“I’d just had another go at her...Sarah. She’d been regaling me with another of her life-stories. No, I don’t remember what it was about-probably some situation she was facing at home or how she came to find a five-dollar note on the sidewalk. Why do you want to know anyway?
“Fair enough, but it seems to me that knowing exactly what Sarah Hill was talking about at 8.30 a.m doesn’t have much significance in the whole scheme of things...everything that’s happened here. Are you documenting the tragedy or researching a biography of Sarah’s life! Wait, no, I’m sorry, that was uncalled for. But, God, it’s only been a week. Don’t we all have our own scars to tend?
“Don’t worry, I’ll answer your questions...I need to talk to somebody. Just have a little respect. Thank you... So yes, I yelled at her, told her to shut up and be more professional...Of course I’d have been kinder to her, but how could I have known...
"Of course I regret it! How dare you suggest that I wouldn’t care, wouldn’t regret! I’m not the heartless woman you seem to take me for! You say you want my story, but all you seem interested in is trying to get me to say what you want to hear! If you want my recollection, listen and let me tell it...please. God, people should be allowed to share their experiences of this...
“Sorry, sorry. Emotions running wild, I can’t get my head into normality again. Yes, I’m ready, thank you. Next...I sent her-Sarah- upstairs to run a message to Taylor Scott, one of my collegues. Her office was on the ninety...sixth floor. Yes, of course we had fax machines, but I just wanted to get Sarah out of my sight for a while. God, if only I’d faxed it...
“I worked on the ninety-fourth floor, by the way...for Marsh & McLennan, an insurance company. The company occupied the ninety-fourth floor to the hundredth floor. It was the worst hit...
“I didn’t know anything until it happened. Suddenly the world just exploded around us...it was chaos everywhere. People were screaming, I couldn’t see anything, there was dust everywhere. It hardly cleared at all, it was like looking through mist. The lights were flickering, bodies were everywhere...There were a few survivors in the room, but one half of the space had been destroyed. The wall with the elevators was just...gone...No one knew what had happened, there were screams of bombs and that we were all going to die...I was so scared. Terrified...I was sobbing, all I could think about was getting out of there. God, the noise...
“I couldn’t see anything-the electricity was short-circuiting. The lights were sparking...It was like Hell. One girl was praying, another was on her cellphone, talking to her mum. She was crying, talking like she was going to die...saying goodbye. Plaster was falling from the roof, plaster and chunks of the ceiling. A few people were pulling at others, trying to get them to safety. I didn’t...I just ran.
“I was feeling along the wall, trying to find the door. I didn’t see the shattered brickwork. It broke as I pressed against it, empty air under my feet. Hell behind me, people screaming on the sidewalk below. Someone pulled me back as I was falling. They dragged me into the room and shoved me towards the stairs. When I looked around they’d gone, just another of the crushing, terrified crowd. I stumbled through the door, looking around me. The stairs were crumbling, chunks of concrete falling away along with sections of the once-grand wall...
“Only as I tried to navigate down the ruined stairs did I realize I was bleeding. My suit was sodden with already-congealing blood all down the left arm, my collar ripped and the skin beneath it gashed. Pieces of metal and wood were embedded deep in my muscle. I couldn’t raise that arm to protect my face...I couldn’t get away from the screams, the urgent ring of cellphones as people watching the tower tried to contact their loved ones, praying that they were on a lunch break, had gone out for a coffee...anywhere but in the tower. I was choking on the dust, it was so thick, I could hardly breathe. Every time I inhaled I could taste the dust, somehow taste the horror in the air.
“A piercing scream was rising above all the others...I could hear terror, pure, animal terror in that broken scream...the scream of someone damned. It was only as I fell into a shattered mirror that I realized it was mine...
“I was stumbling in the dark-I fell several times. One of my shoes had been lost along the way. I didn’t think of what was happening above me, to the people who had had the courage to stay and help others. I was dizzy from the loss of blood and the rush downward, forever down...doing everything to continue that frantic, scrambling pace down to the main doors...to safety, to people who still could know happiness.
“A girl was crouching in the corner as I turned down yet another flight of stairs. I could barely see for the spinning of my dazed head or the cloying dust.. The sparking lights were now flashing on-off, on-off, illuminating the other’s eyes. Something about her expression scared me more than anything I had just come through. My hand trembled as I-almost unconsciously-held it out to her. The cries echoing round my skull somehow faded as I looked at her shaking body. She was reaching out her hand to mine...
”I jolted back as the entire corner she was sitting in grew a pattern of cracks, before separating from the main tower entirely...My scream rang out as I held her eyes. They were empty, so empty, as she fell. I watched, as the corner she was still huddled in shattered against the ground below...I felt I owed it to her to watch. To live to tell her story, entwined with mine forever...
“I don’t know how I got out. The girls’ face was the only thing in my head, her features mixing and melding with those of Sarah. God, their faces, faces in my head...I knew they were both dead, and Sarah had died because of me... The tears running down my face were the only obstruction to my vision now...I was so close, the daylight was striping my face as the dust cleared-down so far from the explosion, it only swirled around my feet a little.
“Arms dragged me out of the doors...people pulled me away, shouting. The police were there, the ambulance...I was taken over to an ambulance...as they loaded me in, I saw the tower, burning, next to its twin. That was the first time I realized that they had both been hit. I had thought it was just the North tower... The full horror hit me then, at seeing the scale of this...I had escaped from Hell, and I knew even the few survivors would never forget this day, the date forever burnt into us.
“The date of 9/11.”
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