It’s not every day someone swallows their one-thousandth bomb but here I am surrounded by the chatter from officials invited to see it. The flash of press cameras flickers across the lawn from where they stand behind a security barrier. If all goes well, and my body absorbs the effects of a nuclear bomb a new era of world safety will be within reach. 

“It looks like a fishbowl,” my partner, Elaine, says of the structure they’ve designed for me to swallow it in.

A bark of laughter escapes me, and I can’t meet her gaze when she turns to look at me. She scans my face, following the thin-lined mosaic of scars left behind from reforming after each explosion.

With my nerves locked behind a cocky smile, her look of concern becomes one of annoyance. She waves at the president of South Korea, leaving me on my own. 

“How are you feeling? Ready to put me out of a job?” The Director of the International Agency of Atomics asks me.

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” I say.

A hand claps me on the back, pulling me into an awkward side hug. “I’d be shitting myself,” the President of the USA says.

I pull away from him and scan the crowd, looking for Elaine. Once upon a time she would’ve saved me from this sort of interaction. My heart stutters when I see her slinking off with a person whose face I don’t catch. I can’t stop looking at the copse of trees she’s disappeared into until I feel someone staring at me. A quick search reveals it’s the President of South Korea. She nods at me and I swear I glimpse a fragment of pity in her somber stare.

When I enter the special dome, everyone moves to the bunkers fitted with viewing screens at the edge of the field. The bomb is wheeled in remotely and a thirty-minute timer starts. I watch Elaine smooth her dress, the sparkling navy one I got her for her birthday this year. A small part of me had hoped my eyes had tricked me. She doesn’t even wave before entering one of the bunkers. Though I haven’t swallowed the bomb yet, it feels like fissures web across my chest. 

In the final minute I shove it down my throat and an enormous rumble pulses within me, shaking the ground. For a moment the fiery pains merge and then numb as I atomise into trillions of fragments, rippling with raw energy before stitching back together. The radiation meter never rises above zero. In this lighting my new scars shimmer ghost-like. One pain dissipates, the other remains.

Spectators exit from their bunkers, cheering my name. Fireworks erupt in the sky. I avoid eye contact with Elaine. Pulling me to the side, the Director of the IAA offers me a job; seek out and destroy nuclear caches. The one Elaine said I shouldn’t take.

“When do you want me to start?”

---

Katherine Garrison writes short fiction, cnf, and poetry in rainy rural Wales. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Superlative Literary Journal, WordFire Press, Utopia Science Fiction Magazine, HAD, Small Wonders, Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Dishsoap Quarterly and others. She was nominated for Best Microfiction 2026. She is currently a volunteer poetry reader at Okay Donkey Magazine. You can find her on Bluesky: @katherinegarrison.bsky.social