"If that thing rolls off the table, we're all dead," the soldier said to the librarians.

Libraries hold lots of shit. Everybody thinks of books, but there's also local treasures. Personal papers of famous citizens. Trinkets of elections and dances, high school yearbooks and football jerseys. All things miniscule in the grand scheme. Things not deemed precious enough for archives but priceless to everyone local who remembers.

Sometimes cannonballs.

We have a lot of weird things in our little collection. With the pandemic and all the extra time we have without patrons, we decided to go through them. Most are pretty normal, but there's a few we are not sure about. Some of the items, well, the labels fell off, including an old brown box full of metal balls and bullets wrapped in styrofoam.

We figured they were bullets and cannonballs. In the Civil War, a few camps were set up outside town both coming and going. Collectors are still finding things with metal detectors. We have a base just outside town, still. Lots of military around to tell us what these balls are.

Master Sergeant Majors came in masked up but out of uniform. Good man, right to the point he asked where they are. I think he was excited. Not much has happened and maybe he wanted something for the base museum. Brenda and I led him over to where we had put the items out on a table. Kids used to play Magic on that table. Now it had a layer of bubble wrap with two dozen balls and bullets of various sizes.

Majors said, "All these little ones are minni balls. Nothing too special, but interesting."

"Civil War?" I said.

Majors nodded. "Probably. But everyone shot everything around then. Not much standard issue. Some of these round ones? Probably some rebel picked up granddaddy's musket to go kill Yankees."

"And the bigger ones?" Brenda asked.

"Artillery shot. Cannonballs. These little ones were a grape shot. Kinda like a shotgun. Tear men apart." He hefted a larger one. "These were for structures or just bouncing around and tearing shit up."

"Any of them worth anything to you?"

"Oh, we'll take them. Good condition, little rust. Except that one."

He pointed to a ball about the size of a small melon. "If that thing rolls off the table, we're all dead."

Brenda took a step back with her hand over her heart. Me, I got closer.

I said, "What do you mean?"

"See that wax?" Majors said.

I did.

"That's a seal. There should be a fuse coming out of it, but it's keeping in a load of gunpowder and probably a good bit of metal. Shrapnel. Light the fuse, fire it off, and it explodes above the enemy spreading out all over. Hell of a thing. Hurricane Dorian in South Carolina uncovered a bunch and they had to blow them up. Some guy named Sam White in 2008, he thought he could restore one he found. Poor bastard died in his driveway. They found pieces of it on his neighbor’s porch."

Brenda, almost at the door, said, "What's the chance it’s okay?"

"No chances, ma'am. Even if it's empty, and with that wax it's probably not, best not take the chance. Could be unstable."

I said, "Okay. What do we do?"

"Get it out of here," Brenda said.

Major said, "She's right. Take it up to the base. We'll blow it up. Blow it up good."

"You can't take it?" Brenda said.

"I'm not riding with that thing. Shocks are for shit," Major said.

And so the next day, I made the thirty minute drive in my Corolla with a small box that contained a ball that should a dumbass late for work run a stop light and kill me dead. Thirty minutes of white knuckled panic. I would probably make the paper, though. I could see the headline, "Librarian Last Victim of the Civil War."

They don't teach you that in library school.