The Day They Called the Bomb Squad

In retrospect, it wasn't surprising that a suspicious package shut down an entire city and sent a population into panic. At the time it was astonishing and terrifying.

Jane saw the package first, hurrying on her way to an important meeting with her publisher. Medium-sized, wrapped in plain brown paper, and sitting by itself on a bench in the bustling plaza in the middle of the bustling city. Curious, but far too bustling herself, her stride never faltered as she kept on going.

"I saw something funny this morning," she mentioned to her publisher, describing the package.

"Sounds like an interesting start to a new story, but let's talk about why your current story is late," replied the ever practical publisher, and that was the end of that.

John saw it next. He casually and slowly veered toward the bench, wavering about picking it up and taking it with him. His desperation hadn't yet called for desperate measures, so when a group of teenagers bounced between him and the bench he casually and slowly veered away.

The teenagers all glanced at the package but knew better than to examine it closely. The dim voices of their parents echoed in the backs of their heads. They rarely consciously acknowledged those voices, but moved on anyway.

A young mother swooped up her young child as she started running to investigate the package.

“No, no, don’t touch!” the mother warned, and a voice of caution was planted in yet another young head.

An old man on a nearby bench saw the toddler and the mother and wondered when his son would call to check on him. Still feeding the pigeons, he imagined himself answering, then continued to feed the pigeons.

And then it began.

A teenager told her mother about the package, who casually mentioned it to her friend the publisher over happy hour cocktails. The publisher remembered the errant writer who first brought it up, and asked her husband later if he thought it was suspicious, and had he heard anything on the news. He hadn’t, but he’d been thinking about his father and was about to give him a call to check on him.

No one knows if Karen actually saw the package before she called the police about the bomb in the plaza. By then, the game of telephone was in full swing.

A news crew with a scrappy young reporter set up on the edge of the plaza. The reporter had a story tip from a friend of a friend, and she very much needed a juicy scoop to advance in her job. The cameraman thought it was a waste of time.

“Bomb!” someone screamed from the middle of the plaza, looking at their cell phone as if they couldn’t believe what they’d heard. For a few seconds it appeared that no one else did either, and then someone ran. And then everyone ran, screaming, crying, shouting, trampling over others in their haste to get away, pulling out cell phones to relay last messages and pleas for help.

“I hope you’re getting all this!” shouted the scrappy young reporter to the cameraman.

She breathlessly reported that someone knew someone who knew something about this bomb. It was a special bomb designed to wipe out an entire city, not just the immediate area. There would be radiation and chemicals and everyone had to get out of the city immediately.

Everyone already knew that because people had called people with warnings and they had called other people, and by now all the roads out of the city were jammed with furiously honking cars.

By the time the police arrived in the plaza it was empty, except for the scrappy young reporter and her grumpy cameraman.

They sent in the bomb squad.

The box was empty.

Everyone hopes that everyone else has learned some kind of lesson.