The Diamond

            Son, we were born when your great-great-grandfather was as little as you and found a diamond under a leaf. It was on the side of a cart path and he carried it home in his cheek. He kept it there for the next seventeen years and never told anyone. Once he was sure he had swallowed it in a thunderstorm, but the next morning there it was again. The coroner was the first to discover it, under the limp tongue, and the moment he set it like a fragile seed into the young widow’s palm, she knew she was pregnant.