by NAP BOOKS
Do you remember the day the towers fell? Doesn’t matter where you lived that year, that month, that day, for days and months and years after, you know about the day the towers fell because we were each inside those falling towers and we were each the bodies falling outside of the falling towers and we were the rescuers and the mourners and the newsmen and women trying to capture the moment the towers fell because already, then, we knew that we would remember wanting to remember the moment the towers fell.
Before those towers fell, we did not know of an after the towers fell, because we did not think in terms of before and after. Only after a before do you think in terms of before and after.
We shrouded our mirrors in black and tore our clothing and cried until we were waterlogged from crying and we went to cemeteries and talked to the before-dead because there is no room for the after-dead and I feel I must archive each after-dead, remembering their before-dead, resolving their afterlives.
We went to church and we asked for forgiveness and we asked for reasons and we kept saying that word, why, whywhywhywhywhywhywhy, until we sounded like a murder of crows. Why.
Harriet sent a postcard last week. Made it, she wrote. Beautiful here. Neither rain nor snow nor sleet nor hale nor flash can keep the postal services from delivering, though the decrease in postal use has most post offices shuttered every other day. Stamps cost $23. No joke. $23 to send a letter. But we send these letters because every now and then getting something unexpected is nice.
Beautiful here, Harriet wrote, but she didn’t include a return address, so we can’t write back and say that here, where we are, this here, remains the same, and that her farmhouse in Topeka, still where it landed, remains the same, and the streets with its cars and its dead and its stop and go lights and signs and dead ends and two ways and rotaries, all of that remains the same, and we remain the same and mostly we can’t write back to say how jealous we are that she is somewhere beautiful and we are somewhere still the same.
William Henderson has been published in Dr. Hurley’s Snake-Oil Cure; Eunoia Review; Hippocampus Magazine; Annalemma Magazine; Curbside Quotidian; How I met …, an online collection of essays detailing intersections, crashes, and other ways we meet people; Sea Giraffe (from which he was awarded the Martius Prize in Nonfiction); the Smoking Poet, Bluestem, Zouch Magazine, Whistling Fire, 50 to 1, Specter Literary Magazine, Pure Slush, Revolution House, This Great Society, Ham Lit, The Writing Disorder, nontrue, Xenith, The Fix, The Subterranean Literary Journal, Red Fez, and Writing in Public. Also, NAP Literary Magazine will publish his first chapbook in January 2012.
Henderson works as a freelance writer, editor, and copyeditor, and is a full-time father to his children, Avery and Aurora. He can be reached at [email protected], on Twitter @Avesdad, and through his blog, HendersonHouseofCards.wordpress.com.