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.