I was born in Alabama in 1960. I pressed of plastic and forged in Factory Floor steam hot as lava smoke. I sat in a dusty room for 12 years before I was taken from my rat filled prison to feel the air and run once more. It was beautiful, I remember riding the plane. It was bumpy. The men who carried me were fresh, new recruits. Some never saw combat. Some fought through WWII. Those men were the hardest. All carried their shiny new M16’s, which had rolled from their fiery birth not long before. I remember the Vietnamese forests. The wet but never cold swamps, the brutality that was shown toward us and which we showed back. I remember being placed in the field stuck in the ground waiting for my prey to step in front of me, but when they came they found their way around. Then my brothers left me buried in the dirt and grass. They left me. I spent years laying in the dirt waiting to complete my mission. This is what I do to pass the time. Wait….
“Wait. What was that?” It’s the farmer’s children.
They skip toward me laughing and smiling the grass sinks beneath their feet. They move closer to me. No don’t come near me. Stop, their will only be pain. Please no!
Go away! Run away…Click.
My trip wire, No...
BOOM.
My arsenal of a thousand plastic spikes jump from my body into the children’s. They scream as they fall to the ground, their blood pours from their wounds and they lie in their own blood, which forms a river and sinks into the earth.
I feel myself slipping away from the world. I feel like I’m sinking. Voices from the past fill my head: my creators, their bosses, those who sent me to my mission. Their voices pull me down. I look up to see the children who I just brought to the end. Their transparent forms stand over me crying.
What did I do? What was the point? It was my mission, but why now? On my dying breath, I realize my mission is flawed. I watch the two transparent figures take to the sky gracefully as I sink to my internal pain.