by Angela N. Hunt

A pile of rubies ran through Shelley's fingers. Different cuts. Different shapes. Sharp-faceted pears the size of her little fingernail. Uncut stones the size of her big thumb. She let the stones fall into the celadon-glazed bowl.

Both the bowl and the gems were at odds with the rest of her surroundings. Cheap motel room. The kind you could rent by the hour, if the sheets were any indication. The tub in the bathroom the size of a postage stamp, and really not a tub at all, but more a catch tray for the shower.

Both bowl and rubies had been her mother’s. The only item of worth in the old woman’s effects.

Shelley considered the graveside service again, early that morning. Only her and the priest: him to say the words, and her to listen. The priest had been the one to give her the bowl and gems. All else had been disposed of to pay for the meager service and internment.

“She wanted you to have these,” he said. His professional sympathy was unable to hide his unprofessional curiosity.

Shell had pressed the bowl against her midriff, not really taking in the contents.

Only now, in her lodgings, did she finally try to make some sense of the odd bequest.

Rubies.

There’d been no question of what they were.

It made no sense. With such an asset, why had her mother never moved? Why had she lived out here, in this nowhere end of the Earth? Alone in the horrible trailer that Shell had been happy enough to avoid this time out.

“She couldn’t bear to part with us,” the stones sighed.

Shell swore her heart stopped for a full minute before it found its beat again and allowed her to breathe.

She’d imagined it. Gemstones couldn’t speak.

“We spoke,” they sighed again, soft crystal chimes in the multiple voice.

Nor could they read minds, Shell insisted, not willing to reply.

“Yes. We do,” the voice said a little louder. “Wear us and you will never suffer your mother’s fate.”

* * *

Rubies at ears, wrist and throat. Sparkling with red bloodfire.

Shell had found out why her mother had never had more than a few cut to gemstone. It was physical pain. They were commingled now somehow, gems to her soul, her eyes for their windows on the world.

But she had a strength her mother never had had.

She’d endured the pain. Considered it a type of labor and birth. Had the gems set and endured that as well, a different pain, but coupled with a deep satisfaction that she knew came from the rubies as they found their place in earrings, necklet and bracelets.

From then on, all things were hers. They were Luck and bright. It wasn’t that things unrealistically happened. Just the right job was offered to her and then the next. Housing she never thought to afford, offered for practically free. Men or women offered anything she could think of.

And all never took their eyes from the rubies at her throat.

* * *

A few years later, Shell went back to her mother’s graveside. Took out the one ruby on a long gold chain she’d had made special. Dug a small hole in the ground with her fingernails, while the rubies at her ears caught the fading sun. Buried the stone and the chain and patted the dirt back, with unsteady hands.

It hadn’t all been wine and roses.

She wasn’t suffering her mother’s fate. But she began to see some of her mother’s wisdom.

No one saw her anymore. Just the rubies. Only their fire. The stones tried to comfort her, tell her she wasn’t alone. But what did they know? They were only rock.

“I’ll take them off some day,” she told her mother’s grave, even though she knew her mother couldn’t hear her.

She looked around at the meager plot. Sighed in her now-fine clothes and touched the necklet of rubies around her throat.

“But not today.”

*****END*****