Empty
© 2002 by Nikki Isakk

Trish, like most people in the United States, remembered where she was when those hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center.

She'd been reading a Harlequin romance, Q.D.  Jones's "Bethany's Dancer," lightly fingering herself through damp silk, when the phone rang.  Her hysterical mother, making sure she was okay.

"I'm fine.  What's the matter, Mom?"

"Two hijacked planes just crashed into the World Trade Center."

Trish's mom talked while Trish turned on the television.  Trish didn't hear her.  The looping, horrific images of the two planes stunned her.  She simultaneously felt like puking and laughing.

Thank God she'd called off sick this morning.  Otherwise, she might be dead.  It didn't even occur to her to wonder if she still had a job.

"Are you still there?" Her mother, still worried.

"Yeah, Mom.  I'll talk to you later, okay?"

Her mother rang off.  Trish slowly placed the receiver back in its cradle.  She spent the rest of the morning watching her television spew its shocking images: dust and debris, terror and tears tremouring the world.

She shut off the television as she cricked her neck.  Her tension extended into her tiny, rounded shoulders.  Closing her eyes, she laid back and resumed jilling off, imagining Armando, Bethany's lover, ravishing her with his bitable lips and burning, heavy sex.  The world was a horrible place, but there was always this to remind her that she was lovable, alive.

*            *            *            *

Three months later, Trish stood on the platform overlooking Ground Zero.  Shivering people pressed about her.  Undamaged, wintry-hued buildings towered behind her, as if to deny the reality of the attack.  Someone cursed in Spanish, and she ignored it, not believing that she'd finally entered Mayor Guiliani's "sacred ground."

A curious change had marked her after September eleventh.  Horrible reality had slipped into her fantasy life.  Hunky heroes like Armando, Che and Liam no longer took her on their galleons or on their pub counters—they fucked her (sometimes simultaneously) like the whore she was, in the rubble of the World Trade Center, halogen lighting warming their wind-gouged flesh.  Their hands were calloused and skilled, culling from her the most exquisite, drawn-out mewls and orgasms, bucking hard as they came on and in her, their impressive cocks immediately ready for further action...

She'd become obsessed with going down to Ground Zero to rid herself of this fantasy.  Twenty-seven and sexually adventurous, she'd had different lovers in different places (memories of Josh, herself and the bathroom at Blue Ribbon Sushi still made her shudder with delight), so the idea of seducing a Harlequin-worthy rescue worker didn't seem outlandish.  However, the soon-to-be ex-Mayor Guiliani had barred the public from the devastated site for three long months, allowing only site personnel and prominent public figures down there.

Her efforts ­ two, total ­ to seduce the workers had been in vain.  The second one, a cute Hispanic guy in the familiar Red Cross vest, had almost been taken by her skimpy lace and long winter coat but chickened out at the last minute when he saw an approaching cop, twenty feet away from them.

She'd all but given up hope, when Guiliani had opened up the site in the last few days of his administration.  She'd been among the first to flock down to Ground Zero, to see the damage wrought by the religious fanatics.

Most of the rubble had been cleared away.  It was little more than an empty lot, with haphazard piles of concrete and heat-twisted steel.  The rescue workers, initially harried and tortured on the television screen, went about their job with a resigned business-as-usual efficiency.  They appeared to be benumbed to the horror of the place.

The on-lookers, fresh to the sight, reacted differently.  An aura of sorrow hung about the place.  They didn't see the empty lot; they saw the planes slamming into the Twin Towers, remembering their gut-wrenching oh-my-Gods, that falling flailing man and that relentless, ominous dust that pursued witnesses for countless blocks.  They remembered it the way their parents remembered the Kennedy assassinations.

Trish had given up on seducing any rescue workers.  She was rubbing herself through her winter coat pocket, that familiar aching damp rising from her pussy to nipples as she pressed against the wooden barrier.  Nobody around her noticed, not even the cops stationed around the viewing platform.

In spite of her arousal, she felt empty, dirty.  She hadn't asked for this fantasy.  It had sought and polluted her; more than two thousand people had been killed here, and here she was, jilling off on their death patch.  Biting back a gasp of shame, she surceased her erotic motions before turning away from the empty lot.

She left, sad, but strangely relieved.

© 2002 Nikki Isaak. All rights reserved.

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