A Brief History of Time | Janey L Foster

She found the small black marbles again, not that she’d lost them of course. They lived, making occasional ripples, in a secret jar she kept away from most people.

It was time to open the jar. She placed them on the floor in front of her but couldn’t decide what material would constitute the floor. Was it concrete, was it slate? Most likely stone and she sat there for an indeterminate amount of time rolling the marbles around her palm.

Despite their smallness they were heavy, dense, maybe made of osmium, some were tungsten, some were onyx but most hurt her hand with their insistent mass.

She studied them, placed them on the glass sheet in front of her and leaned over. If she was quiet and still she could almost make out her reflection, some distortion, something hinted at, a ripple in time then dispersed.

The marbles were moved by her hands, arranged in rows though she knew they wouldn’t stay.

Sometimes they clattered into each other and ricocheted off at sharp angles feeling the force of the ones with which they’d collided.

She tried again. Lining them up in order of size, then in mass. And if they stayed in a pattern she’d be fine. She noted there was no weather, no movement of air, just the tiny black spheres feeling no friction, moving of their own accord on the dark glass in front of her.

She wondered if they had any sense of their movement and if they did, would they care? She tried to imagine how they might feel, rotating on their planes and never understanding the formula of their volume. Why would they roll with no awareness of their form, how could they just be marbles, insentient, presenting themselves to her over and over and over again.

And again.

Discrete excitations, forming patterns in her field. Around and around, crashing and clashing, firing into each other as if to say,

‘Look at us, watch us,’ and although she didn’t want to order them on the glass and although she knew they’d refuse her actions, that they’d make their own way, she did try.

She tried to understand them, to control them.

She wanted to make sense of them all if she could.

Like she did, like she does, like she will try again.

Black marbles in her hands, heavy, chaotic, despite her attempts. Around and around again. She kneeled before them, helpless, committed to their action, trying.

On repeat, kneeling down in her layers of grey skirts, soft, bundled up against the hard coldness of the stone. Her skirts, in contrast to tiny dense black marbles every time. Vibrations in a field, patterns connected through space and time.

And she played with marbles again; it was some kind of mid February fluctuation.

In a park, somewhere in an old deep green and bristled wood, there was a car. It was an old car, corners had rust and the seats had seen better days but it still worked. And although the miles had built up on the clock, it still drove quite well, well enough to bring him to her door.

They sat in the car, her hair waving and him in the driving seat with his list of objectives and plans. They talked. They always talked and here in the car, near the car park at the swimming baths, they sat and talked about Stephen Hawking.

She didn’t have much time for scientists, not in those days and she listened to him chatter and enthuse. It all seemed so alien to her, so remote from her ways and her thoughts.

There in a park, far from where she was now, they would sit and think about knowledge, argue over the unknowable and as lunchtime turned towards afternoon, she promised to read the book.

A Brief History of Time became their bible and on distant settees far from his, she made notes and she frowned at the pages. And as weeks became months and strangeness seeped into familiarity, she found her way.

Planets crept into her soul and atomic mass with all its inherent uncertainty became the conversations of a Sunday night. How odd it seemed that she grew to follow his ways, his words and yet now, leaning up the kitchen cupboard, how strange it was that there could have been any other way than this one.

This was the way and they knew it at a cellular level, and certainty was woven into every interaction and every dream.

And years later their son was on his way home, top deck, front seat of a double decker. And the trees brushed past the glass that held him and his college bag was heavy with unseen words.

She thought back to first of the parks and his old car and all the talking. There seemed to be no passage of time between now and who they were back then.

Stephen Hawking had bent the fabric of their spacetime and they rolled into each other with a permanece that was unknown to them, back there, back then in the car.

In the now, the bus with their child came nearer and she thought of the worlds that had changed. And in an echo of the car wheels turning was their son playing out all the maths, their boy calculating and rejoicing in calculus and if he could, he’d have sat in the back of the car in the past and shown his parents the workings out. There, on his pure white page was the algebra to the split screen experiment and equations for Schrödinger’s cat.

In a park, in a car many light years away from here they all sat, together. And they were unaware of this day unfolding as they read, as they talked, as they laughed.