roxanne69

I was walking to the corner. The street was crowded with cars and pedestrians. A small group was gathering outside an electronics store to watch something interesting on the TVs in the window. The crossing light had changed and I didn't notice. The group on the sidewalk began growing. Not in number, just in size. Two teenage girls had begun shoving each other and yanking hair. An older woman scolded them and asked them to stop. The people just watched. No one moved to stop the girls from swinging at each other. A rickety bus came rolling down the street from my left and I turned back toward the street to watch for the changing light. The bus hit the intersection and a gunshot went off on my right. The small naked body of a child slammed against the windshield of the bus, and a black woman screamed out that her son had just shot his brother. The bus stopped so fast that people standing inside had come flying to the front, shattering the windshield. Several hands appeared and reached out to grab at the body, bringing it inside. The bus rumbled to a start made a sharp turn and went reeling off into the distant. At some point it had started raining and the sour smell of burning tires stung my nose. The cars in the road had disappeared. The people once standing in the street were running in the direction of the bus. Several explosions went off along the street and I could see a small boy with elastic waistband shorts walk into the street, tears in his face. He stopped to pick up a leg in the road and began sobbing loudly as he dragged it to the curb. I noticed an orange plastic camera was hanging around my neck. The crosswalk light chimed and turned green. I crossed the road and took pictures as I walked, following a few of the running people for a while, then turning back to take pictures of the row of severed heads along the street. Their faces held horrific expressions. The rain stopped, and the sun began burning into bodies that were lying heaped up on the street. I helped other able people to lift the bodies, in a desperate search for survivors. I took a picture of each live person we dragged from the piles and a few of the dead and mangled bodies still in the street. The smell of tires went away. The streets were no longer slick. I had finally taken the last picture. I opened the back of the camera to remove the roll of film. There was nothing inside.

I awoke from my dream.