The Worthless Gemstone

“What use are you?”, said Grady, angrily, scowling like thunder and spitting on the enormous, sparkling diamond in his hands, “What f-ing use?”.

He had felt so elated the first time he had noticed the diamond glittering in the gutter; just lying there waiting for him to pick it up.

“At last”, he’d thought, “A stroke of luck after years of just scraping by. If I sell this diamond, I can become rich and start a company; become the wealthy entrepreneur I’ve always dreamed of being”.

But he should have known better than to think fate would be kind to him.

“You don’t get anything for nothing”, he now thought, “Not in this terrible, grey, flint-hearted world”.

The diamond was worthless you see, although it was a genuine, flawless, 900 Carat diamond and big enough to fill his two large labourers hands, he couldn’t sell it because the damn thing would only be a diamond for him.

Time and again, he had tried to show it to diamond merchants but each time, when he had placed it in their sweaty, trembling, greedy hands, it had become nothing more than an ordinary lump of dark, grey stone and, time and time again, he had been angrily thrown off of their premises for wasting their time, the glittering diamond hurled after him.

“Capitalism!”, bellowed a man standing on a soapbox on a street corner behind him, “Is a worthless system; like a machine that only works well for some but for most does not work at all. What is the use of a machine like that or of a system that only benefits a small minority”.

“Shut up!”, yelled Grady, hurling the worthless diamond at the head of the man on the soapbox
but narrowly missing him.

The man got down from his box and picked up the diamond that was still glittering in his hands and showed the diamond, open mouthed, to his scruffy socialist friends.

“Thank you, brother”, he said to Grady, smiling and tearful, moved by such an enormous act of generosity, “We can do so much good with this diamond. Help so many people”.

“Life is unfair”, thought Grady, bitterly.