Marbles

Flash fiction. Based on a real childhood game, but not on a real situation.

I was throwing marbles through the door of a doll’s house. But it wasn’t a murder game, or a war game with cannon balls. It was target practice, like shooting a goal in netball.

You didn’t understand. You’ve never understood, always thought I was doing something evil, something that had got out of control. Perhaps you lived in that doll’s house. Or perhaps you couldn’t see that to the mind of a child, the front façade of a house doesn’t have to be a house at all; what I was seeing might have been a crumbling wooden fence with a large hole in it, or a canvas with a target hole at the back of a bowling alley.

You didn’t even notice that the front façade was on hinges, and I had opened it out wide, so there was no house behind it. It was fun to swing it, like the door to the next world. All you could think of was that the game must be about wrecking a house, and you wanted to take the doll’s house and my marbles away from me.

You should have tried riding on one of the marbles, to see how it felt as you belted through that front door- it might have been exhilarating, like riding down a slide. We could have developed it together into a fairground ride and sold it to the funfair industry with their tacky reputation and tacky bulbs, some of them gone out at irregular intervals along the strings.

Instead, you had to be a misery, and you stomped out of the room calling back, “keep your nasty game, then.”

That’s what I say to you, too- keep your nasty game.