Crystal Orb

A man walks calmly down the sidewalk to purchase some cigarettes.

His name, as he introduces himself to coworkers, is Timothy Walton. He is forty-two years old, wears his socks inside-out, enjoys a Coca-Cola with his Marlboro, politely declines alcohol, and prefers two sugars with his coffee. He works at Intelicom Industrial Services. He writes programs which talk to the robotic servers in large industrial factories. He has blue eyes.

In his off time, he enjoys a game of billiards down at the bar. He usually plays alone, but every once in awhile, when the bar is closing, the bartender might take a few shots with him.

He was once a devout catholic, raised by devoutly catholic parents. He ran away at the age of thirteen, however, after refusing—for quite some time—any confirmation of any sort. He experimented with LSD for awhile after that, and tried his hand at writing poetry, but eventually left the combination of drugs and literature to Burroughs and Coleridge and the like.

When he was sixteen, he was introduced to Jonathan Walton Seamus. Nobody knew who he was. He lived in a quiet New York apartment in Queens, in a loft he owned after he bought it from the landlord. He did not have an official job. He did not pay his taxes. The only person who might recognize him was the Indian man who owned the convenience store three blocks down. Jonathan apparently bought cigarettes there, and occasionally stopped in for a few miscellaneous food items.

Timothy met Jonathan while in that very convenience store. Timothy was buying a 20oz. Coca-Cola that morning, just before he left for his part-time job at the newspaper editing office. Jonathan was buying his customary pack of Marlboro—it would probably last him a week, at which point he’d return the following Tuesday to purchase another pack.

A polite ‘hello’, a small conversation, and a few dozen cigarette purchases later, Jonathan confided in Timothy and invited the boy over to the local bar for a game of billiards. Timothy accepted. He was seventeen.

The game went well. Timothy won by luck, and Jonathan gave him a small crystal orb as a prize. He told Timothy that it would grant his any desire, his any wish, but it would never satisfy a lonely life. It always worked, he said, but it would never satisfy. When Timothy asked him what the price to such an orb was, Jonathan simply smiled. “Your life,” he said.

The two of them went their separate ways from the door of the bar. Timothy went back to his cramped hovel he shared with a transsexual hooker. Jonathan went back to his loft.

Jonathan died in his sleep that night, from cellular decomposition. His birth record calculated his age to be fifty-six. The coroner said he looked like a thousand-year-old mummy by the time he examined the body.

Timothy came into the possession of a large sum of money, on no small account thanks to the crystal orb. He moved out of the cramped, basement-floor apartment and into a comfortable, top-floor loft apartment which he bought from a landlord. It was relatively inexpensive, and the landlord showed no sign of recognizing him a week after the purchase. When he returned to his old apartment to retrieve his belongings, his roommate did not recognize him either. His belongings were gone as well.

He was thrown out of a newspaper editing establishment after he tried to convince the owner that he worked there. There was no record of his employment.

Sensing some involvement of the crystal orb, he placed it on his shelf and denied to use it any further. The orb itself was no larger than a tennis ball. It worked like this: one wish would be granted—if the wish adhered to all of the involved rules—after the wisher grappled the orb within his left hand and shook violently. The snow-like particles inside the orb would fizz and be tossed about, until settling back in the middle of the orb.

On the few occasions that Timothy did this, he would often try to peer into the ball to see what was in the very center of the orb. Sometimes he would see a tiny city, he thought. Sometimes he wasn’t sure. Often, the snow-like particles would rest before he could really catch a solid glimpse.

He proceeded to live alone for quite some time. He took online college courses, but failed to receive a degree after registration denied his existence. He tutored himself in computer programming. He unknowingly saw the future in his dreams, and subconsciously took steps to fulfill the destiny he saw—on no small account of the crystal orb.

Timothy developed a taste for Marlboro cigarettes, but found that—although there were billboards all over town advertising the brand, there was only one story which sold them. All other stores had either sold out their remaining stock, or had dropped the brand due to the lack of sales.

There was a convenience store a few blocks down from Timothy’s loft that sold the Marlboro brand, however. He made an effort to buy the cigarettes once every week from that store. The Indian man behind the counter was the only man to remember Timothy’s face—but never his name, since neither made an effort to introduce themselves.

When he was thirty-two, Timothy found that he was bored with his solitary life. He sought out corporate jobs which might use up his copious amount of free time, and found that he was able to land a job at Intelicom Industrial Services. It was a large, international computer-oriented company, worth somewhere around nine hundred and thirty-three million dollars. He had found that the proof of employment was largely secondary in the cubicle-infested building, and most of the employees didn’t seem to know each other anyhow.

It is now ten years later. He is now forty-two. He still lives alone. It is currently Tuesday, the day he buys Marlboros from the convenience store down the street.

No sooner had he placed his hand on the door to the store than the ground began to shake. The buildings remained solidly rooted to the concrete-and-dirt foundation of the world, but they swayed violently. Timothy’s grip on the door handle faltered and broke, and he stumbled into the street. The few people he noticed did not seem affected by this violent swaying and shaking, and it seemed odd to him that this was the case, but he could not linger on the subject.

After what seemed like an eternity, the shaking stopped. Timothy was sitting with his back to an alley wall. There was no one around to ignore him. He trembled slightly.

He looked up into the blue sky as he took tentative steps into the street, and saw—for the first time—that the sky was not blue, but transparent. Giant fingers gripped the sky, holding on to some invisible barrier that served to protect the city from harm. And then the fingers were gone, leaving light smudges on the invisible barrier, before the blue returned to the sky and covered up even the smudges.

That night, Timothy returned home, and smashed open the crystal orb. Giant shards of glass rained down on the city like hellfire as he did so, and the world ended in a giant flash of epiphany.