​Jillian Westbrook was searching. For what, she hadn’t decided yet. But she was hunting for it in the great expanse of the woods behind her new house. She had just moved into it yesterday with her parents and younger twin brothers. So far, Jillian was loving her new home. She had a whole room all to herself, and her new bed was comfortable.

Jillian suddenly had a profound thought. Her twin brothers had a strange obsession with anything shiny. The room that the twins shared had almost a million CDs hanging from the ceiling. What if she could find something shiny for her brothers? They would adore her, and she could have something to look for.

So Jillian looked. She found a broken cd at first, but then contemplated the gargantuan amount of CDs that her brothers already had in their room, and she immediately threw it as far as she could. Jillian did not have a very strong arm, so she saw where it landed. When the disc landed, it made a metallic “clink.” Jillian rushed over to investigate what strange object the CD might have fallen on. She found the CD and picked it up to see what was underneath. It was shiny, heavy, and made a ticking noise when she put it to her ear.

“It must be some clock without a display,” young Ms. Westbrook reasoned (she was only nine).

She ran back home as fast as she could and went into her room, intending to clean the clock off. Once Jillian had removed all the dirt and grime from her gift, she raced upstairs to present it to her brothers. She knocked on the door, opened it, and got on one knee. Jillian then reached behind her back, and with a flourish, showed her finding to the twins. She then explained that it must be a clock because it made a ticking sound and didn’t have a display. The twins didn’t care; they grabbed it and put it on their dresser.

The next day, the Westbrook family went to the zoo. They all had a wonderful time. The twins were most fascinated by the beautiful shiny cages, and the rest of the family enjoyed looking at the animals. There were tigers and elephants and monkeys. Jillian decided that the elephants were her favorite animals and went on to have a lifelong affection for those great beasts. When they had finished looking at animals (and cages), they piled into their car and headed to a Chinese restaurant. The quality of the food and the service impressed the whole family, and they all left the restaurant feeling very satisfied. As the Westbrooks were in no rush to get home, they stopped by the beach and looked at the sunset over the water. That night, in particular, the sunset was a magnificent fluorescent orange. The sheer beauty of it left the whole family awestruck. After they visited the beach, they finally went home. It had been a long day, and the whole family was ready to sleep.

As they pulled into their street, Jillian’s mother screamed, and her father stared. The scream woke Jillian up from her slumber, and she sleepily looked out of the car window. The top floor of the house had collapsed. There were police surrounding the ruins of the house now, and Jillian’s dad got out to talk with them.

“It must have been a bomb,” were the first words that the police said to the father of the Westbrook family. He was right. The shiny, heavy “clock” that Jillian had picked up the day before had been a bomb, and, though nobody realized it, it caused this major explosion.

The next few days were hectic for the Westbrook family. The police were almost constant figures in their lives now, and the Westbrooks grew to know some of them well. They moved out of their new house and into another in a separate neighborhood. This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone, seeing as the unknown bomb had destroyed all their belongings.

Life gradually returned to normal for their family.

The twins could never hoard as magnificent a collection of shiny things as they had before.

The parents always wondered who had bombed their home.

Neither Jillian nor the rest of her family ever realized that it had been the “clock” she had given to the twins that had destroyed their previous house.