Personal Experience of Terrorism

Storm Windows
05/02/09 - Cara Ellison

An experience of the 9/11/2001 attack on New York. An excerpt.

That was it. Everything was gone.

He knew this on some instinctive level, though he had no time to really understand what that meant. He rolled from underneath an SUV, jelly-legs, and looked around.

The building would not stop collapsing. It came down, then the giant clouds of dust, coffee cups, motherboards, phones, people, a burning Pompeii in the sky. Now the air was full of dust lighter than air, floating on the currents. When he rubbed his eyes, they stung. He tasted gritty metal in his mouth, and he spat on the ground.
. . .
It was all gone. His wife. His job. He tried to wash off the dust. The dust was in his nose, in the seashell curves of his ear, between his teeth, under his fingernails, in his hair. He lifted his face to the stream of water.