Just the very most basic items, that was all Patterson had packed in his bag, just the very most basic items. Patterson was a thinker, after all. People had told him so. But all that thinking, such a waste, because the bag lay behind him, in his living room, in his house, in the city, which was in flames. Patterson had made it through the field and was sitting, alone, on the riverbank, smoking one of his very last cigarettes, and thinking about his bag. No, not thinking. Not doing anything, really, except saying words over and over again in his head: Bag. Gone. Fire. Nothing. Gone. No, not nothing. Fire.

As the day wore on, Patterson had felt the heat diminish, felt the back of his neck grow cooler, seen the haze and smoke and ash clear from the sky until he could see more of the blue that was there, before. It had been, Patterson thought, an extraordinarily nice day. Usually, he would have spent this sort of day with friends, but his friends were gone. He thought. They must be, after all, because he was on the riverbank, alone.

He pulled a stick of gum out of his pocket, and his hand brushed his house keys. Go back, he thought. What? Go back? To that? Cross the field? The gray, ugly field? The field where at one point he had become so disoriented that he had actually lain down upon the ground, lain down in his work attire, lain down in his cheap pants, and searched for any signs of the horizon? Go back, he thought again. For how was he to know where his friends were if he did not?

He was getting awfully sick of being alone.

Patterson stood and turned. In the distance, the fires still rose, lesser now, fading. It was almost as though they were receding into the distance, not decreasing in intensity, simply getting farther and farther away. Slipping below the horizon, Patterson thought. Strange. The horizon had been so elusive, before.

He had always been known as a thinker. He had fancied himself a leader of men, that when the time came he would stand with survivors on mountaintops, triumphant, alive. That he would reach the shores of this very river and find others, like himself, waiting for others, like himself. He had stupidly packed a bag, not realizing that when the time came, he wouldn't be anywhere near it, and as much as he wished to go back, as much as he shielded his eyes and stared at the dazzling flames, he knew he never would. He never could go back, after all. He had learned since the field that he did not possess the courage he'd hoped for. He was not courageous. He had no courage. His courage, if it existed at all, was tiny. He hadn't led anyone. He hadn't even brought his bag.

Patterson turned back to the river and sat once again, picking up tiny pebbles and throwing them into the water, watching them streak across the clearing blue sky. The back of his neck continued to cool, and he began to feel, no longer imagine, the spray from the river on his cheeks. The water was rushing stronger now, as though rain had fallen on a far off field, a field far off from the gray one he had so labored to cross. If this was true, Patterson thought, than it might be only a matter of time before the rain fell here, on this riverbank, on his wasted city.

It came, something, then: Rain? No, not rain. But something. Shimmering up from the very furthestmost point: a structure. Patterson rubbed his eyes with hands dirty from lying on the ground and smoking cigarette after cigarette. He rubbed his eyes and looked at the structure.

Patterson was a thinker, but he was not usually an imaginer. And this was important. He could trust himself, he thought, to know what was real and what was not and what to do and how to survive, though for most of today, he had questioned all of that. And now as the structure continued to near, he felt very strange to find that it bore a great resemblance to his own house, standing, alone, in the middle of a rapidly greening field. He glanced over his shoulder where the air had cooled even more and found that the flames, once so imposing on that horizon, had dwindled to flickering matchtips in the distance, and, on the other, greener horizon, his house kept growing near.

He was not usually an imaginer. He rubbed his eyes. The house still stood.

He got up. Brushing the dirt from his cheap pants, his work attire, he took a tentative step forward into the ever-widening river and then took another and another. In his pocket his house keys jingled. He put a hand down to silence them and then pulled them out of his pocket all together and gripped them tightly in his fist. He took a last step out of the river, soaked to his torso but clean now, cleaner, the dirt gone from his hands, the dirt gone from his eyes. He approached his house to find it not in one piece, no, not hardly, but standing, alone, tall enough for him to find on the horizon, clear enough for him to approach without fear of getting lost. Patterson had been lost a great deal that day. But now, as he reached out a hand to touch the smoldering bricks of his home, he knew that maybe he was finding.

Patterson thought. If the house still stood, no matter how barely, then…

yes?

is it?

could it be?

might something have?

Good grief, thought Patterson, is this how I might go on?

Patterson, accustomed to nights at the movies with friends and weekends falling asleep in front of football games, reached his hand through the charred doorframe of his house. Inside lay his bag. He lifted it, clutched it tightly for a moment, then shouldered it, and began to walk upstream, in search of rain.

*Read the original Patterson story at Eyeshot.net

Pindeldyboz is a literary magazine that publishes a magazine twice yearly and a website each and every week.

In the weeks that followed September 11th, Pindeldyboz collected contributors' writings and images about the attacks.