Marble Warfare

Prose- Life writing



Marble Warfare



Marbles, brightly coloured orbs of many different colours, deep blue, pearly pick, glittering and transparent, they were stored in an old sweet jar secured with a red lid. The jar resided in the top of my brother’s wardrobe, tucked away behind the marble run game.



However we would rarely use the marble run, more often than not we would set up camp in the upstairs hallway, laying the marbles out in a mass of colours jumbled across the faded pink carpet. It was satisfying  at the age of six to take a handful of the cool polished orbs from the jar relishing the crunching noise as they separated them self from the tightly packed mass. I would let them slide off my hand in a rainbow of colours spiralling across the carpet.



We would find great entertainment in simply passing time sitting there, playing various different games, competing against each other. We would pick our weapons of choice with which we would then attempt to knock out as many of the others marbles as possible. For me this usually meant choosing the prettiest marbles present, the pearly pink ones were my favourites, but for my brother, ever the competitive one, it was much more calculated than that. He would weigh them up taking into account their size and speed before making an ‘informed decision’. It was all very fair of course, well most of the time.  We would take it in turns to pick a marble for our arsenal. Marble warfare was something we took very seriously.



Then, war would break out. It would start out civilised, each of us being very polite and taking it in turns to roll one of our precious ten marbles attempting to knock out another one. If we succeeded in doing so the marble would be ours and as such we would increase the size of our arsenal.  Again, I would usually be influenced by what they looked like, wanting to collect the pretty pink and purple ones. We both fought over the transparent ones. They were rare. My brother though would be much more tactical, the thought of how best to win always on his mind.



Inevitably the game would increase in rowdiness; even my competitive side reared its head. We would loudly exclaim and ‘whoop’ when the situation called for it, or use underhand tactics to undermine each other, like discreetly moving a certain marble further away when the other was not looking, or even depleting the others supply surreptitiously pinching one.



We would eagerly await the satisfying ‘thwack’ as one of our marbles made contact with the cool hard surface of another. It was the sound of victory and was more often than not accompanied by a self satisfied smirk. The glee would only be heightened the further away the victim was blasted. On rare occasions we would achieve something particularly impressive; our victim would spiral away and plummet down the stairs. This was always something to be proud of.



The game would end when one person had run out of marbles. Although this could take a while it would always be my older brother that won. I had to face it my brother was much better at the art of marble warfare than me.