JANET BURROWAY is the author of seven novels and two texts on creative writing. Her Writing Fiction, now in its seventh edition, is the most widely used creative writing text in the United States. She divides her time among Tallahassee, London, and Wisconsin.
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Chapter One
Smoke hurled itself up out of a field a couple of miles to the north, toward Shanksville. Up ahead was a white farmhouse with a crooked chimney and, nearer the road, a boy and a dog staring, the boy’s hand on the dog’s head like a piece of Americana hokum.
Phoebe said, "If that’s a controlled burn, they’ve lost control of it."
Dana said, "It’s the wrong color for a burn."
They were side-by-side on the backseat of the limo, both still stupefied by the fumes that poured from the collapsing towers on their TV screens not two hours ago. Dana thought of the crematorium where they were headed; and it also came to her that the smoke out the window--not mushroom shaped but rather like an oak in summer, thick trunked and burgeoning--was the color calledtaupeormole,which is a good color for the upholstery of a mortuary limousine (her fingers splayed on the seat beside her) but not a good color for a burning field.
But the possibility did not occur to her that the ash was mixed with Pennsylvania dirt and limestone spewed from a thirty-foot crater made by the nose cone of a plane where another forty-four had been pulverized. It was only later, when she understood her place as an incidental widow--her experience, whatever it would have been, shunted aside by general catastrophe--that she thought how one thing follows on another, how nothing keeps something else from happening, how foolishly we suppose that we have earned respite, that Armageddon will not be followed by emergency, that because the car is totaled the pipes won’t burst.
A mirror was mounted on the window between them and the driver--mourners need to check their mascara--and it gave back her blanched face, brown hair lopped at the chin, regular and unremarkable features except for a full, mobile mouth, out of which it would (and did) surprise anyone to hear an acerbic remark. A good face for a politician’s wife. Whereas her friend Phoebe, a lawyer in her own right, had a glimmering black coif and high color, interesting bones. Wit fit her. It was Phoebe who wore the mascara.
Dana said, "What if I threw a funeral and nobody came?"
And Phoebe: "Do you want to cancel?"
At which Dana lifted her hands far enough off the upholstery to suggest the pointlessness; and Phoebe let out her disconsolate bark of a laugh, and the limo hit pothole after pothole on the weatherbeaten turnpike west toward Somerset.
She had hated him, and then he died.