The first
bomb hit at 3am.
On the move, it's sometimes a surprise
to be brought back. Almost as surprising is what brings you there... a bright
wrapper in debris, clear and orderly print newly revealed by a
rustling of fragments, scraping of dirt, weather, entropy, the
process which holds us all as we fall apart. A bit of structured order alien and
impotent against the chaos surrounding it. Sometimes a color.
Sometimes a sound. Sometimes the way that light bounces off of the
setting horizon, reaching you sideways like a glancing blow across
the surface of the Earth through broken glass, in broken windows, in
broken buildings, through dust clouds on the broken world that used
to be a whole home. Looking back, I am nonplussed to recall how
deeply I felt of that old apartment of ours as a place. It was to
me, a familiar and welcoming thing, and that seemed so normal. It
seemed so certain. It seemed so ours, and then... after well, at
least for a time so mine.
I never thought so much about what it was, what it contained, as an avatar or shrine to what was no more. How much power it held, that things held. I never thought too deeply about it, I only felt it, and that knowledge probably contained all the thinking I could have done. Only now... when I'm looking for any reason why, do I think about it.
The first bomb hit at 3am and shook us from our beds. A noisy distance of electronic alarms, mechanical noises, and then, slowly, human cries. Before there was time to make sense of any of it, the second bomb hit. It came from the sky. It destroyed the top third of the building across our street from the inside in an expanding fractured shrapnel bubble of brownstone, fire, and telephone pole. The Russos were gone, as was Walt Jackowitz and his daughter Ginny, and all of the apartments around them. Radios told us later that, “the targets could not be confirmed as neutralized,” and that was why five more bombs hit over the next twenty minutes. We were told that the government somewhere that had released them was targeting “international terrorists” hiding in midtown. America, no longer the world police on a day of suicide drones, responded. That was how the world ended.
If anyone ever asks... if we both survive to wonder, I will tell them the thing that surprised me most was missing an apartment like.... I don't know how to describe grieving a place. The people were gone, but, so were the only places I could go to feel their memory. It made even the soil alien.
A food wrapper is pinned, bleached pale yellow and orange, gently flapping beneath a twisted bicycle rack. In that moment I remembered the aisles and the people and the sound of Alphonse and the trailing chuckle of his voice in a shared joke and I had never even eaten the brand. In that instant I saw the world die again, and a dead stranger had given the news.
I never thought so much about what it was, what it contained, as an avatar or shrine to what was no more. How much power it held, that things held. I never thought too deeply about it, I only felt it, and that knowledge probably contained all the thinking I could have done. Only now... when I'm looking for any reason why, do I think about it.
The first bomb hit at 3am and shook us from our beds. A noisy distance of electronic alarms, mechanical noises, and then, slowly, human cries. Before there was time to make sense of any of it, the second bomb hit. It came from the sky. It destroyed the top third of the building across our street from the inside in an expanding fractured shrapnel bubble of brownstone, fire, and telephone pole. The Russos were gone, as was Walt Jackowitz and his daughter Ginny, and all of the apartments around them. Radios told us later that, “the targets could not be confirmed as neutralized,” and that was why five more bombs hit over the next twenty minutes. We were told that the government somewhere that had released them was targeting “international terrorists” hiding in midtown. America, no longer the world police on a day of suicide drones, responded. That was how the world ended.
If anyone ever asks... if we both survive to wonder, I will tell them the thing that surprised me most was missing an apartment like.... I don't know how to describe grieving a place. The people were gone, but, so were the only places I could go to feel their memory. It made even the soil alien.
A food wrapper is pinned, bleached pale yellow and orange, gently flapping beneath a twisted bicycle rack. In that moment I remembered the aisles and the people and the sound of Alphonse and the trailing chuckle of his voice in a shared joke and I had never even eaten the brand. In that instant I saw the world die again, and a dead stranger had given the news.
