Anna doesn’t mean to drop the grenade. It is cupped in her palm one moment and the next it is falling in a strange, slow arc, tumbling end over end like some sort of dislodged pineapple. She knows that she should reach out and grab it, that she should stop it from smashing to the scuffed concrete floor. But her body is frozen and her thoughts sluggish, stuck on the telegram she received this morning and the two dozen words that irrevocably altered her life:
The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret that your fiancé, Hans Nowak, was killed in action in Amiens, France, on August 9.
Anna cannot command her limbs to obey the order that her mind is shouting. So she watches the grenade fall, then bounce and skitter, the slim silver pin flying from the arming mechanism. The grenade comes to a stop where her supervisor stands ten feet away, his back turned, shouting instructions into the busy, clamoring factory. Anna knows that there are seven seconds from when the pin is dislodged to when the grenade explodes, yet she does not move. Does not speak.
It is as though her mind was cleaved upon reading that telegram: one half eerily calm and the other disintegrating into myriad pieces that ricocheted inside her skull. But between these two halves a curtain was drawn, and Anna’s conscious mind was trapped on the still, quiet side, unable to process the horrific reality that Hans is dead.
Six seconds. Anna pushes against that dense barrier in her mind but she cannot access the necessary panic or the words to warn her supervisor. She cannot step away or run.
Anna walked the two miles to the factory today. She donned her cap and apron like she has every day for the last year. Stuffed wool in her ears to muffle the incessant rattle and clang of the machinery. She went to her place at the end of the assembly line and for two hours she did her job, unable to think or cry or feel. All emotion muffled, all reality blurred. There was only the work in front of her, the ability to do the next thing.
Five seconds. She may as well hear the tick of a clock in her mind, counting down until the people in front of her are obliterated.
Hans was so alive, so warm, so intimate just a few months ago, pressed against her in the dark, whispering and laughing in her ear, hands exploring all the swells and hollows of her body. He cannot be gone from her. She did not feel his passing. August 9 came and went without so much as a shudder in her soul. Without any sense that he had slipped away. How could she not have known? It shouldn’t be possible. And yet, somehow, it is. Hans is dead, and he will never know that she carries his child, that a piece of him has taken root inside of her.
Four seconds. She tries to speak but still the words do not come.
So Anna did her job all morning. And then she lifted the grenade from its place within the assembly wheel and checked the safety mechanisms. Striker, lever, and pin. She rolled it over in her hand, examining the compact metal ball. It was identical to the others except for the fact that the triggering pin was loose, pulled an inch out from the shell.
Three seconds. She lifts her hand. Tries to wave. Tries to get her supervisor’s attention.
When Anna first noticed the loose pin, she looked around the room for her supervisor. That is protocol. He is the only person on the floor who is allowed to reset the pin. In all the time that Anna has worked here he has had to do it only three times, and never for her. But just as her supervisor’s name formed on her tongue there was a nudge deep within her. A gentle, prodding poke. An acknowledgment of existence. Not so much a kick, but a greeting. Hans’s child saying hello. She gasped. The grenade fell from her hand.
Two seconds. The curtain in her mind shudders and splits apart at the realization that she too is about to die. Hans’s child is about to die. There is no time to run or scream or hide. No time to pray. The only thing she can do before her entire field of vision detonates into blinding white light is fold in upon herself and press her hands against the small, firm swell of her belly.
Hellfire.
Thunder.
Shrapnel.
A cloud of red as her supervisor is eviscerated before her eyes.
Franziska Annalie Schanzkowska is blown backward into the wall, jagged bits of metal ripping into her temple, torso, and thighs.