Simon pulled the swivel lamp forward, steadied his trembling fingers, and used tweezers to lift up the tiny creature. He examined it with a magnifying glass and was dumbfounded with joy. It was authentic.
It was given to him as a joke. He worked as a low-level clerk, and one of his nastier co-workers dropped it, alive and squiggling, into his soup during lunch. It was disgusting.
Simon now whispered a prayer of thanks, then took another look through the magnifying glass. Yes, it was the real thing: a thought-to-be-extinct, cancer-curing space beetle, valued at just under a million dollars.
Author’s note: I read about a rare postage stamp worth over a million dollars and imagined a collector, teased for being “nerdy”, stumbling onto that!
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