Twin Towers

That year, we moved into the 14th floor of Tower A of the Twin Towers. My father kept wiping the floor tiles at the door until the whiteness swallowed up the entire ground; my mother kept wiping a key engraved with "14F", and the blood marks on her palm were as dense as a spider web. There is a group of silent people living in the elevator - the uncle in blue, the thin aunt, the sister holding the child - they never go downstairs, they only nod at me. There was a barefoot little brother in the stairwell, who led me upstairs and disappeared after reaching the 14th floor. TV news began to report a series of deaths, each victim related to this building. My parents' bodies decayed in the smell of rust, their lips turned purple, and their complexions turned black. On the last night, those people in the elevator poured into the home, pulling my father's ankles and squeezing my mother's shoulders, as if they were completing some kind of silent ritual. In the early morning, my father rested against the wall and my mother rested against the cabinet. I went downstairs alone to call the police. Later, I moved to my aunt's house, went to school, worked, and grew up, but my dreams never left that white door. The wall behind the door was as warm as skin and covered with fingernail scratches. My mother repeatedly photographed two words in Morse code outside the door: There is a ghost. Years later, the Twin Towers were demolished in the news, and excavators smashed the gray exterior walls, but the elevator lights on the 14th floor were still shining deep in the ruins, the steel cables were turning, and the eternal breathing and beating came from the cracks in the doors. Some buildings can be demolished, and some ghosts are forever trapped in the rising elevator.