A cup of coffee saved Aunt Leila from the Tower One collapse.

Evidence

Aunt Leila smiled lightly and described how she was getting herself a cup of coffee from the Starbucks across the street from her office that morning. As soon as she stepped out of the building, she heard a roar and a crash. The plane had hit. After the initial mayhem, the police appeared and told everyone to leave. She explained how she trudged across the Brooklyn Bridge with thousands of other people, like refugees leaving a war zone. And she told Omar the story with remarkably little emotion. “Thank God for that cup of coffee,” she said, and the two of them laughed a little. Then they turned and went quietly inside, and Omar shut the door. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 742

Categorization

• CANDY: The survivor detail - getting coffee across the street saved her life, capped with ‘Thank God for that cup of coffee’ - is a darkly wry, memorable anecdote.
• DEEPTHINKING: The resignation in ‘remarkably little emotion’ and the nervous laughter about a mass-casualty event being averted by a coffee purchase is a quietly profound portrait of how trauma is processed - the absurd relief that someone survived because of a trivial errand.