"The Jewel Man"

A little story for the heck of it ...

The jewel man was an artist. He worked magic with bits of glass and glitter. Every piece he made held a little bit of his soul, so he was loath to part with any of them. He kept them in a showcase like a museum display, pleased to elaborate on minute details whenever someone expressed their admiration.

“That bracelet,” he would say, “I made from pebbles I collected on the beach. I ground and polished them and my apprentice drilled the holes to string them all together.”

It was a beautiful piece. Speckled stones no larger than a child’s fingernail, threaded with silver beads on wire as fine as unicorn hair.

“And that one,” he would say, pointing, “was a new-sprung leaf. I picked it myself, and my apprentice melted the gold I used to paint it.”

Another lovely piece, a delicate gold leaf strung on a silken cord.

“These,” he said, “came from a little dove new-possessed of its feathers. My apprentice held the bird as I clipped the fairest few and fit them on the hooks.”

Such pretty earrings, soft and white as fresh-fallen snow, fitted to small scarlet beads that glistened like pinpricks of blood.

“Each one of these is precious,” the jewel man said with pride. “Each one means the world to me. I could not bear to part with any of them, so none are for sale.”

One morning, the jewel man and his apprentice were walking. The morning rain had cleansed the air and the world smelled fresh and alive. While strolling through the garden, the jewel man’s eye fell on a spray of drops like diamonds scattered across a leaf. “Ah!” he cried to his apprentice, “those drops will make a fine necklace; I must have them for my collection.”

He reached a fingertrip to the first glistening drop, but the raindrop scuttled away. The jewel man tried another, and the same thing happened. Every drop he tried to capture trickled beyond his touch. Some ran together, hoping to escape in a crowd or make themselves so large that he could make nothing of them. “Hold the leaf,” he told his apprentice, to no avail. He tried and tried, but caught none of them.

“I would have made them beautiful,” he lamented. “I would have given them a soul.”

The apprentice said nothing, but the apprentice knew that the rain had a soul of its own, as had the bracelet stones and the tender leaf and the little white dove. These things had no need of the jewel man's soul to make them beautiful. The apprentice thought the rocks and trees and raindrops should be left on display where they belonged, where they shone at their most glorious without manufactured pride.

The jewel man was an artist. The apprentice was a magician.

copyright 2013 Ruth R. Greig