How To Make Marbles

How To Make Marbles

By Maria Getto

     At first I thought you could just roll some agglomeration of warm glass around on your tongue, flicking it savagely, running it across the ridges of your sticky palate. You might think about a teenage fuck because you just can’t help yourself. Or maybe it’s like dating a construction worker who comes home in dust and neon without a college degree. Rebellion and a little bit of shame each time the thought crashes into one of your molars. It doesn’t really taste good, but it feels like something that a mouth was meant to do. However, that would necessitate a quantity of warm, misshapen glass. The mouth would not be the birthplace of such a pleasure, but rather a receptacle, a refinery, a reformatory as it so often is. The mouth is a shapeshifter’s cave. It seems almost unreasonable now, silly.
     There is, quite possibly, an island where lightening strikes more than twice. The Irony Island, the point of universal spite, where such reckless force creates a shower of temporal immaculacy. The weights of this perfect rain being the corpse chained to some kind of perfection, its illegitimacy. Definite and unforgiving, but the liquid haunting dissipates as soon as you try to touch it. The beads surrender in mid air, give in to rigor mortis, and fall to the sand only to reflect the water that they once were. The fisherman will revile their beauty, piss on their chance to evolve while they laugh with missing teeth and toss them next to the day’s haul of mackerel, squirming and slimy with the wickedness of the sea. Some will escape the net and spin toward the water. I can smell the rotting seaweed that would squish into the negative space and leave a slippery mucous on the already slippery drops. Maybe I can hear it too. Or maybe it’s just the sound of you remembering what you did on a dock one night.
     I killed someone in a dream. She was very close to me, but I can’t remember her name anymore. The drag and the dream fog kept it while I opened my eyes. I felt intrusive trying to remember. Please tell me your name. Please undress while I watch. Please let me put my hands inside you to see if your belly is a good rock tumbler, and you can tell me your name when I’m finished. You are human if you look into an open window, but you are a voyeur if the shades are drawn and you look for cracks of light. Her name must exist somewhere, reeling down allegorical hallways in my sub-conscious like Barbie thrown down some stairs. Her name will be trapped in a maze, wearing itself down into tiny memory blobs, hoping to find a place to fit, a place to be filed. But because I’ve never filed anything but fingernails, the globs that used to be something must rattle around until someone gives up a body for science and they can be collected after the brain and the guts are studied and discarded. Surgical extraction of memories turned into toys. I doubt doctors are simply highly trained marble collectors, but it isn’t completely insane to consider. That just seems cruel, all that money for an education.
     Some people who could be doctors don’t become doctors at all. They become utilitarian and they use sand instead of needles. Once, a doctor who didn’t end up becoming a doctor built a factory wedged between some red lines on a map that wasn’t really a territory. There was a pipe painted on the bricks, but it wasn’t really a pipe. The factory had fingers for shaking growing out of each side and those fingers began to perspire. Those beads of factory sweat were pickled with black clouds and empirical mechanics. The reason that the sweat can be something else entirely and is only a representation of "a something that is sweat" is the infinite regress that you never learned about and now you don’t want to keep reading. Does it scare you that you may have been made in a factory that was made in a factory that was made in a factory?
     They wear no assembly seams to pick at. Infuriating. No two are twins (but I know you’ve been fooled), and they are not burdened by atmospheric imperfections as their planet mimics. They are exact as close as your palm can carry them to your eye, where a planet is only perfect from too many miles away. They are perfect to a degree that makes you want to masturbate when you hold one, to orgasm in the presence of the indisputable. Fucking marbles (figure of speech or the other option blablabla)…amazing things.