This story was written four years ago as part of a writing workshop, off the prompt to write something about an object: in this case, a marble. It was the first time I tried to write off that kind of prompt, and it changed my life. The story was good, but then I put it through the Discord Writing Workshop, and this week it placed third in a writing contest. Enjoy.

Here's Part One.
Part Two is here.
Part Three continues to the conclusion, below.

They sauntered up the hill like they had all day and stopped at our meeting spot, about fifty feet away, looking down. The first man pointed. “See, right here. Never seen the like, myself.”

They bent down to get a better look at the ground. Both of them had backs to me, and I saw a chance that might not come again. I reached in my pocket and grabbed a steelie. I got to one knee, ignoring the girl’s frantic grabbing at my pant leg.

Maybe it was because I couldn’t believe any of this was real, or maybe I’m just nuts that way, but I had a moment of insane courage. I raised up over the bush and fired the steelie at the rump of the closest horse, dropping flat as soon as I let go.

I have a pretty decent arm, I mean, I pitch for my little league team and stuff. Fifty feet is about the distance from the rubber to home plate, and a horse’s backside is a really big strike zone. I hit the horse square on the butt. It reared up like it was shot, and bolted up the hill.

The two men shouted and grabbed for the other horse to stop it from doing the same. The first soldier swore again and started up the hill after his galloping ride, while the new man mounted up and gave chase. In a minute, both men had disappeared over the rise.

I was out in the field as fast as I could go. Down on my knees, scrabbling around in the grass trying desperately to find the marble. Nothing. “Come and help me,” I said, in an urgent whisper I didn’t really think she could hear, but I didn’t dare speak any louder, for fear the men would hear me.

Eventually, I saw the top of her head above the bush, but she was still timid as a mouse after being played by a cat. “Come back! You’ll get caught!”

“If they come back we’re caught anyway,” I said. “We have to get out of here.”

“We’ll run then.”

“And find more of them over the hill? No thanks. I’m finding my marble.”

She was most of the way out from behind the bush now, still crouched, and looking up the hill anxiously. “What marble? Ye’r on about this marble, and what is it?”

“You don’t play marbles?”

“Me brother, he pitched stones. He’s dead as well. Shot by the Yanks two year back.”

“This is kind of like that.” I was frantically pulling up handfuls of grass. She could watch the hill. I had to find the glassie. “I found a marble at school today and when I pinched it a certain way, I…came here. If I find it again maybe we can go back.”

“Back where? To the…whenever ye say ye’r from?”

“2017. Yeah. It’s a lot safer than being in the middle of a war.” Nothing. I couldn’t find it. I stood up and tried to get back into the same position I had been when I appeared, and recreate the impact, and…maybe over here a bit. Maybe.

She stared at me from twenty feet away. Tears ran down her cheeks. “This is home,” she said. “I don’t belong in your home.”

I looked up at the smoke column rising over the hill. She knew what I was looking at, and sniffed. For a moment, I stopped looking for the marble and looked at her instead. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do. All I can think is to get out of here, and there’s no better way out than 150 years into the future. I don’t think any army, blue or grey, can come get you there.”

She didn’t move for a moment, then she looked back over her shoulder at the smoke. “Home,” she said. “There’s no home here fer me. No home and safe is better than no home and in the hands of Cobb’s.” And she got down on her knees. “What do I search for?”

“It looks like this,” I said, pulling a glassie from my pocket. “Only, older, and it’s a little chipped. I dropped it when you ran into me.”

We searched every inch of that ground. It seemed like it took an hour. But we didn’t find anything. The marble was gone.

And I was stuck in 1864.

“It’s got to be here,” I said. “I had it--”

A shout rang out above us. “Hey! You two! Hold it right there!”

It was the first soldier, standing at the top of the hill, his rifle out and pointed at us. Fifty yards away, at most, so close that he could reach out and touch us. I put my hands up and stood still.

The girl, though, shrieked and ran down the hill away from him. He shouted and charged after her. On his way past me, he hit me in the gut with the butt of his rifle and I went down as the breath whistled out of me.

I writhed in the dirt and tried not to throw up, rolling from side to side. I couldn’t make my lungs work; I gasped for air like a landed fish.

And there was the marble. Right next to my face. I almost didn’t see it, I was heaving so hard, but the sun hit it just right. I grabbed it and turned it in my hand, searching for the rough places. There. I pressed my fingers to them and the hill and the dirt and the grassy rise with the pillar of smoke just beyond it all disappeared. I was lying on the blacktop at the school again.

But just as I disappeared, or reappeared I guess, I heard the girl scream.

The relief of being back in my own time was so wonderful I almost passed out there on the playground. I probably would have, except for the pit of guilt in my gut.

I didn’t know if there was any way to get her here. I had no idea what the marble could do. But there are some things a guy just knows he has to try, or he’ll be ashamed all his life, so before I could think my way out of it, I took my fingers off the marble and the green valley reappeared, with me lying in the dirt again.

The girl was still screaming, being dragged back up the hill by the cavalryman. The Reb had his back to me and didn’t seem to have seen anything. It was pretty clear what he was going to do, though, when he got back up the hill to me. He was going to bash my head in and then…well, hadn’t they already shot her parents? She was right to be screaming.

He was much bigger than she was. She had no chance, though she didn’t come without a fight. Finally he dumped her next to me and hammered her in the stomach with his boot. She retched.

But she was close enough to reach. So I put one hand on her and another on the marble and found the magic places again. The valley flashed away and I was back on the playground.

But she wasn’t there. The marble hadn’t brought her.

I let go again and there she was, a foot or so away, grimy faced and gasping for air. Her eyes stared at me, wild and terrified. The cavalryman let out a whistle and yelled for his companion. Since we didn’t seem to be going anywhere, he took a couple steps back and leaned on his rifle, throwing glances up the hill.

I held out the marble toward her. “You have to touch it,” I whispered. Her eyes stayed glassy. She saw the marble, but it didn’t register with her. “Touch it,” I said, “please.”

She reached out a hand and touched the side of the marble. I pinched it. Again, the playground appeared.

She wasn’t there.

By now I was sick. What if only one of us could go? I let go of the marble and the whole horrible scene reappeared, but this time I heard the cavalryman say “What the devil…” He had seen me disappear. We wouldn’t get another chance at this.

“Touch the top,” I said, and pointed frantically at the marble. She closed her eyes and her mouth moved, muttering something. A prayer. There was a crunch of a footstep as the cavalryman came closer to see what was up.

Not knowing what else to do, I grabbed her finger and put it on the rough patch at the top of the marble, at the same time putting my thumb on the bottom patch.

The playground reappeared.

And she was lying on it with me.

#

The rest of the story I’m sure you know, well, most of it. It was in all the papers. When a fourth-grader disappears off the playground during school, every policeman in the world shows up to try to find him, and they were all there looking for me when I blinked back onto the blacktop.

Naturally I tried to explain where I had been and what had happened, and of course no one believed me, but there was one thing no one could explain: the girl. Here was this girl, lying on the ground with me, in an impossible dress with an impossible accent. A little at a time she told her story, and what could anyone do? They searched everywhere for records of her, and found nothing. No one was missing a thirteen-year-old girl in Spotsylvania or anywhere else in Virginia. Her story matched mine exactly. They prodded her and probed her, and then they threw up their hands.

Eventually they let her come and stay with my family, since she had nowhere else to go. That’s how my sister Erin and her red hair got into my family of blondes. She even learned to shoot marbles after a while.

Speaking of marbles, everyone tried to get my marble to do something again, but it wouldn’t. It was just a piece of chipped glass after that day. I guess it had a thing to do, and it did it, and then it was done. You’d know all this if you read any of the papers or watch any of the news programs, because Erin and I were on all of them for weeks.

Then the press moved on to something else and our lives went back to normal, or mine did, though Erin’s probably wasn’t. But my dad had a hunch and did some looking into some documents stored at the county archives. One day he came home with a copy of an old newspaper. A very old one. It was from May 24, 1864. And it said:

The battle of the Courthouse had many casualties, but these should never be forgotten: Sean and Maeve O’Brien, and their daughter Erin, whose farm was raided by deserting Confederate cavalry the day before the battle began. The parents’ bodies were returned for burial by Major Ashley Wilkes, who tragically was captured by a Yankee regiment in the ensuing battle. The daughter’s body has never been found, and she is presumed a casualty of this never-ending war.

You probably never heard that part, because our family didn’t talk about it much. But after that, I paid a lot more attention in history.

You know. Just in case.

~Cristof