Danger

(Signs of the Times is a work of fiction based on true events. Views expressed are the characters’ own. Viewer discretion is advised.)

I took shape millions of years ago. Pressed and ground and churned out onto a beach. I was rutile on Vladivostok shores.

Dredged and sifted, I was sorted. Moving through space on boxcars and trucks and boxcars. My millions of individual parts were dumped into a chute. I was covered in chemicals. I was sand. Then I was titanium tetrachloride.

I was melted. Pressured. Formed as my molten self flowed with a burning indifference into castes and shapes. I am cooled.

Then, off in a box, placed in a container made of baser materials, hoisted onto a ship by a crane, and taken far away from where I began. I awoke again in suburbia.

They called the place a machine shop. A young man, no more than twenty-five years old, attached a hook to my shape. He hoisted me with a system of pulleys and a crane. I was loaded into a great big box with a big computer. It was dark inside. But then I was transformed.

A fuselage. Not for a plane. I am small. I have fins. I believe I am a bomb.

The machinist didn't fill me with trinitrotoluene. I learned the TNT would be placed in me later. So am I a bomb?

It was in a place called Colorado I was made whole. I was complete with a fuze, ignition system, and TNT. Everyone joked about me going home. I did not understand.

It was back on a train in a crate moving across the west that I thought of what it means to be. I was put into a crate that said danger in many languages. Am I all that dangerous? Or is it the humans who arm me?

From train to boat to another boat to truck to plane, I moved across the Eastern Seaboard, through the Atlantic, past Dover and Lancashire, onto the foggy shores of Dieppe, and over in a land called Moldova and onto a truck for a land called Ukraine.

All was normal. All was quiet. The overland trip was unremarkable. But when the lid to the crate that held me was opened, I was in hell.