By Laurie Knapp

This Story Won First Prize in Our Contest

Learn More About Our Contest Here

When she first hears about the towers, she already knows he’s gone. 

“Some putz just crashed a plane into the World Trade,” her neighbor says on the phone, in the same cadence she used last week to gripe about that putz in 3A who left his trash in the hall. 

The first image that comes to mind is Orville Wright and his ridiculous biplane getting lost somehow in clear blue skies and denting the side of a skyscraper. She can’t even imagine that anything else could be possible, until she flips on the TV with shaking hands and sees all that dark, angry smoke churning across the screen and thinks “what floor is this on” and then realizes it doesn’t matter because she knows.

She knows because she had felt an inexplicable shift in the air, like molecules transforming from one state to another—solid to liquid, liquid to gas. Same mass, same substance, but essentially different. 

Now she knows why. 

What she doesn’t know yet is how. 

8:46 a.m. Was he standing at the coffee machine pouring a second cup? (She sees the dregs of his first growing cold in the sink.) Was he impatiently waiting for a fax that never arrived? Was he reading numbers aloud from the morning financials? “Forty-five thousand, two hundred and…” 

Did he see it coming?

Was he alone? Was he in the stairwell, caught in a crush of bodies like the rush-hour train, where you couldn’t tell your own limbs from a stranger’s? 

She hopes so. 

Or was he standing by a shattered windowpane, watching smoke pour out from the floors below, running one final cost-benefit analysis with his colleagues: jump now, or wait and burn? 

Did he have time to think about her? 

Later, on the news, she hears about the voicemails from the dead. “Hey, Mom, it’s Brad…A plane crashed into World Trade Center One. We’re fine, we’re in World Trade Center Two…I think we’ll be here all day…Love you.” She checks the machine, but she knows it’ll be empty of any last words. 

When he left that morning, she’d said, “Can you pick up the dry cleaning?” and he’d said, “I’m going to be late today.”

Before the tower falls, she knows he won’t be coming. 

She’s strangely irked at him for that. For not giving her at least a few days of misplaced hope. For not being a face fluttering on a wall of hundreds of other missing faces, tacked up by people who didn’t yet know. And where did they think they’d be found? Wandering around the city, confused and dust blind?

No, she thinks. It’s better to know.  

Like she knew when they first met. 

They say sparks aren’t real, but that’s just a lie unlucky people tell themselves, because when he met her eyes across the bar, some magnetic pole inside her spun around and pointed at him and said “there.” And she felt her atoms shifting, forever entangling with his.

Three days later, she gets a call saying his body has been found. 

She says, “Okay,” and hangs up, then goes to the window and opens it wide. Something leaves the room, and something else comes in with the dust. 

She doesn’t cry.

Dust blankets the city for days, blotting out the sun, erasing the skyline, so they can’t see the startling gap like a newly missing tooth.

The dust sticks to everything. The streets and the façades and the leaves and the light poles and the faces. Black, brown, and beige faces, all white with dust. And in the dust: everything. Persons, places, things. Transformed from one state to another. 

She tries to picture him. She forgets what he’d been wearing that day, but standing at his closet, she narrows it down by process of elimination. It was the periwinkle blue button-up. The one he wore on his very first day at Marsh McLennan. She remembers the day he got the job. How they’d danced in the kitchen until the downstairs neighbor hollered up and the roaches skittered anxiously back under the sink. The following Monday, she’d pressed every last wrinkle out of that shirt, and as he fastened each button, she stood behind him in the mirror, arms wound around his waist, thinking, “This is the beginning of everything.” 

Four days later, they tally 5,000 missing. 

She hates that she must share her grief. That the most devastating thing that could have happened to her has been diluted into 1/5000th parts. 

She can’t cry. Her eyes have gone dry. She blames the dust. 

Besides, she wants to mourn him, but it feels selfish, because it’s them. It’s him and Edna and William and Steven and all the others in the towers and the planes and the Pentagon and a field she can’t quite picture but imagines as the tufty little meadow behind her childhood home in Lancaster. 

When the obituaries come out, she traces his name in the New York Times and reads the sum of his life in 150 words, and doesn’t understand how this can be it. 

Because at night, when it’s quiet, she still feels him there. She touches the indentation left behind on his pillow. She runs her finger through the dust on her porch railing and stomps it from her shoes and blows it out of her nose and tastes it on the bodega apples.

Until one night, the wind comes and carries the dust cloud away. 

And in the morning, when she sees the clear blue sky, she cries.