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Now, when 9/11 happened, I was in Sacramento. Safe. Secure. But just because I wasn’t there at ground zero doesn’t mean it didn’t affect me. In a way, it probably affected me more than anyone else. Because while I wasn’t a passenger on that plane, or an officeworker in that tower when it went down, I am an author. And as an author, I have a remarkable sense of imagining myself in place of those people. So it’s as if I experienced that fear. Their trauma is my legacy. My name is Bonky, and this is my 9/11 story. I was in New York that day, at my favorite bodega, when I got the call. “Bonky, it’s the president. I’m afraid 9/11 is going to happen today.” I checked my casio date and time model made especially for horses in yellow. A chill ran down my spine as indeed those fateful numbers were on display, obliterating any hope that it were some other day and date. “That’s right. While this event has already happened, and is thus irreversible in its conditions, I need you to nonetheless try and stop it. In the margins. Somehow. Not sure how. Just be a brave horse.” “Right,” I said. But how could I stop an event that was destined to take place? Thoughts and figures ran through my keen horse mind at impossible speeds. “Mr. President,” the answer arrived to me, “I need a way on that plane.” “Done,” he said. And hung up. Twenty minutes later, and only five minutes prior to the first plane striking the tower, I was on board a military dropship in full high altitude parachute gear, and the pilot was narrowing in on American Airlines Flight 11. “There,” I said, pointing at the plane to inform the pilot of his job a little better. Just in case he was confused about the objective or distracted by his instruments. I hurried to the back of the plane and threw the switch for the cargo bay door to open up. A bunch of unsecured boxes tumbled out the back, into the wild blue whose icy winds whipped around my goretex suit. “Get me closer!” I shouted, as the dropship pulled in front of AA-11, the plane destined to smash into the side of the world trade center - if I could not do enough to stop it. I could see the pilots at the front of the plane. Smiling. Peaceful. Unaware that they harbored Al Qaeda terrorists bent on hijacking their plane. They waved. I waved back. I started running down the cargo bay. I had to pick up speed and time my jump very carefully if I were to hit my target. I made the leap. A look of sheer handsome determination on my face. The sound of my breath and the oxygen canister in my gas mask hissing. Everything else dropped away. All fear. Even the sound of the wind. Just my breathing and heartbeat. I made contact with the top of the plane, but satan tripped me up. I saw his evil little goat hoof shoot out from my peripheral vision and cause me to err. I scuttled down the smooth back of the plane, unable to find purchase. I was in a panic slide. But by luck, the stewardess was having a smoke and had the passenger door open a crack. I saw my chance and shifted my weight to slide toward the open door. At the last second, I caught the edge with my hooves, and pulled myself in. “Bonky!” The stewardess said, smiling. “What are you doing here?” “Almost missed my flight,” I said, smirking extra-handsomely. Before she could say any more, I had kicked off my jumpsuit and hurried to find a vacant seat. I found one and buckled in for safety. Then looked around me for terrorists, but humans all look the same. I had no way of knowing who was terrorist and who was innocent. I just had to rely on my horse intuition. “Bonky,” the passenger next to me said, “I’m really nervous.” “Hmm,” I hmm’d, looking around at the human features of the humans all around me. None of their faces revealing any sort of terrorist features. “It’s just that.. my uncle has convinced me of this crazy plan he has.” “Crazy plan, right.” I said, still trying to figure out what makes a human a terrorist or just some dude. “Yeah. And I really don’t want to go along with it.” This dude was just talking on and on about his stupid fears when 9/11 was literally happening all around us. And I was trying to stop it! “I just really don’t want to hijack this plane and crash it into the world trade center,” he said. “What do you think I should do?” Then it hit me. I was sitting right next to the terrorist. I looked him over, and almost immediately his human features gave way to what could only be terrorist features. I had been so blind. It was all right in front of my face all along. “You said your uncle is the mastermind of this plan?” I asked him. “Yes. My uncle Mohammad Atta. He is seated in first class.” My horse telepathy wooshed to the front of the plane, and I saw him. Ordering a sprite. Smiling. Thinking everything was going according to plan. But there was nothing I could do. Because as of yet he had not started taking over the plane or doing any sort of terrorist activity. He was just drinking a sprite and enjoying a Will Smith movie. He was, by all accounts, totally innocent. Untouchable. I had to wait for him to make the first move. I tapped the call button for the stewardess and got some headphones and a sprite cause it seemed really nice. Mohammad Atta made a really good choice. Extra ice. I plugged the earphones into the armrest and tuned in to Wild Wild West. Superlative movie. Insane. Deranged. Horrible to behold. Awful to understand. Insipid to appreciate. Totally demoralizing. Yet somehow prescient. Somehow unifying. I felt historic racial tensions melting away. A young afro-american man in the row across from us hesitantly tried a smile on the elderly white passenger next to him. It worked. The elderly white smiled back. They had exchanged a small moment of mutual appreciation and shared enjoyment of nothing more than one another’s presence. Incredible. This is what America could be. If we could just stop the hate and appreciate the other people around us. Enjoy a movie and a soft drink together. Laugh and smile. Share a care. Share a chair at the table. Keep kids away from drugs. Next thing I knew someone was screaming. Mohammad Atta and his team of terrorists had stabbed two of the flight attendants and a pasenger and had forced their way into the cockpit while I was innocently enjoying the potential of peace on earth and consumed by this horrible yet intriguing movie from 2001. I hurried to the cockpit. The trees and buildings and streets of New York zipped by, perilously close below us. But my entrance was barred by two of the terrorists wielding x-acto knives menacingly. This was it. There was no way I was getting past them. But, looking into the eyes of that terrorist, I suddenly felt something very human from him. And the words of the terrorist who sat next to me came rushing back. “I just really don’t want to hijack this plane and crash it into the world trade center,” he had said. And, through my horse-intuition, I noticed that the terrorist holding a blade at me was none other than the man I had been sitting next to, enjoying beverages and great american cinema together. “this isn’t what you want,” I told him. His steely eyes faltered. “I know what’s in your heart. You want to change the world. But you can’t change the world with hate.” His eyes fell away. I carefully extended my hoof and delicately turned the edge of the blade away from my heart. He hung his head. Then, in an act of total surprise, he turned to his fellow terrorist next to him. “Bonky’s right,” he said. “We thought we were saving the world by crashing a plane into a building full of office workers. But we were just putting more hate and fear into the world.” The other terrorist looked at his friend, then at me, then back at his friend, then cautiously put away his weapon. He assented for me to enter. In the end, he was just another guy trying to do the right thing in a crazy topsy-turvy upside-down world. I threw open the flimsy door to the cockpit and there, on the horizon and looming large, was the world trade center. And my telepathic horse-intuition wooshed in for a close-up and I saw in the window straight ahead was my love interest, Sandra Andra Babbitt, hard at work in her office on the 99th floor. Just that morning, she had fatefully told me, trembling, “I think... I think I’m ready to move onto the next phase of our relationship. I’ve just - I’ve been held back by this pathological fear of getting 9/11’d. You’d save me from that, if it were to happen, wouldn’t you?” “Of course,” I said, embracing her. “Sandra Andra Babbitt, if you choose to be my lawfully wedded wife, I’d save you from a hundred thousand 9/11’s.” Then we smooched and groped and tongued. “What the hell is he doing in here?” Mohammad Atta’s sinister voice broke my erotic revery. “Didn’t I tell you idiots not to let anyone in?” “We’re not idiots,” said his nephew, “you can’t call us that anymore. Bonky told us your plan. Your REAL plan that you had been hiding from us.” Mohammad Atta turned away, as if struck, and it was clear he was harboring some sort of resentment and anger. “What would you know?” He said. “You think you know what happened? You think you have the whole story? You think you can stop me from what I’ve been planning my whole life to do?” He had a good point. I looked at his nephew, who looked sheepishly back at me. Not just a half hour ago we had all been sharing a soft drink and enjoying a movie. We didn’t know the danger and the seriousness of our situation. But life isn’t all soft drinks and blockbusters. Sometimes you have to stop. When someone’s hurting inside, and your recognize it, you have to stop what you’re doing and just listen. I put my hoof on Mohammad Atta’s hand, but I didn’t move to steer us out of the path of the world trade center. I just put it there to comfort him. “Then tell us,” I said. “Tell us. Because we’re here for you.” He wasn’t ready to give up his intensity. His eyes were dead set on the narrow path he set out for himself. He couldn’t bring himself to give it up. “Just talk,” I said. “Nothing more.” His brow furrowed in deep concentration. Trying to remember something. Something very difficult and painful he had been keeping deep down for a very long time. “There used to be this little girl,” he said, and my horse-intuition wooshed into the past to see her. “This little girl used to give me roses every day when I left to work for my job. I was a construction engineer. I built the very building we are going to crash into. Every day she would give me a rose, and she would say ‘Mohammad Atta, what are you going to do at work today?’ and I would say ‘I’m going to build the future. A brighter and better future for you.’ And this would please her very much. And it pleased me very much. But one day, she wasn’t there. Then every day after that, she was nowhere to be found. I went and I asked her parents what happened, why wasn’t she there handing out roses to me every day. They said, ‘the little girl has cancer.’ I looked at Mohammad Atta’s nephew, and nodded in grim understanding. Cancer is bad. Mohammad Atta had tears streaming down his cheeks. “Then one day, they told me...” his lip trembled, “they told me didn’t make it. She had passed away. The cancer had won.” He was racked with sobbing. I breathed in deep. There was nothing that could bring back the little girl and her roses. Nothing to take the pain away from Mohammad Atta’s heart. “Maybe you’re right,”I said. “Maybe there’s nothing we can do but slam this plane into the world trade center. Maybe 9/11 was destined to happen all along.” I hung my head. Accepting the cruel fate that destiny had in store for us. Suddenly a little voice piped up behind us, and we parted ways for a little bald girl holding her teddy, “Mr. Atta,” she said, “are you really going to fly this plane into the side of the world trade center?” Mohammad Atta looked at her in disbelief. His eyes carried over her, searching, as if he knew her from somewhere. “I’m flying with my mommy and daddy to have my cancer cured in Sacramento,” she said. Mohammad Atta suddenly became very still. And I followed to where his intense stare was directed. On the strap of the little girl’s dress was a little embroidered rose. Just like the rose the little girl had given him every day. Back when he believed in a better future. “My God!” He shouted. “what am I doing!? I have to stop this!” “It’s too late.” I said, looking at the world trade center ahead of us, looming large, impossibly large. “There’s no way to steer a plane this big out of the path it’s currently on. There’s only one way to stop this: from the inside.” I hurried to the back of the plane and threw open the passenger door. I grabbed a parachute, and prepared to leap. “Bonky, you can’t just jump out of a moving plane at this altitude. We’re too low. You’re not going to make it.” But there was no time. I had to do something. “Even if there’s, like, a one in fifty billion chance that I make it, I still have to try.” I told her. She seemed to understand, and backed off. I watched the buildings and trees and cars pass by at perilous speeds down below. Trying to time my jump so I could land in, like, a rooftop pool or a truck full of mattresses or something. “Bonky,” I felt a gentle hand on my neck, “Good luck,” the stewardess said. I looked in her eyes, and something about her sudden certitude gave me the confidence I needed to jump. I leapt from the craft and pulled the string. The parachute deployed and I hung from it by my teeth. The world twirled around me. The resistance of the chute, throwing me around at tremendous g-forces. I crashed into a tree and tumbled down its branches hitting me like baseball bats all over. I landed hard, balanced on a huge branch, the wind knocked out of me, then teetered over into a dumpster. I lay in the stinky dumpster, for a moment, I asked myself if all of this was worth it. I heard a voice from outside. An elderly, but plucky, afro-american voice asking, “what in the world is going on in there?” I got up, wincing at the alarming pain going off in all my muscles and joints. I threw my head over the side of the dumpster. Down below was a little old lady with a walker and coke-bottle glasses. “You look like you’re having a bad day,” she said. “Lady, you don’t know the half of it.” “Yuh-huh,” she said. As if she had days this bad. Maybe she did. Maybe, in all my struggles and strife, I had lost track of what really mattered. “I’m going to visit my son in the hospital,” she said. “Right,” I said, suddenly ashamed of my complaining. “He has Leukemia.” Damn, I thought to myself. “Only support we got is from my husband. He works in that there World Trade Center building. If that building went away, I don’t know what we’d do.” And there was the world trade center, with American Airlines Flight 11 flying straight at it. I had to get there first. I hoisted myself up and pivoted over the edge of the dumpster. I skittered to my feet and began racing at full speed, throwing a banana peel from my mane. “Thank you!” I called back to this stranger, but I hesitate to call her a stranger. She was more like family to me in that moment. “Young people,” she said, shaking her head sadly, “always in a rush. Can’t never relax and just appreciate the day.” In a way, she was right. But I had a job to do. I hurried to the street corner and tried hailing a cab. Luckily, a cab was pulling in right ahead of me. But when I got there, a young woman with her shopping jumped in. “Excuse me,” I stuffed my head in through the open window. “I need this cab.” “Buddy, get your own cab,” the cabbie said, motioning at me to get lost. “Yeah, get your own cab,” said the young lady in a thick jersey accent. “You don’t understand,” I said, “there’s about to be a huge accident.” “There’s gonna be a huge accident if you don’t keep moving, buster.” Said a patrolman who happeened to be walking by. “You let the young lady go.” I didn’t have time for this! What a stupid misunderstanding! I didn’t have time to explain myself! By chance, a man leaning up against the building happened to point and shout, “Hey! That airplane is about to 9/11 into that building!” Everyone looked. Time stood still. I looked at the plane. I looked at the officer. “I can do something. I can stop this.” I beseeched him. Nothing stirred in his stern and serious gaze. He was a New York City street cop. He had seen it all. “You won’t make it,” he said. I was crestfallen. “Not without a police escort.” He said, and tightened his pointed police officer cap with the metal badge on it. Then jumped into his police car, started up the engine, turned on his sirens, and sped off up the street to direct traffic out of our way. I leapt into the cab and told the cabbie to step on it. He put the pedal to the medal and we were zooming down the boulevards and the avenues at a pretty clip. We made it to the world trade center in no time at all and I rushed inside. I ran up to the front desk, but there was someone waiting in line ahead of me. I tried to get the attention of the lady at the front desk, but she was intently focused on helping the person who rightfully had their place ahead of me. The grand clock in the foyer ticked away. Every second lost was one we would never get back. The fate of everyone in this building, uncertain because of an unspoken social obligesse of respecting the order of a queue. I knew they could tell I was in a hurry. I wanted to shove the man out of the way. But is that the future I really wanted? Did I want to live in a world where people don’t respect the sanctity of a line? No. I stood there, riveted in place. If you throw out all the things that society needs to operate, the little acts of kindness and respect and sacrifice and obligation we show each other every day, then what’s left to save? Luckily he didn’t take long. I leaned over the counter and told the woman at the front desk that she needed to evacuate the building immediately. “I can’t do that,” she said. “You have to trust me,“ I told her. “Bonky, there’s over a thousand people in this building. There’s no way I can just ask them all to leave at once. It’d be chaos.” She was right, of course. Chaos. Now, if the plane struck the side of the building then everyone fleeing the building wouldn’t be chaos. It’d be a reasonable effort to evacuate a building that was struck my a plane. Chaos. But, if chaos were to be our enemy - perhaps it could also be our ally? “You have to evacuate the building,” I told her, this time my voice was even and commanding, as I retreated deep into the depth of my subconscious, summoning my alter ego, Jack Stromboni. “You have to evacuate the building, because...” I threw my head back in insane laughter, “I’m a psycho horse!” “Oh my God!” She screamed and slapped the intercom, “everyone out of the building! There’s a psycho horse on the loose!” I chased people down the halls, laughing evilly, thinking evilly. People jumped out of the way, their briefcases snapping open and spraying white copy paper everywhere. I made my way up the fire escape, stopping at each floor to stick my head in and make sure everyone was informed. Laughing maniacally and hauntingly. Finally, I got to the 99th floor. I hurried to Sandra Andra Babbitt’s office. She was there at the window, her hands flattened out over the bookshelf, pensively watching the oncoming airliner. “Sandra!” I cried. “Bonky,” she looked back. Her face was void of emotion. “We have to evacuate!” I said. “Bonky,” she hung her head. “You promised me you’d never become Jack Stromboni again.” My mouth hung open. I couldn’t believe it. I had promised her. Long ago. Just after the Jack Stromboni arctic expedition incident. “But...” I started. But she cut me off. Gently. Just raised a hand. Then looked back out at the oncoming Boeing 767. “Then this is it.” I said, and approached her side. “Everyone else is safely out of the building by now. It’s just us.” We watched the plane fly at us. Inescapable now. There was something kind of beautiful about it. Serene. The city was so quiet. The calm before the storm. “Bonky,” she turned to me. I looked into her eyes. Big, glassy, brown eyes. So beautiful. So full of love. “I’m pregnant,” she said. Time stopped. The nose of the plane was right outside our window. A crack was forming at the contact point. Something deep down inside me came rushing to the foreground. Something deeper than Jack Stromboni. Something that scared even him. I can’t say what it was. It was just an unstoppable force that took over. I’m not one for philosophy or religion. Was it some sort of angel? or demon? Or something far more ancient? Good? Evil? Beyond good and evil? I can’t say. I’m just a horse. Nothing can describe what transpired between the time of impact and the collapse of the tower. But no one died that day. Everyone in the building was evacuated. Everyone in the plane had somehow been whisked away to safety. Almost miraculously. As if borne on the backs of an angel. Everyone, that is, but one horse. . . . “Bonky. You’re a hero.” Said the president. “But I’m afraid the white house will have to publicly disavow your involvement in the incident. The press will be running coverage in the papers that 9/11 went exactly as planned. Mohammad Atta and his crew acted out their terrorist mission, and all souls on board American Airlines Flight 11, and all souls in the world trade center were lost when the tower collapsed.” I grit my teeth. It was hard for me to hear. “Yes, sir,” I said. “You see, Bonky. We can’t let it get out that a heroic and brave horse is going around stopping the horrible things that happen in the world and saving everyone. People need the uncertainty of the appearance of danger in their lives. Otherwise they’ll get all sorts of loosey-goosey notions in their heads. Who knows what they’ll do. Maybe put themeselves in danger just for the thrill of being saved by a hero horse. I hope you unnderstand, we can’t have that. We need the population to believe that their lives are in their own hands. We need for them to have a sense of personal responsibility.” But I wasn’t listening. All I knew was I had stopped 9/11, and now I was being treated like a dang liability. I gave my last salute to the president, and walked out of the oval office. It was a beautiful day in Washington D.C. The cherry blossoms were in full bloom. The tourists were out. People enjoying the monuments. The marble tower thingy. The other marble guy. The marble thing with the marble pieces around it. I stopped to get a hot dog at a cart. The guy working there said, hey Bonky, check this out. He showed me a picture on his phone. It was a little pixelated. It seemed to be an image of a little white horse among the wreckage of one of the twin towers as it was collapsing. And in the picture it was unclear whether the horse were falling or flying. “You ever see anything like that?” He asked me. “No,” I said, smiling to myself. “No I haven’t.” I ate my hot dog, and set off. Didn’t know where I was going. Didn’t really care. Then I hit publish. And little did I know, I had just written my greatest book of 2025 and was on the precipice of a whirlwind worldwide media frenzy. The End