Dark plumes

Dark plumes of smoke spiral upward on the freeway ahead. The smoke sucks in the light as it fans out, and grows larger with each gasp of my breath. It reminds me of a forest mushroom, dark, dank and foul. And yet, its ascent feels majestic for its so obscures the sky, making the blue it once held seem more like a dream.

Mistaken beauty does that, it pulls you in where you’re not supposed to be like a wizard, a magician, so bewitching, it knows all the tricks. I can’t stop watching the black columns of smoke in my sky. I feel possessive like a jealous lover turned voyeur. But I’m coughing and that drags me momentarily out of my trance. With wheezing breath I call Cal Trans and Highway Patrol using my cell phone and they give me specifications how if it’s an emergency to dial 911 yada, yada or otherwise dial such and such number as the smoke gets thicker and the traffic slows down to a near parking lot and fire engines blare past me. I gulp and press a finger on the number nine and hesitate over the ones, daring, not daring, but daring to finally press down as more fire trucks pass me and the smoke begins to turn from black to white as the traffic crawls ahead and I see a car on fire, which the firemen are hosing down just two blocks from the nuclear power plant. I breathe; I breathe, I’m alive and wait for my heart to slow its beat down. Like a mirage I imagine its red petals’ unfolding in a soft bow as the turn signal in my car clicks, not left, nor right but to heaven for in the now whitish looking smoke I see a door opening up in the sky.

Surely, I’ve died. Maybe the power plant did explode and I only dreamed upon passing to my very own death that the firemen stopped an impending disaster. A reality mistaken…surely it’s possible. But why is the signal in my car still snapping to attention? And what is that floating on heaven’s doors? Angels? No.

Marshmallows as big as clouds and I taste them in my mouth and know I’m in trouble as a voice coming from my cell phone says in newscaster smugness, “The smoke is not from a car fire, but is a mask for nuclear gas as the terrorist intended.”

I gulp and my throat tightens with a sickening taste of acidic sugar. I pry my esophagus open with the toothbrush I’ve always kept in the car and marvel as it melts in my fingers as the dashboard curls in on itself enveloping the steering wheel. The air bag billows forth and adheres to my arms; burning the hairs and smelling like roasted
marshmallows’ on a campfire and suffocating me with its sweetness.


by Julie Ann Shapiro




Julie Ann Shapiro is a freelance writer, a prolific short story author with more than seventy stories published and author of the novel, Jen-Zen and the One Shoe Diaries (Synergebooks.com).