“Rik, not down there again.”
Old Yone called out from the porch, sounding thoroughly exasperated.
Every evening, Rik headed for the same corner of the yard—the lowest corner. This planet was heavy, stupidly heavy. Anything left lying around eventually drifted downhill if you didn’t watch it, so the family’s junk had piled up there for years, a small mountain of things nobody used anymore. Rik’s favorite spot was a big flat stone at the foot of that pile. Clear away just enough junk to sit down, and the stone was warm to the touch. From there, the dusk sky was the best view in the world.
One day, Rik’s father brought an appraiser home from town. Father had never once won first prize at the town fair, and it ate at him.
“Look at everything we’ve got. There’s got to be a gem in here somewhere.”
He started with his pride and joy: a shiny new mantel clock, bought just recently. The appraiser barely glanced at it.
“Too new. This hasn’t been pressed at all yet. Worth next to nothing.”
“Pressed?”
“On this planet, the longer something’s been pressed down at the bottom, the harder and shinier it gets. The good stuff always comes from underneath.”
Father’s face went red—especially since that prized clock had just been valued at rock bottom.
The appraiser walked over to the corner of the yard and started clearing the junk pile aside. He stopped dead in front of Rik’s sitting stone.
”…This is it. Decades at the very bottom, under all that weight. This is the finest piece in town.”
“How much—how much is it worth?” Father jumped up.
“Dug out and polished, quite a lot.” The appraiser held up one finger. “But here’s the thing. The moment you lift it out and stop pressing it, it slowly loosens up and goes back to being an ordinary stone. It’s only treasure as long as it stays under pressure.”
Father went quiet for a while, thinking. Then he grinned.
”…Then we just won’t dig it out. We’ll press it harder instead.”
From that day, Father changed. He hauled every heavy thing he owned into that corner of the yard—the wardrobe, the old millstone. When that wasn’t enough, he borrowed an iron cauldron from the neighbors.
“Dad, that’s my stone.”
“That’s treasure, now. Don’t sit on it anymore.”
Rik’s seat vanished under the junk within days.
Word spread through town fast. Soon every yard had a growing pile in its lowest corner, neighbors racing to stack the heaviest things they owned. From that season on, in this town, the richer you were, the messier your yard looked.
Father leaned over the fence, chest puffed out, to boast to the neighbor.
“We’ve got the finest treasure in this whole town.”
“Oh yeah? Let’s see it, then.”
“Idiot. You can’t dig it up to show it off. Then it wouldn’t be treasure anymore.”
The neighbor wasn’t about to be outdone, and pointed proudly at his own pile. Underneath every pile in town, there really was a treasure. But nobody could ever look at it. The moment it saw daylight, it stopped being one.
Rik climbed to the top of the swollen pile—much higher now than before. The stone’s warmth was long gone, and he couldn’t even see what was buried underneath anymore. But the dusk sky above him, the one he used to look up at from the bottom, spread out exactly the same as always. No one could pile anything on it. No one could press it down.