If All Their Sand Were Pearl

by Jeff Baker

(Title from Shakespeare)

It was late Sunday afternoon in Millington and the streets looked deserted when Hal and Denny, looking like High School kids walked up to the old stone canopy in front of the ancient drugstore. It had always reminded Denny of pictures he had seen of cathedrals in Europe, the times he and his Grandmother had stood under it beside the framed glass doors that led into the old drugstore with it’s old cardboard CLOSED sign displayed in the window. His Grandmother had talked about the days when you could buy magazines there and they even had a sit-down lunch counter where you could get things like sodas (“Not those awful canned things you buy now,” she had said) and something called an Egg Cream which sounded wonderful and mysterious like it came from an egg-shaped cow.

Denny had learned there had been sit-ins at the store but that had been decades before he had been born.

But that wasn’t what they were there for.

Hal checked the picture they’d found that he’d saved to his smartphone; a dull, roundish object. Dark on one end, light on the other. The photo had been taken at the British Museum before the stone had disappeared sometime during World War One.

“It’s here. It’s got to be,” Hal said. They were amateurs but they had done their scrying. They had a precious shred of the velvet the Amalfi Stone had been cushioned on in 1917.

“But where?” Denny asked. They were standing under the canopy, the orange light from the setting sun tinting everything.

“Hey, look up!” Hal said. “Remember what they said about the original owner decorating with crushed glass from old medicine bottles?”

They looked up. On the ceiling of the stone canopy they could see shards and chunks of colored glass embedded in the grey concrete. Curved corners of curved bottles. And one curved, roundish chunk that blended in perfectly with the glass.

“There.” Denny said. “Right there.”

“I see it.” Hal said. “Think it’s dark enough yet?”

“Let’s wait just a bit,” Denny said, impulsively kissing Hal.

“Think we’ll look suspicious?” Hal asked.

“Two guys kissing on a deserted street in small-town Kansas?” Denny said grinning. “Probably! But we aren’t stealing, we’re just going to use the thing.”

Only one car had passed by and the Sun had set when Hal nodded and the two of them keyed up the video they had both saved to their smartphones. They held them up to where the ancient jewel was among the glass, bathing it with recorded light from the Midsummer Full Moon.

Nothing. The light had glinted on the glass and the hidden jewel.

The two young men sighed and put their phones back up in their pockets.

“Hey, look!” Hal said, pointing up.

There had been no reason to point, there was only one place either of them would look.

Above them, the Amalfi stone was glittering in the light, but there was no real light; the underside of the canopy was in shadow. It began to glow, a glow that started white but then blurred into all the colors of the rainbow.

They remembered what they had found in the old book: The Amalfi Stone would work for those whose heart’s desire lay in secret.

Hal grabbed Denny and pulled him close as a rainbow of shimmering light shone down on them and they realized that infinite possibilities were now theirs; to go anywhere, to be anything, to have anything.

Denny shoved Hal away and jumped out of the light.

“What the hell did you do that for?” Hal said picking himself off the ground.

“I realized, I saw…” Denny said. “Maybe the stone did it or maybe I always knew.”

Denny grabbed Hal’s shoulders and grinned.

“Don’t you realize?” Denny said. “Infinite possibilities? We’ve got that right here. Wherever we are. As long as we have each other.”

The two of them walked away into their ordinary, extraordinary future.

—end—-