They have sat here at their table, year after year, the three old men with their newspapers and their coffee. Mostly they sit and gossip over the crossword puzzle, comparing notes on their physical ailments and family troubles. Occasionally they flip to the news, and solve the world’s problems in ten minutes, voices growing loud and raucous before someone gets up to use the bathroom and somebody else to get more coffee. Nobody notices the air flicker round them once they’re done, reality slightly shifted. Day by day the world swerves, erratically, following the whims of three grouchy old men.

Today there is nothing to mark where the plane came down. Those 22 houses have long since been rebuilt. The ash from the burning debris has mixed with soil and rain to become part of the bones of this place. Look over the houses, into the canyon below, and maybe you’ll hear voices on the wind. Or maybe the past has drowned in the roar from the freeway. The stories of the women who were home that morning, caring for their children. Did they look up at that scream of sound? Did they see the fire in the sky?

*

*

The children who never grow up, I see them on the canyon’s rim sometimes, where the mesa drops down to the freeway below. Here is where burning fragments of plane and people fell, vanished into smoke before they reached ground. The children’s eyes squint in the sunlight, their faces turned towards the wind with strange hunger as they open their mouths and taste mortality. In this place of forgetting, the children skirt round the borders of memory and delight in its jagged edges, the places where histories refuse to meet. They play in the smoke of stories never told.

*

Today there is fog covering the criss-crossing freeways of Mission Valley. Look into the fog and you might see remnants of the past, malls overgrown by green forests where a river runs again. Open your ears to the howls of coyotes that still live on these scrubby mesa slopes. Coyote was always a border crossing trickster; he ignores your maps of city and country. Coyote will create his own topographies, making you question your own sanity as he walks through walls and flies down slopes. The moon is his witness as he steals your pets for a midnight snack.

*

Tendrils of fog reach the cafe, and the man who sits there with laptop and jelly beans and fogged-out mind thinks for a moment that he sees Coyote’s claws in the mist. The man has been unemployed for over a year, and when friends and family ask how the job search is going he still lies and says he’s hopeful. In actual fact he sits in this cafe all day, every day, streaming films where actions have meaning and moments matter. He dreams of shedding this tired skin and joining Coyote in that in-between world where lives can be remade.

The girl’s eyes they glitter as she describes the things her hands have done, thin brown hands clutching a soda pop as she rocks cross-legged on a cafe chair. She is small, her years short, her world a bubble of family and friends and school and ever-present danger, red violence and heartbreak everywhere she looks. And her thin hands have broken wrists and noses, exacting justice from a senseless world. Her words rise high and unnaturally loud as she brags about her exploits, but she is so very young with her curly brown hair, and cannot hide her fear.