Dressed in mourning clothes and lost in the melancholy of his thoughts, George stared down into a simple wooden coffin filled with marbles in a myriad of colors. He never would have guessed a coffin could hold so many marbles. It seemed odd to him how such a cheerful object, one that brought memories of gap-toothed smiles and boisterous laughter to his mind, could ever belong in such a solemn place like the cemetery. George surveyed his surroundings, taking in just how gray the world had become. The storm clouds that loomed on the horizon were gray, as well as the trees which were lifeless and slowly rotting away like everything else buried in the soil. So were the tombstones. They were grim reminders that this place was filled with people who no longer walked the earth; who had been promised to be remembered forever and who became more and more forgotten with each passing year. But nothing was more devoid of life than the old marble factory that George could just barely see on the hill in the distance.
The factory where his father had poured out his heart along with the cement foundation the day it was built. The factory that had grow and blossomed as he did. The factory in which he and his father had spent the most fulfilling years of their lives together.
  It was a "lost art" his father would say whenever George asked why he had chosen to make marbles a profession. As a child, George could never understand how someone could do something so tedious as blowing multi-colored glass into a balls day after day. However, as he  grew older and more responsibilities weighed on his shoulders, he began to find solace in such a simple task as marble making. His father couldn't have been happier to see his son finally taking an interest in his lifelong passion.
George's mother died when he was fourteen, so it was just he and his father facing whatever the world threw at them, with only marble making and the occasional bits of loose change found under the couch to keep bread on the table. George was always astounded at the amount of profit they reached after a long day of making and selling marbles and counting up the cash at the end of the day gave him a sense of pride. His father, however, was never as concerned with funds, but rather with fun. The children that ran through the factory was what seemed to give him the most satisfaction. It was like every day was Christmas, not just for the kids but for him too.
  Now, the once cheerful factory lay abandoned and decrepit, with nothing inside but the ghostly echoes of children's laughter and the long conversations between father and son from days long past. A pang of longing gripped George's heart as he realized that the last funeral he'd been to was his father's and he remembered standing over his casket, clutching a striking golden marble, the last one his father ever made, and vowed to continue the marble business until he too was lying in a coffin. He never thought for a minute that the marbles -- the second thing he loved most in the world -- would beat him to it. His father had written in the will that only a few select marbles were to be buried with him. What to do with the rest was up to George. At first, he contemplated keeping them, but it became too painful to constantly be reminded of his father every time he looked at them. He decided to bury them as well; it was the only way he could ever move on. A slight breeze blew past, making George shiver and he pulled his jacket tighter around his frail body as he continue to stare at the factory. In some way, he still couldn't believe it ever closed.
It all happened so quickly; he couldn't be certain if took years, months, or, what it seemed like to him, only weeks. In the months after his father's death, business was flourishing as usual, regardless of the fact that it was now only George running the place. Then one day, when he was in his office in the middle of making a marble, he noticed an odd silence in the quaint little store. It was subtle, and would have gone unnoticed if he hadn't spent his entire life hearing the same raucous noises from the children in the main room where the marbles were displayed. Curious, he turned off his torch and walked into the main room only to find it completely empty.  It was the end of the day and typically there wasn't a lot of people to begin with, but they still there nonetheless. This concerned him a little, but he wrote it off as just some holiday he probably didn't know about and went back to his work.
  In the weeks that followed however, the number of parents and children were growing less and less. Soon he was going weeks without seeing a single person. He prayed that someone, anyone, would come in, even if it was just somebody needing change for the payphone. The loneliness was killing him. The days wore on and finally George's hopes, like his father, had perished.
  It took George a long time to come to terms with the fact that times were changing and kids didn't play with marbles anymore, not when they had those newfangled televisions. It wasn't long after people stopped coming that he had opened his cash box and found it empty. The marble maker knew that his days in the factory were numbered if he wasn't bringing in enough money to even buy food. After much contemplation, grief, and one-sided conversations to his deceased father, he closed up the store. He was almost thankful that his father hadn't lived to see his lifelong passion became a thing of the past.
Still staring down into the coffin, he ran a wrinkled hand through is gray and thinning hair. He was sixty-seven, the same age his father was when he died and he started to imagine the marbles shifting and changing, the colors blurring together to form his father's face. After all, these marbles were the very essence of who he was. Now, just like George, they were here with only one purpose: to long for the days spent in his father's care.
George supposed there were around seventy-thousand marbles and each one held a memory that was only shared by the three of them. Soon these memories would be all that George had left. George tried to see through the blurriness of tears while he reached for the coffin lid and slowly began to close it. Saying his final goodbye, only one thought was present in his mind. Today, he was losing much more than his marbles.