So I crossed the street, and there were all these people looking up and so I looked up, and what I saw was so terrible, the girls jumping, jumping from so high up, they weren’t like people, it was like watching insects or animals do something they have to do because they can’t think for themselves, this one girl jumped and she tried to keep herself straight, I could see her trying to stay in a line, moving her arms like she thought she could just fall straight and land on her feet and be fine, but she died. Some of the girls were still on fire, lying there on the sidewalk, and the firemen turned the hoses on the bodies to put out the fires, and then one girl jumped and her skirt caught on the sign pole sticking out from the fourth-floor business, it was Blum, they had trimmings and notions, and she hung there screaming, and she was burning up, and then her skirt burned away and dropped her from that sign pole and she fell on the sidewalk, and she was still burning, and the sound was so terrible when she fell, like a bag of wet laundry falling. Some people on the street, they said afterwards, thought they were throwing out the goods to save them, in bundles, when they saw the falling girls, but it wasn’t bundles of goods falling and making that terrible sound.

So then I walked to the corner where I could see the sidewalk on the Washington Place side because I was looking everywhere for my sister, where she would have fallen, and there were bodies everywhere and I was looking at them to see her but I didn’t see her. I saw so many girls I knew in the street like that, and some of the men, the machinists, the cutters from over by the window where the flames came in. Some of the girls I knew only a few days but others I knew for a while and it was such a big shock, one would be burned black like a cinder but I would know the boots or the dress, and then another would be perfect and still beautiful except dead from the fall.

There were ladders for the firemen, but they didn’t go high enough so they were useless, and there were firemen with another useless thing, a big net they were holding in the middle of Greene Street, and next I saw three girls at once, these girls were jumping into it holding hands, but they went right through this foolish net feet first, all together like that, and they hit the pavement and the force of the falling girls flipped all the firemen right into the net on top of the dead girls, it was just craziness—and then everyone was shouting and pointing and I looked up and I saw Sam, my fiancé, in the window, it was all broken, there was nothing left of the window, just the big opening, and he was helping girls. He was still alive but I didn’t see my sister.