Ember Journal, 2025
Rila stands at a seaside bluff, methodically hurling marbles into the ocean below. Each one vanishes over the edge with a small clatter on the rocks — a deliberate act of destruction rather than carelessness. The marbles, inherited from her grandfather, are no ordinary playthings. They are glass spheres, each containing a living, breathing world visible only through a special brass kaleidoscope that replicates the multi-faceted vision of angels.
Rila’s grandfather received the marbles as a boy of six, gifted by three towering blue angels with six triangular, glowing eyes and seven fingers on each hand. The angels appeared on a rocky bluff near his ocean cottage and offered the jar without a word of explanation. He spent decades gazing into the marbles through the kaleidoscope before passing them on to Rila — his only grandchild — warning her never to lose a single one. When Rila first looked through the scope herself, she saw not the usual geometric patterns of a kaleidoscope but vivid alien landscapes: vast seas, lush jungles, and towering crystal formations.
The weight of the gift becomes real when Rila, at home alone, accidentally drops a marble and discovers through the kaleidoscope that an entire civilization of crab-like creatures has been destroyed by the impact. Buildings lie in ruin, limbs scattered across the ground. Horrified and guilt-ridden, she hides the jar under her bed and tries to move on with her life — scouting, sports, painting — slowly convincing herself the marbles are a childish fantasy, a myth, a metaphor.
At thirteen, Rila makes the mistake of sharing the secret with Dylan, a boy she trusts and admires. After sharing a first kiss, Dylan pushes physical boundaries she isn’t ready to cross. When she refuses, he lashes out, knocking over the jar on his way out. Once again, a civilization — this time a mountain people in yellow — suffers catastrophe. A castle splits in two. Rila, furious and heartbroken, retreats further from the marbles and from wonder itself. She becomes harder, more competitive, more closed off.
By seventeen, grief compounds grief. Her father has long since abandoned the family for a new life abroad, and her mother is dying of illness, withering away despite treatment. Rila retrieves the jar once more and finds the marbles are real after all — which feels less like comfort and more like betrayal. Why was she given this impossible responsibility? Why had no one explained it? Why did careless moments in her world shatter entire civilizations, while her own world absorbed cruelty after cruelty with no divine intervention?
In her rage and sorrow, Rila goes to the bluff — the very place where the angels first appeared to her grandfather — and begins casting every marble into the sea. She flings them one by one as acts of condemnation. But as the jar reaches half empty, one marble catches the light strangely mid-arc, and in a ghostly projection she glimpses its surface. She recognizes it. It is her own world. The final lines arrive with quiet devastation: the marble shatters on the rocks below, and the ocean rises up into the sky.
I’m a goober. I write things. Mostly about trying to follow Christ and helping my family do the same. From time to time, other things, from Faith to Fatherhood to Fiction, Food, Folk Music, Finances, Foreign Policy, Feet Swift Running to Mischief, or just Free Advice. I’m a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. I’m also a teacher of language arts. Read me if you like. It’s free.