The Little Blue Marble

Friend Chris Little spoke during our study time today about the pictures showing earth from the vantage of planet Jupiter, as a small blue speck in the darkness, what he called “the little blue marble”.

I hear the phrase, and among other thoughts, ponder it as a great title for a short story.

Borrowing shamelessly from All Things Considered and its 3-minute fiction contests on NPR, I offer my own 3-minute (more or less) short story, The Little Blue Marble, an homage to small boys and their wondrously large imaginations:

A boy, too big to ride in the shopping cart and his Gran deeming it too dangerous to allow him to ride on the back, takes it upon himself to push the cart – his first solo drive.

Soon the boy’s mind wanders and an amazing thing happens:  the roof of the large store disappears leaving only the night sky before him.   

Open-mouthed, the boy  pushes the cart upward, slowly at first, step after magical step, until he and the cart, one in intention, hurtle into the vast sky. Only upon landing does it occur to the boy, still clutching the bar of the cart tightly in his small hands, to look back into thousands, maybe even millions of little lights he knows to be stars.  

As the boy seeks he knows not what,  suddenly, one light – the smallest of all that his eyes can see – pulses an insistent blue.  It looks like the smallest, the tiniest, blue marble ever made.  The boy cannot look away.

A word creeps slowly into his mind: home.  

As soon as the word takes shape, maybe even a second before, boy and cart turn towards the tiny blue marble and find themselves traveling even faster than when they left.

Back in the store, boy and cart continue down the aisle in front of Gran, who is none the wiser.

Atop the tiny blue marble, the boy begins to whistle with a smile in the tune and a skip in his step, and if you listened closely, you could hear the cadence in the whistle, the slight dipthong that says . . . ho-o-me . . . 

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*Maybe you have your own little-blue-marble story you’d like to share.  I’d be happy to post it here (the obvious caveats apply).