Why?

"I wish I were wise enough to say something that would help make sense of this horror, something that would help ease the unimaginable pain of the victims' loved ones, but I'm not that wise. I'm barely capable of thinking. Like many others, I've spent the hours since Tuesday morning staring at the television screen, sometimes crying, sometimes furious, but mostly just stunned." --- Dave Barry from his column dated 9-13-2001 also reprinted in his blog

this is the anniversary of the day that America changed...Well at least for a little wile. I wish I could say that we as a nation learned from the experience, that we saw past our differences as persons and saw ourselves as a people. But here five years later the bickering has begun again.
for a wile..Even a year later we stood united but then, like the disfunctional family we are, we turned on each other. Wild accusations, disturbing questions, touching tributes, and other stuff soon invaded our lives much like those planes invaded our airspace.
so what else can I say that hasn't already been said? Nothing really. I wrote a story , a tribute, featuring my character Wyld and his demonic roommate Ton-kun, exactly one year after 911 (9-11-2002). I recently found a rewrite I did for a short story contest (I didn't even get an honourable mention) replacing the two main characters with an angel and a demon. Here below is that story comments and critiques are welcome:

Izyah's memory of 9-11-2001

My name is Izyah and I am an angel, an archangel to be more specific, one of the warrior class, sent here to this place over 160 of your years ago to defend the pure and innocent from corruption. That in and of it self may seem unbelievable to you, however there is more. As I explored this world I came to realize something that you as natives must have figured out long ago. The line between pure and corrupt, good and evil is not that well defined. This is something that my peers, blindly close-minded as they are, refuse to accept, so as such I am a bit of a pariah among my kind. I am tolerated, barely, but not accepted. In my search to find the truth of this world and it's people I found a kindred spirit, ironically enough, in a demon named Lucent.
Lucent is not what most people, even I, would think of when one says the word 'demon'. Most would even consider him pleasant to look at, even cute. His personality however leaves something to be desired. For the most part he is dark and brooding, like a rebelling teenager, although he is by your calendar a couple thousand years old. It seems he became disillusioned with the seething hatred his race felt toward your kind, and as such is now considered anathema.
So, in what would seem like the underlying theme to a new reality show, we bought an old bar with a loft upstairs. So there you go, the story of why a demon and an angel not only own a bar but live together as well.
There are many stories I could tell, however what happened that fateful day of September 11, 2001, I remember all too vividly.
I was readying the bar for opening and had turned on the TV to watch Judge Judy when suddenly the screen went blank. "A news flash" the TV blared. I looked up and saw the horrible image of the twin towers, buildings I had personally seen built so many years ago. One was on fire with a gaping hole in the side. "A plane" I heard the TV say, had crashed into the side. No one knew whether it was an accident or not. Then I heard it, a sound I could hear even through the cheap speakers of the bar's TV. It was the faint squeal of jet engines. Then it was deafening, and the second plane hit. I roared, my warrior heart raged, my blood boiled, feathers flew wildly about as I spread my wings to their fullest and crushed the glass I was cleaning into fine powder.
Lucent opened the door of the loft upstairs.
"What the hell is your problem Izyah?" the demon screamed in his grumpy, half-asleep tone.
Stunned as I was, I could barely speak. I calmed down slightly and with tears running down my face retracted my wings.
"Th... The towers!" I stammered "in New York... They... They... They"
"SPIT IT OUT!" he snapped, still cranky over being woken up before noon.
I gathered up what little sanity I had left and spoke plainly.
"Someone or something has attacked. They flew commercial airliners into the World Trade Centers." Suddenly my head started to ache, my soul felt cold and my feet wobbled beneath me. I felt myself collapsing.
With a speed I never knew he had, Lucent ran down the stairs and caught me before I hit the floor.
"Are you O.K.?" He said with a tenderness no one but I ever see, and I see it rarely.
"I don't know... I feel weak, disoriented. I can feel the psychic backwash from all over the neighborhood" It was true. Crushing despair, anger, fear, I could feel them, all lumped together. Normally I could screen out such a thing, but this time they were too close to my own feelings.
Lucent looked at the TV screen and the images it was producing.
"Stupid humans" was the last thing I heard him say before I blacked out.
When I awoke I was on my bed with my wings neatly folded around me like a blanket. As I sat up I noticed I had been taken out of the clothes I had been wearing before and was now dressed in my 'Hello Kitty' pajamas. I stumbled into the living room and saw Lucent sitting cross-legged on the floor, in the dark, in front of the big screen TV. He looked at me and his golden eyes seemed to glow as they reflected the light from the TV.
"Go back to bed, Izyah." he stated flatly. "You can't handle this alone"
"But I'm not alone," I smiled. "I have you"
He turned slowly back to the TV.
"No, you don't. You can't rely on me. This was an evil act and as a demon I don't know what I can say to console you."
I looked at him thoughtfully.
"Lucent, you said 'stupid humans' before. What makes you think only humans where involved?"
Lucent frowned further and started to float off the floor.
"A demon," he stated matter-of-factly, "wouldn't have been so cowardly as to hide behind an aircraft"
Again I smiled at him.
"That is consolation enough for me at the moment." I looked at his blank emotionless face and said, "Perhaps it is not I who needs to rely on you, but the other way around?"
"Shut up and sit down, asshole," he grumbled underneath his breath.
And so we spent the rest of the day and into the night. Other than a snide comment that if I insisted on fainting again I should lose weight, we hardly said two words to one another. I finally dozed off on the couch and when I awoke Lucent was gone. I went to his bedroom door and heard faint weeping from the other side. I did not knock.
Instead I went downstairs and cleaned up the broken glass and prepared the bar for its first day in a brand new world.

Copyright 2002 Sheridan Salyer