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eraser that you could carry in your pocket and use to get rid of your mistakes. He decided to write it down in his book along with his gravity ideas.

Chapter 7: The Magic Spectacles
    It was impossible to divide the marbles up. They flipped a coin to see who would chose first. There was no problem with that. But there was no way to separate them into two piles. The marbles kept running back together, as if there was dip in the floor. They tried putting them into jars, but there was something wrong with that, too. The little puddles of marbles in the jars were too small, for one thing. In the fishbowl the marbles had looked like a collection. Now they looked like a collection cut in half. Then one of the jars fell over, and Danny tried to grab it, and accidentally knocked the other jar over too, and the marbles ran together again like two rivers flowing into a lake.
    They tried again, switching marbles back and forth and being careful with the jars, but it still wasn’t any good. When they were done, the fishbowl sat there empty on the floor. Full of marbles, it had been almost magical, like a treasure chest in a cave. But now, empty, all the magic had gone out of it.
    Then Ahab came into the room and walked straight through the jars, t knocking them over again. Maybe thinking they were bugs, he began to push them around with his nose. The sound of their rolling was loud on the wooden floor as they disappeared behind the dressers and toybox, bumping into the wall rolling away again along the floor mouldings until they all ended up under the bed. Danny crawled underneath and rolled them back out, and John caught them and dropped them back into the fishbowl, all except the last two.
    One of those was white, with a red and green swirl through it like a piece of Christmas candy. John put it into his pocket. “I want this one for a good luck charm,” he said. “It’s all I want. You can have the rest.”
    “Let’s just leave the ret in the fishbowl,” Danny said, holding one last marble in the palm of his hand. “I’ll keep this one.” It was pink and blue, the color of an Easter egg or of a springtime sky at sunset.
    The wind blew harder than ever outside, making a moaning noise around the window. It was a cold wind, and the sky was full of clouds. In the western sky, the sun shone from beneath the clouds like an orange half-hidden by a china plate. That morning it had seemed to John that something unusual was about to happen, something big. But now, late in the afternoon, the wind had scoured most of the mystery out of the day.
    There was nothing left to do but clean up their bedroom. That, for some reason, had to be done every Saturday, no matter what. It would be easier just to shut the door, so that no one could see in, but somehow that wasn’t good enough for their parents. The room had to be cleaned because it had to be cleaned.
    Danny put books away on the shelves while John picked up toys and tossed them into the toybox and into baskets lying around on the floor. They found a pile of old, dried-out banana peels behind the toy box along with an empty carton that had once held frozen fish sticks.
    “That’s not
my
trash,” John said, pointing at it. “What was this, some kind of midnight snack?”
    “Don’t look at me,” Danny said. “I’m
sure
I eat frozen fish sticks out of the box.”
    “Then who put it there? Dad?”
    “You tell me and we’ll both know,” Danny said.
    John picked all of it up anyway. The banana skins were as stiff as cardboard. He smashed it all down into the trash can and then shoved a lot of old scrap paper on top of it, stomping it flat so that the can was only half full and didn’t have to be emptied. He pitched a few dirty clothes out into the hallway, and the room was nearly clean except for a couple of things that were hard to put away but that fit just fine under the bed.
    “Watch me do a trick,” John said finally.
    There was a certain amount of dust and sand and