Rilla Askew's Blog - Posts Tagged "9-11"

In my classes in short fiction we talk about creating the moment after which nothing will ever be the same. My students haven’t lived through one like this before. Sometimes the moment is dramatic, a violent eruption we watch in disbelief that slowly settles into acceptance—the crumbling, cascading towers of the World Trade Center, for instance. In the days after 9/11, no writer I knew could write. It was the journalists who first told the stories, then the poets, then the short fiction writers, last of all, the novelists. Some of these turnings open for us like a flower blooming, slowly at first, then quickly, more quickly, like a fast motion video, from bud to dying petals dropping to the ground. The closer you are to ground zero, the more wrenched and wretched you feel. But where is ground zero these days? The streets of Rome are empty. The cafes in Paris are closed. Broadway theaters are dark. In my small university town in the heart of the country, the bars and restaurants are shut down. We walk our suburban streets, keeping our distance. Everyone is enormously polite. We smile. No one says much. We know we are all in this together, even if we don’t know quite what this is. Or how, from this irrevocable moment, nothing will ever again be the same.