Specialist A. Morrison reporting. Time stamp 0900 hours. Date: September Eleventh, 2021.
Twenty years ago, the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were struck by hijacked planes and devastation ensued.
I was three years old.
Do you know where I was?
Sitting on the kitchen barstool. Stella was brushing my hair with one of her house hunting shows on the TV in the background. She tightened one of the pigtails and tugged on my auburn hair, flipping it over the top of my head to make me giggle. As she started the next one, the TV screeched.
You know the noise when there's "technical difficulty?"
Some news guy came on and started talking about planes crashing and New York and the word "terrorists" like fifteen times. I remember Stella dropping my hairbrush on the ground as the live feed came on and we watched the second tower get hit. She covered her mouth, so I covered my mouth too.
I always wondered about the people there that died. We didn't live too far from New York. Could my real dad have been somewhere in that building when it collapsed? Did he know I existed?
All throughout high school we learned about Al-Qaeda and the Taliban and the horrors that had happened because of them.
We also learned about every other "not war" and war prior to this one.
We learned about the Battle of the Bulge and the Rape of Nanking.
We learned about the Boston Tea Party and the Constitution.
Mostly, we learned about the winners of these wars and battles.
We learned about the American military for... basically all of it.
Reason number five I will never have kids: who would want to bring kids into a world with so much war and devastation?
Even before I joined the army, I had a lot of reservations about having kids, especially thanks to history classes.
But now that I've witnessed all of this?
I think you already know.
YOU ARE READING
Five Reasons
Short StorySpecialist Alex Morrison doesn't know everything about the world, nor many things about the way it works. But what she does know is that more than anything in the world, she never wants to have a kid that goes through the life she did. Follow along...
