Ficlets

9/11 through the eyes of a third grader from Minnesota

It was a normal morning. Everything had been going as it always had. The third-grade girl was waiting anxiously for the orange-vested crossing guards to appear before she could begin the trek to school. Then, she heard someone, a resident of her apartment, say “A plane crashed into a building.”
“Really?” The girl heard her mother say.
“Yeah. New York City. The World Trade Centers.”
It didn’t register then. The girl knew that New York was very far away, and it didn’t seem like anything was wrong.
Then she got to school. The students were abuzz with the news, and in music class, the girl finally committed the words to the national anthem to memory.
That night her father called. He usually called on Wednesday, but everything else had been shaken up.
“This was big,” he said to her, “This is the type of thing that makes history. History was made today. No one will ever forget this.”

And she never did.

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