Lobsters and Landmines

by Glen Johnson

  A low growling sound made him jump. Pulling his hand away quickly he was rewarded by seeing dogs all around. He was inside the large dog’s cage.

  All the dogs were growling, a deep vibration that ran through the ground. All had their heads lowered. However, none was attacking.

  Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!

  He pulled the old revolver from his waistband and fired at the large dogs. All six rounds, one after the other. A handful of dogs lay dead, with some injured. The others did not even flinch or move as the ones next to them were gunned down. However, they still did not move towards him.

  He noticed they were no longer staring at him, but looking at something behind him.

  He understood when he spun around. The Bitch stood to one side, her one good eye staring straight at his throat, as she always did when he walked past, but this time, there was no fence between them.

  Movement outside the cage caught Lennie’s attention. A small girl in a white dress, now all covered in mud and stains, sat to one side, watching, her dirty, bare feet pointed at him. Her dark-brown eyes wide, while staring. For some reason, he noticed a grubby doll head on the mud-covered ground just in front of her.

  Time slowed down for Leonard Solomon. All his life choices had lead-up to this one moment in time.

  He knew he could have jumped back down the hole, but the Bitch would only follow. He would rather die in the open air, than in a pit in the ground that those cunts had dug.

  Karmas a bitch, he thought.

  The large Alsatian moved forward; her gaze locked onto a throbbing vein in his neck... Her one good eye seemed to state, yes, today is the day!

  -4-

  Towers of Tears

  The Lord is close to the broken-hearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. Psalm 34:18

  Kerri Worthshaw sat in front of her double door French window, looking out through the dusty glass across the small balcony towards the vista that stretched out before her, roofs, towers, steeples, and a million reflecting windows. Her small apartment sat above a noodle shop on Mulberry Street, Manhattan.

  Kerri’s once beautiful, shining, shoulder length, mouse coloured hair was now all tangled and dull. Her brown eyes had lost their lust for life, and had dark, puffy rings. For someone who was twenty-four she looked considerably older and worn-out. She had never had a magazine-skinny body, a little too much around the hips and backside, but that had all gone. She now looked skeletal – unhealthily thin.

  It had only been six weeks since her world changed forever, but six weeks was enough to change her body and her view of the world.

  On some days, she couldn’t even manage the simple act of looking out at the skyline. Looking across at the tall buildings, she could see the many lives being lived out within. She felt a prang of guilt that she was, in fact, sitting here at all.

  The whole city changed forever due to one event.

  A world in shock.

  Kerri lived on the lower-east side. Everyone believed that the entire island was expensive real estate, but you simply had to find the little corners where the rent wasn’t higher than your monthly wages, and where the crime wasn’t too prolific. And if you were lucky, where you didn’t have to walk too far on a dark morning to catch the subway.

  Nevertheless, even from her low-rented apartment window she could still see the city’s impressive skyline. Or what was left of it. Its two main structures were now a vast hole, referred to as Ground Zero – the cause of all her heartache and sadness, and her self-inflicted bitter loneliness.

  Kerri worked for a large insurance company, whose offices had been on the seventy-fourth floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Now the view from her office window was spectacular.

  She used to be a little afraid of heights, but as a close friend pointed out to her one day, “If you fall from anything over four stories high, you’re likely to die. So it is not the height that kills you, it is the ground. So just enjoy the view.”

  Remembering what her friend said made her melancholy. She sat hugging the coffee cup close to her chest, its contents long cold, but she hadn’t even realized, or cared.

  It was raining outside. Big wet greasy drops slapped against the balcony, and swam down the wide window. It gave a surreal feeling to everything. Everything was just a grey blur, indistinct, like an old washed-out watercolour painting. It was as if Mother Nature was copying her mood.

  A few scrawny plants on the balcony were bent double by the fat droplets hitting them. She did not care though. Only plants.

  At one time, her balcony had been overflowing with life and colour. She had been so proud of her unusual assortment of flowers and shrubs. However, they had all ‘gone-to-the-dogs,’ as the expression went. The time she had spent nurturing them, watering them, all seemed pointless, when everything you had could be taken away in the blink of an eye. Or the flash of a plane’s fuel tank.

  Kerri noticed the cold coffee in her grip. She slowly stood, turning her back to the view, and made her way through her small one-bedroom apartment. She Ignored the screams of an argument from upstairs, and the clatter of broken furniture. Just part-and-parcel of living in this area. She could hear Mrs. Clark; the old senile widow from the apartment below, smacking her walking stick on her ceiling, she probably thought the arguing was originating from Kerri’s apartment. She ignored it all. She simply didn’t care.

  She stood in the kitchen after putting the cup in the sink. She didn’t bother washing it, just piled it up with all the other unwashed dishes.

  Her kitchen window looked directly onto another apartment building. All that could be seen was a dirty grey brick wall with a small greasy window – the bedroom of some adolescent. Heavy metal posters covered the walls. Loud abusive music blared from the window.

  She hung her head forward, her unbrushed hair cascading around her face. A solitary tear rolled down her left cheek. She didn’t bother to wipe it away, soon more would follow. She leant over the sink, her tears pattering onto the dirty dishes.

  She looked up, and was rewarded by seeing a spotty teenager leaning out of his window, smoking. He could see she was crying, but he simply tossed away his dog-end and slammed the window shut.

  That was the great thing about this city, no one cared. Or was that its biggest problem?

  A cry issued from her trembling lips. Tears soaked her face. She turned slowly, as if on a turntable, and like slow motion, she started to slide down the cupboard to the tiled floor. Her arms gripped tightly around her tucked up legs. Head resting upon her knees, tears soaking her sweat pants. There she sat for over an hour, with no one to comfort her. With no one to tell her everything was going to be all right. With no one to love or support her. And while she sat there, silently, and all alone, she thought about her best friend, and how she had sent her to her death.

  *

  September 11th 2001, 9/11 a date a nation would never forget, or stop grieving over. A date many individuals lost loved ones – family members and close friends. A date etched onto their heart’s calendar for the rest of their lives.

  However, for some, like Kerri, the date was an even worse nightmare. A date where she not only grieved the death of hundreds of friends and associates, but she also carried the knowledge that one person should not have been there, should not have been buried under thousands of tons of twisted steel, glass and concrete. A person, like herself, who should have been at home on her day off, or more to the point at the zoo with Kerri, like they had arranged.

  Like most plans, things happen. Things change. Accidents happen – terrorists happen.

  The reason Jade – Kerri’s friend – had changed their plans was because of one man: Milo Spencer. Milo was the new man in the company. He worked the False Claims Department.

  Kerri and Jade were best friends since high school. People thought they were sisters they looked so alike. They had the same tall thinish bodies, with mousy shoulder-length hair, brown eyes, and quick smiles.

  They even went
for the same job interview. Both ended up with jobs with the same company, and against all the odds, they had desks facing each other, joined together. Fate they both called it.

  Then Milo arrived.

  Milo sat to one side of the office, over Jade’s left shoulder. And after almost three days of constant begging, Kerri had swapped desks with Jade, so Jade could stare fixated at her dream man across the office. The last man she would ever be infatuated with.

  It turned out that Kerri knew Milo – a friend of a friend – and Milo would walk over to talk with Kerri, always flicking sideways glances at Jade, who would sit like a puppy; eyes fixed on Milo, and his chiseled body, strong jaw, and piercing, deep green eyes. At some points, it even looked like her tongue would be about to lull from her open mouth.

  Jade pushed and pushed Kerri to introduce her. On a few occasions, she did. However, Jade sat staring into his eyes, unable to utter coherent words, just sitting like a statue, nodding at all Milo’s comments and questions and giggling like a schoolgirl.

  Jade started to wear low-cut tops to catch his attention, until Mr. Hammerhock, the office manager, had to have a word with her about her attire.

  Then September 10th arrived, when Kerri announced to Jade that she had found out where Milo ate his breakfast and lunch. They had tried to follow him on numerous occasions, but being seventy-nine stories up, with thousands working in the same building; it was hard to keep track of one person. They had always lost him around the thirty-second floor, where Milo had a friend working, and he would get off on that level to meet him.

  Kerri announced to her friend that Milo, and a few others, went to the plaza between the two tall buildings for breakfast, to eat from a pretzel stand, and again at lunchtime to a small hotdog stand that was famous for its chilly-dogs. Jade was there, hook-line-and-sinker. However, by the time they had made their way down the lift, and across the plaza and made it to the hotdog stand, they could see Milo and his friends walking away, napkins wiping the remains of their dinner from their mouths.

  Jade had an idea. Tomorrow was their day off. They had both arranged to meet outside Soho, and go from there, taking subway line three, to the public zoo. However, Jade wanted to come dressed in her work clothes, and stand waiting for Milo, as if she was on her way to work and had stopped off for a pretzel. If she didn’t see him, then she would hang around until lunch, to try to start up a conversation.

  Infatuation made people do crazy things; Kerri decided.

  Kerri was a little put off, by being dumped from a girl’s day out, so her friend could stand and dribble while looking at Milo, as Milo tried to make conversation, with Jade eating a chilly-dog, and having red chilly sauce smeared all over her face. However, seeing the look of pleading in her friend’s eyes, she gave in, saying it would be fine; they could go to the zoo next week. However, it would be the last day she would see her friend alive. So little was recovered that there couldn’t be an open casket at her funeral, eventually having to identify her by DNA and a silver and jade bracelet Kerri had given her for her eighteenth birthday. The contents of her casket weighed only five pounds.

  Kerri made her way home, sat on the subway train, as it slowly filled beyond capacity. She had given up her seat to an old lady, and was now being squeezed up against an Italian man in a black leather jacket; whose personal hygiene was obviously the last thing on his list of priorities. Nevertheless, that didn’t stop him from smiling at her, and trying, even with the roar of the train, to strike up a conversation. She fretted deafness.

  Jade had begged Kerri to meet her at the hotdog stand twenty minutes before Milo appeared. Kerri said she didn’t mind not going to the zoo, but she wasn’t about to waste her whole day off acting like a love-struck teenager. Of course, she didn’t say the last bit aloud.

  The morning of September 11th came, starting like any other. A whole nation not realizing that something was about to happen, that would, in someway, affect them all. By the end of this day, a nation – the world – would cry an ocean’s worth of tears.

  Jade called Kerri, excitement, and worry was obvious in her voice. She asked a hundred and one questions about what to ask him. What should she say? However, Kerri was the last person to give advice on courtship.

  She hadn’t had a steady boyfriend in over eighteen months. So long, in fact, that she used to joke she was in training to become a nun. Her last failed relationship was with Colin Hampton the departments’ Mailman – of all people. He came through the office everyday at ten o’clock sharp, depositing the mail on their desks. Why she picked him; she would never know, but the relationship was doomed from day one. It ended up getting nasty, and in the last few days her mail started to disappear.

  Kerri hadn’t heard another word from Jade until five minutes before she was to meet Milo. Kerri’s phone rang, as she stood on her balcony watering her rhododendrons. She had just finished clipping back her small conifer tree that sat in a terracotta pot that Jade painted for her. Jade knew Kerri loved flowers, and not having much money on one of Kerri’s birthdays; Jade had painted her the pot. The pot now sits next to Kerri’s bed, besides a photo of Jade and Kerri, during graduation.

  Kerri stood leaning on the rail, looking out across the city, the two towers standing prominent, in the distance. Kerri imagined Jade stood between them, in her best low-cut dress, and high heels, cradling a big salted pretzel that she had been holding for twenty minutes, while waiting for Milo to appear.

  Kerri laughed at the image. Wondering how Jade wasn’t arrested for loitering. Or the strange looks the pretzel man, Ken was giving her, wondering why she was stood next to his cart and hadn’t moved away.

  That’s when it happened.

  Kerri saw the plane gliding along, thinking nothing of it, still talking to the nervous Jade on the other end, who had just stated Milo was walking towards her, smiling.

  Then a huge red and bright yellow explosion lit up the area around where she was looking. The plane hit the northern tower.

  The phone went dead.

  Kerri panicked.

  What had just happened? It looked like the plane had hit the tower. Was it a malfunction of the onboard navigation system? How could this happen?

  She struggled with the phone, after the fourth try, she reached a frantic Jade. Jade was ranting on about what had just happened, and how the towers were being evacuated. She explained that Milo was there with her, comforting her.

  Like everyone on that day, they both believed that the crash was an error, a freak accident. That was until sixteen minutes later when the second plane collided with the southern tower.

  She could hear Jade shouting and swearing down the line. Kerri was trying to get some sense from her, but she had just witnessed the other plane hit, and was in a state of shock herself.

  Could this be happening? This is America; things like this didn’t just happen!

  The line went dead again.

  Kerri franticly tried to get her friend on the phone, but with no luck. Then while still trying redial, Kerri left the balcony and flicked on the television with a shaking hand. The crashes were already on every station. There were many theories. CNN was saying it was a huge navigational error. Flicking to FOX, they were saying from the word go, that it was more likely to be a terrorist attack. Then, while she was watching, another report had come in; a third plane had struck the Pentagon.

  With shaking hands Kerri was repeatedly hitting redial. Then her phone rang. She answered it quickly, thinking it was Jade. It was Kerri’s mum, crying on the phone. She knew it was Kerri’s day off, but she needed to check. After a few minutes of crying, Kerri explained to her mother that she was trying to get hold of Jade, telling her about the situation. Her mum hung up, after saying a prayer that her only daughter was okay. Kerri asked her to say one for Jade.

  Then after almost forty minutes from when the first plane had struck, she got a ring tone.

  Jade’s voice came on line, crying. Both of them would have been sitting on t
he very floor the second plane struck. Both knew hundreds of people on that floor. However, Jade stated that a crying Milo was here holding her shaking hand, helping her, comforting her.

  So Jade had what she wanted, but through the worst kind of circumstances, Kerri thought sadly.

  Kerri was trying to explain that another plane had struck the Pentagon, but Jade was upset, crying hysterically. Kerri was telling her to get out of there. However, Jade was too upset, wanting to know what had happened to all their friends, and she wasn’t about to let go of Milo’s hand.

  Kerri sat watching the television, back on CNN. The two towers burned like huge candles. People were jumping from upper levels, because the stairs were destroyed on impact.

  Kerri sat crying; watching the bodies fall, almost gracefully as if the people knew there was no other way. It was heart rendering, and loud sobs escaped her.

  No one knew what was going to happen next. The towers were huge, like standing sentinels to America’s greatness, no doubt, why the week; cowardice terrorist had picked them in the first place. No one believed a plane could bring a building that size down. Then again, nothing like this had ever happened before.

  Even though she could see the buildings from her balcony, Kerri sat in front of the television. It made her feel like she wasn’t alone; listening to the news anchorman and woman, because even though the phone was still on, Jade was jumping back and forth between her and Milo.

  Her heart was screaming out to all her friends, on the floor the plane had hit. Crying into the phone, along with Jade again, who was back on the other end, who was there looking up at the flames and falling debris, and the people jumping for their lives.

  Kerri could hear all the commotion around Jade down the phone line – people crying, screaming, and shouting in disbelief, with the sound of sirens in the background.

  The buildings were streaming with dense, black, and grey smoke, with sections pouring flaming tongs of fire; almost looking like larva pouring from the buildings as the metal melted under the extreme heat.