Niv and Jenny were on the couch in our apartment, staring at the television screen and listening to the reports on what happened to the towers. I caught the tail end of a narrative and felt bile push its way up my throat; I rushed to the bathroom and retched, pushing Harry away when he tried to hold my hair back. I could hear Jenny's voice rising, Niv's low tones carrying to me, but I couldn't make out any words. A door slammed and then there was only quiet, settling down softly around me like snow. Or ash.  

I brushed the blunt ends of hair from my face, feeling the slime on them but not caring. I went to my room and found my journal, grabbing a calculator and sitting down on my bed. Harry lingered, watching me closely, but didn't sit down.

I plugged the numbers into the calculator, adding and adding and adding, losing track of time but not of what happened.

I thought of every smile I'd cataloged, every happy face I'd seen over the last three years, and cried of the people I knew were in the bar. The regulars who came every morning, the wait crew who worked in tandem with the kitchen staff, Deno who insisted on being there for every breakfast rush. Aleska. All of them, gone, turned to ash or splattered on the pavement or buried beneath thousands of pounds of rubble.

I punched the numbers in harder, as if I wasn't counting smiles but bodies. Harry watched me cry; I was thankful he didn't try and comfort me.

When I finished, I took my favorite picture of Aleska-- her eyes bright and shiny and grey, her hair in a high ponytail, her head turned slightly to the side as she smiled; we had been in Jaz's that day, celebrating her 19th birthday, the low light making her skin look like poured gold-- and taped it under the grand total: 985,753.

The finality washed over me, reminding me of why I never wanted to add the numbers in the first place. But it was over now, done. There wouldn't be another shift, or another night spent cleaning the windows, or another conversation complaining about Deno and his endless list of rules. There wouldn't be anymore smiles, anymore fingerprints to clean off the glass. The bar was gone.

The image of the towers falling kept replaying in my mind, over and over and over again. It seemed that it never stopped; I wondered if it ever would.

//