Felix turned the key in the door of his jewelry shop and, as always, double checked to make sure it was locked. He glanced through the window to make sure the red “armed” button was blinking on the alarm system panel. Then he used another key to lower the chain wall that protected the glass door. It latched with a satisfying clank, the padlock snicked shut, and Felix set off down the sidewalk toward home, satisfied that his jewelry store was closed and quiet for the night.
He couldn’t have been more wrong.
The first up were, as usual, the zirconiums. They hummed softly as they did their square dances, which led into the cube dances they practiced nightly. This woke the diamonds, whom nobody liked. The diamonds were, not to put too fine a facet on it, racist jerks. They jeered at the sapphires and rubies, taunting them with insults about being “impure corundum” and “copperheads” (or titanium-, chromium-, iron-, or magnesium-heads, depending on their color). They wouldn’t even speak to the jade, sniffing that they “wouldn’t associate with mere metamorphic rock”. They had really gotten to the emeralds with their “girly beryl” taunt, at least until the emeralds got over it, which took some heavy counseling sessions from the blue garnet, who was so rare she’d never met another like her. This somehow seemed to have made her completely immune to the opinions of other gems, no matter how offensive or unyielding. When she first arrived in the shop and the diamonds started in on her, she simply gave them a blank stare, lustered over to the nearest metal hinge on one of the display cases, and demonstrated that she was not only rare, but magnetically attractive. The diamonds were so astonished they actually shut up for a few minutes, which made the blue garnet quite the heroine among the other gems.
The diamonds, of course, made a great deal of the fact that they were the hardest of the gems — they liked to boast about the fact that they never changed in the tiniest way. The other gems gave them a hard time about this just for something to do, but the diamonds didn’t seem to even take much notice. The pearls, who were all about progressive change, were the most scornful of the diamonds, but only rarely engaged with them. As soon as they woke up every night they rolled over to the shelves at the side of the store to visit with the many decorative pieces ornamented with nacre, which the pearls insisted on calling “mom”.
The gold had the most complex relationship with the diamonds. The other gems were pretty sure the gold despised the diamonds even more than the diamonds hated the gold for being soft and ready to alloy with almost any other metal, but gold and diamonds were so often forced into the close quarters of settings that they’d developed the ability to tolerate each other, albeit in a somewhat reserved, frosty sort of way. Even when stone and metal were in the intimate forced relationship — almost a marriage, as they said — of a setting, the most the other gems ever heard was that when the diamonds began to get uppity the gold would tend to loosen a bit just to show the diamonds they could easily be dropped at any opportune moment — over a sewer grate, for example — and spend the next few millennia at the bottom of a sea of sludge.
The only gems who ever really stood up to the hated diamonds were the opals. The opals tended to keep to themselves for the most part, holding their own weird and mysterious rituals while the other gems watched, puzzled. The diamonds had once taken offense at this, calling it “impure silicate idolatry”, but later that week the opals had surrounded the diamonds and out-refracted them all night, showing some spectacular effects that had the whole store — except the humiliated diamonds — cheering. When the sun came up, the opals dispersed without a word to anyone. Since then the diamonds had been moderately more reserved, but every once in a while they found themselves surrounded by the opals again — it seemed more like a reminder than a threat — and even though the opals just sat there silently before leaving, the diamonds were cowed.
The jewelry store’s most extreme example of segregation was the costume jewelry section. Every night saw parties there with music, dancing, and other festivities, and even though the costume jewelry had welcomed the other gems “come party any time”, only the topaz (and often the pearls, after their visit with mom) ever took them up on the offer. Some of the gems — including the diamonds, of course — didn’t think much of the topaz, but the rubies, sapphires, and emeralds acknowledged that the topaz did seem to have more fun than they did, and if you took the time to really talk to them they had the most amazing stories to tell. Much more interesting than the standard “darkness, heat, and pressure” tales that the gems had grown up listening to.
The night progressed like clockwork — everything monitored closely, as always, by the clocks and watches, who argued amongst themselves about microseconds, the proper volume of ticks and tocks, and the relative merits of Arabic, Roman, unmarked, or (shudder) digital faces. The cuckoos hooted in amusement from their wall and those with alarms answered back from the shelves and cases.
Everyone faceted back home as the sun came up, and as they settled in they heard the rattling and clanking of Felix opening up the chain wall and the door.
“Time for the store to wake up again,” he muttered to himself. He couldn’t have been more wrong.
