Writing
Months to Years Journal
Spring 2026
A Bluebird Day
Even now, some twenty years later, people continue to describe it as a “blue bird day”, a sky so void of clouds that the imagined cerulean contours of the heavens seemed to peek through. Little did anyone know, as their work day began, that two massive jet liners would soon slice across the horizon, piercing through the perfectly aligned metal and glass twin structures overlooking the world’s most admired City.
She had darted out of her apartment lobby that morning and into the subway entrance, precisely 56 steps away (counted out in seven reps of eight), barely glancing at the sky. She boarded the #1 train to Cortlandt Street, exiting into the subterranean level of those twin towers, and then escalating up to the main lobby. She stood in line for the ATM machine, calculating how much cash she should withdraw to cover her four lunches for the rest of the week from Sam’s Falafel food truck at Zuccotti Park.
It was Tuesday.
She entered her office building, two blocks south of the towers, and taking the express elevator to the 24th floor, she greeted several colleagues, entered her standard issue management office, closed the door behind her, sat in her chair, turned on her computer and loaded up the document that she needed to send out immediately.
A large clap of thunder startled her. Or was it a rumble? The window shook. She stood and looked down to the street, wondering if trucks had crashed into each other below.
A yell came from the hallway; a female voice screeching.
She heard footsteps rushing by her door. Her heartbeat quickened.
She rushed into the hallway and followed the quiet man from Tech, who was running and shouting something about a plane. They came into the large conference room overlooking the towers where others stood staring. Vicious black puffs of smoke pulsed out from the shattered windows.
“Oh my God!”
“They’re saying a small plane.”
“No, no, a bomb, has to be bomb.”
A deep rattling roar, like that of an on-coming train--no a rocket, no an earthquake—fills the room. She cuffs her hands to her ears. A plane, slides effortlessly across the sky into view, and smoothly slices into the second tower and disappears. Her brain is stuck. She can’t think. She can’t move. The top half of the building is lashed with flames and smoke.
Silhouetted against the brilliant sky, flecks fall effortlessly.
She thinks they are birds.
Touché!
Jimmy Doherty’s bodies always look good. That was Nana Mae’s opinion.
Jimmy was an excellent embalmer. Nana Mae believed that Cousin Clarence had looked absolutely angelic in his coffin, which was hilarious given he was a son-of-a-bitch and had terrible pot marks on his nose from where he had tried to pop pimples from the time he was a devious red-headed scruff of a kid. That’s what Nana Mae was thinking when she arrived at Doherty’s Funeral home on a late November morning; Jimmy had done wonders with Cousin Clarence. Could Jimmy make Sally, that back-stabbing sister of hers, look good? She couldn’t wait to see.
Maneuvering her walker up the ramp, Nana Mae had a moment of panic. She had forgotten something. Damn, what was it? She was so eager to be the first to arrive that she had rushed out of the house. She planned to sit in the front row, with a full view of the casket. Not with the immediate family, of course, although it would have been a gracious thing for those selfish nephews to have invited her to sit with them.
Backing her large bum up against the door to the Ladies Room, Nana Mae pushed in and noisily dragged her walker across the tile floor. She turned, placed her handbag on the counter, and looking up into the mirror, she saw an old woman looking back at her, with large zirconium earrings, an ashen face and a bald head. She forgot her wig!
She could almost hear Sally whispering from beyond the grave, “touché”!