The terrorists kill the buildings first. Beautiful buildings. Things of a thousand lives sewn together in neat rows of headstones. Concrete and electric power, steel ribs, supercolossal blades skewered through the midsection to counterbalance the Earth itself. The windows are – were – luminous. Like rainbows, stained-glass in the Sun's halo. You could see the park downtown, the black water and the planes carving the sky through oilslick crow-blood.
They kill them and rip them out by the roots. They put nails through the windows and pry open the doors. In the rootnest below they break the asphalt with axes and hammers like fucking pack-dog mongrel barbarians. Concrete lungs, pumping Wi-Fi and asbestos. The whole thing gasps and screams a death rattle before they cut its throat too. Wall Street sounds just like a person does when it's about to die.
They tear out the flesh and bones and leave these bloody gaping wounds choked in barbed wire, sewage and ashdust on the streets. If you look into the wounds they're brackish, black with dry blood and reeking of seawater, and the dying haze rises in pillars you can see for a hundred miles, even taller than the buildings ever were. Tastes like metal. I wish I had more.
You don't feel the pain of something until it's taken away, do you? The pain bound to everything, all of it. Tied up in its structure like nuclear energy – like firepower – til they immolate themselves and open the doors and pour blood to the concrete, til they kill and murder and defile and spit through broken mouths.
How could they do it, God damn them? How could they do it? How could they do it?
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