on.
A marble. This imagined thing that did not lead anywhere. I could thump it with my thumbnail across the empty room in my head and it would hit no wall because it does not exist. This yellow marble flawed by the glassblower who isn’t even a character and I have nothing to offer the blank page. The marble has failed.
She pops it in her mouth to keep from speaking.
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