When Darkness Swallows the Sun (what I wrote on the 1st anniversary)

I am asleep when the killing begins, and when news of it reaches the desert city where I live. The airports close, the offices empty and the city soon has the feel of a Sunday morning.

When she leaves her office, she comes home and finds me asleep. She shakes me awake and tells me what has happened. I don’t take it in at first — the World Trade Center reduced to rubble by the impact of two hijacked airplanes, another plane flown into the Pentagon, another down in Pennsylvania, thousands of peo...