Fire on filth street

It was midnight and down the street cars were on fire.
Kevin & I smelled the smoke and we looked outside. Fire on the Fifth.
"Smells like tires burning," Kevin said as we looked down a deserted and hazy Portland Avenue.
I knew my neighbor-friend Rich was down the street so I texted him.
Rachel: 12:04am You still at that house?
Rich: 12:08am Yes, someone broke into the house and stole her day old mac book pro a few hours ago. Now there is a car on fire, called the cops, the firemen let me pull the handle on the hose
Rachel: 12:12am Lol, wtf!
Then police cars started zooming up and down the Portland Avenue stretch, pulling u-turns...
Rachel: 12:18am What is with the police are they looking for someone?
Rich: 12:19am We are now two blocks west, another car totally engulfed in flames!
Rachel: 12:20am No way!
Rich: 12:21am Crazy shit

I had this dream where I was a student in Iran. I wore a hijab and was taking luggage out of my car. The Iranian school was my old elementary school in Beaverton (Oregon) and I was there for orientation in the old gymnasium where we used to have wall-ball tournaments.
"Salaam Alaykum" I said to two Iranian students the way I was taught by a Turkish friend.
"Alaykum Salaam," they responded with smiles.
Walking across the old play-yard there was a lot of movement. Bikes and people and kids, a kind of makeshift marketplace had materialized.
"I wonder if there will be a bombing here..." I considered sadly without hesitiation as I entered the crowd.

The other day I walked across a field and never thought once if there were mines hidden under the ground.
I turned on my car today without having a thought there might be bomb rigged up inside.

Douglas Coupland confronted the subject of atom bombs in a few pages in his unconventional little book, Life Without God.
"I was by the fridge in the kitchen when it happened."
"I was having my hair done when it happened."
"I was in the office and it was near the end of the day and people were getting ready to go home when it happened."
"What happened," was the bomb. The stories are the last bits of peoples lives before the bomb, the nuke, killed them. They watch radiation peel their skin off, they fly in the air like super heroes unraveling as the heat and chemicals burn them alive, they are in their cars, in the shopping malls, they suffocate.
I write these stories in my head.
"I was at Safeway when it happened," I thought when I a boom of thunder knocked out the electricity.
"I was taking out the trash,"
"I was driving to the gym,"
"I had just laid out dinner."
Once I had a dream I was with my family on a hill in the forest overlooking a city. We were having a picnic and watched a plane, the plane, fly over the city. Then there was an orb, the orange orb, and we knew it was over.
If we weren't going to die right then and there from the fallout we would die soon after from the radiation.
In a dream my car was pulled to the side of Highway 97 and the bomb was dropped there, right down the road and I curled in the fetal position as the wall of earth rushed towards me.
Reminds me of that Radiohead song "4 minute warning," about the London subway bombing.
{This is just a nightmare, soon I'm gonna wake up, someone's gonna bring me 'round.
Running from the bombers, hiding in the forest, running through the fields, laying flat on the ground.}
A few years ago I visited the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas. There were these slides you could play by rolling your hand across a smooth ball which set the action in motion. The action was video footage of different nuclear tests.
They experimented with houses, trees, cars, dunes ...

Kurt Vonnegut wrote about his protagonist Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five watching a documentary regarding the production of nuclear weapons. Except Billy watched it in reverse, the orange orb being sucked into the shell canister, entering back into the plane, being gently unloaded, being disassembled in factories and put back in the earth.
I spun the ball the opposite direction, creating house and giving trees back their leaves.

(I when in good humor give grass its green Blazon sky blue and endow the sun with gold Yet, in my winteriest moods, I hold Absolute Power To boycott any color and forbid any flower To be. -Sylvia Plath

The fire on fifth street is put out. My friend Rich helped. So did his girlfriend Heather. It was fun.
Kevin and I went back to bed.

Fear and danger happen to other people, not to us.
The car was insured, whoever it belonged to will get a new one.
The firefighters will slide down the poles and save the day just like they always do. I will ride my bike through the crowded downtown wihout a thought and run through the fields and not worry whether someone is going to blow up when I go to shake their hand.

We are safe.

But here it is, in the back of my head - showing up in my dreams and clearing its throat during the quiet times - the suspicion that things aren't always as they seem.

It interrupts me and makes me skeptical of this unquestioning safety.