The Broken Drone

It fell without warning. One moment sky, the next a screech and a thud that rattled the shed. I thought it was my fault. I was outside. I’d thrown a rock, maybe too high. Maybe it hit something I couldn’t see.

I found it smoking in the weeds. Sleek. Charred. Not dead. Not alive either. Just... humming. Like it was thinking. Or listening.

I didn’t touch it. Not that day. But I didn’t tell anyone either.

You grow up around rules, you learn what not to say. You learn that trouble comes easiest when you didn’t mean anything by it. So I stayed quiet. It wasn’t the first time quiet felt safer than truth.

The next day it was still there. The lens twitched when I moved. I covered it with a tarp and dragged it under the shed. My hands shook the whole time. My knees too.

Weeks passed. The thing didn’t move. Just whirred sometimes. Clicked, like it was remembering something. I tried to forget it. But it was mine now. Not in the way you want something. In the way a lie becomes yours.

I didn’t know it had weapons. I didn’t know anything.

One night—heat, a sound I can’t describe, and the dog next door dropped without even barking. It just dropped like a bag of sand. And I didn’t scream. I just stood there.

That’s when I realized what it was. Or part of what it was.

And by then it was too late to say I hadn’t meant to keep it. Too late to explain that I only hid it because I thought I broke it. That I only stayed quiet because I thought I was in trouble.

No one believes innocence after the damage is done. They say I should’ve told someone. But they weren’t there. They didn’t hear it fall. They didn’t feel the way silence closed around it, and around me.

I didn’t know what it was. I still don’t.

Only that it broke, and I hid it.