Carved from Darkness

Strange Clouds

SYNOPSIS: A tale of devastation, as told by a hero.

This topic may be sensitive to some. If anything in relation with the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon makes you uncomfortable, please read something else.

(Also, this story won the regionals for a state contest, so...there's that.)

~#~

On the eleventh of September came a downpour of rain, bleak drops of water mixing with the soot smudged against the curbs, and I hated it. Every star in the universe struck the earth by my feet and blew apart the smooth stone at my hands, exploding geysers before me that rose and crafted themselves into the reflective ghosts of towers that had fallen like the Roman Empire.

I was once an insignificant businesswoman, naive and rapturous, with a husband and two boys. That morning came temperate; the beginnings of an urban autumn threaded through the sprouts along the streets and the people that walked along them. I had just sent my children to school, and their bright morning smiles were still imprinted into my mind as two shining light bulbs that would never burst, though the fact that they had complained about their small lunches costed me the precious hours of work travel.

With a last, silent goodbye to the empty apartment (the father had long since left), I gathered the strap of my working bag over my shoulder and began my journey of ultimate loss.

"One who is faced with locked doors can find the key within themselves," my mother told me in the last evening at the farm. Standing before the frontmost set of elevators in the North Tower, I realized that I had never truly pondered over those words enough. Instead of focusing my mind on, perhaps, the biting condescension of my boss when I arrived late, I thought of what I could do to retaliate.

Yell back? Throw my papers to the ground and jump out the window?

8:44 A.M. The elevator chirped its light ding, and I stepped inside, ignoring the sting of the tight ponytail against my scalp.

8:45 A.M. At the automated announcement of the ninety-first floor, I stood to the side to let a couple of other men and women through.

It was the next minute that froze my heart and shook my chest to merciful tears. A deafening rumble plowed through the building, and I thought, God, an earthquake. Who's ever heard of an earthquake in New York?

Confusion turned the heads of my fellow business-people, even as the elevator's system jolted us to a shaking halt. I collapsed against the back corner, my knees utterly useless, and tried to speak over the yells of the man.

"What's going on?" he said, pounding his fist against the elevator doors. Debris rained down from the ceiling of the small space, coating shoulders and heads with fine earth-colored dust. "Let us out! We demand to know what's happening!"

"Be rational!" I snapped. "Open the stupid doors!"

The man placed one hand on each slab, pushing them apart from each other with strained effort. I rushed forward to help while the other woman collapsed to her knees, holding her head in her hands.

A plume of smoke bloomed forth as it reached the thin opening that we had created; at our feet was the floor beneath the highest, where everything was stained gray, footprinted papers covered the ground, and people crouched in on themselves.