9/11 Exercise

I had to be the one to tell my mother. As I watched the news, she slept in bed. Although I knew something big had happened, something that made me go into my mother's room and wake her up, it didn't hit me until she started crying, in the dark, still recovering from a dream. It hit her instantly. I didn't understand how she could react so viscerally without even seeing that image - one plume of smoke, one flaming puncture. Some people were kept out of school that day. I went around laughing and asking people if they were Pakistani. I still feel sickened by that 12 year old reaction to something too grave for her to understand. Not long after the event occurred, the memory became absurd to me. My friend's little brother would say the pledge of allegiance at 9:11 each morning, each evening. We'd eat hot dogs off paper plates with printed red, white, and blue.