They yanked me out of my mother with a pickaxe. They took us in our thousands, each bucketload stealing away a hundred of my brothers and sisters. Electric lamps cast everything in harsh white. Sifted, sorted, milled, cut. Steel rolled over our bodies, and we became dust. Water baptised us, then came the sulphates and solutions - oh, how they stung. They burned and pricked at our essence, a molecular wildfire that ate at our chemical bonds like flames to a string. 

A truck, a train, a truck again. The furnace swallowed us whole. Superheated air roasted away the sulphur in our hearts and we became one, a million siblings in a single liquid body. Down channels and pipes, we glided effortlessly through a maze of siphons and metallurgic filters. Our molten profile became blocks; blocks became sheets; sheets became wire. Form upon form. A dozen journeys, a dozen reincarnations; each new life a vessel to the next.

The thermal mould blessed me with my final shape. I grew curves, contours - a purpose. Machines honed our heads into perfect killing tips. A thousand copper jackets clamped around a thousand tiny waists, and we became complete. We lined up in our new uniforms ready for inspection. Plastic gloves picked out the runts on the conveyor belt, singling out the duds, the ones too crooked to complete the journey. Straight as an arrow, I made the cut. Not all of us did. 

Into a crate and onto a flatbed truck went the chosen ones. Shipped out to some foreign land, each of us a carbon copy of the next. Our jackets clinked with each rumble and bump. We came to a halt, and the crack of light at the line of the lid erupted into a vista of cloudless blue sky. 

Dirty hands delved into our mass, grabbing us by the fistful. I was pinched up between forefinger and thumb and thrust down into the curve of a rifle magazine - click. A brother followed - click - and pushed me down further down still. Then a sister - click. Third in line was as good a place as any. We huddled together in the darkness, the tension of the spring underneath keeping us poised for action, ready to be thrown up into the chamber. The call to war came sooner than expected.

CRACK! Light flashed, and a sister left us.

 CRACK! Light flashed, and a brother left us.

 Then my turn came. A firing pin pounded into my primer. The gunpowder in my belly ignited. The rifle roared - CRACK! - and I burst out of its mouth at eight hundred metres a second. African bush spat past, too fast to drink in. I twisted, I spun, and I slotted into a man’s stomach, just above the belly button. 

I bounced around inside his chest cavity a little, unsure where to settle. The spine was too firm a bed. The ribcage, likewise, but I tired with every ricochet. I came to rest, exhausted, next to the scapula - that hard slab of collagen and calcium that calls itself a shoulder blade. Here I settled. And here I sleep still, with bone as my roof and shredded lungs as my blanket. 

My mother will not reclaim me, shaped and formed and polished as I am. My bed must rot. My body must rust away to dust. What can be done, but wait?