If money left a trail of smoke wherever it went the smoke would cluster and coalesce around atms, banks, and restaurants, and it would be beautiful. A snippet of a bygone conversation. Someone had told her that once. They belonged to that other world now. A voice from the other side.
The tall gothic letterings of the Chemical Bank sped by in an indecipherable whir, its atm firebombed and dismantled. Ash markings on the cracked asphalt marked its absence. The mechanical emptiness like the missing space left after your car radio’s been jacked, detached and unfeeling. Her red Corvette drove on in that same vague manner, a bloody streak down the empty street.
Trails of smoke would wind around toddlers and teenagers’ hands, tracing themselves back to the doorsteps of their houses. The same hands that would clutch melting ice cream cones would have spatters of smoke around them, the hands unwashed. Commercial airplanes would trail a thick cloud of smoke behind them, not all from the engine. Smoke would crisscross around the globe in polyellipsoidal patterns. In the 21st century the smoke would disappear and reappear in places far removed from each other.
In contrast, screams emanated from unsightly bodies, an inhuman wall of sound. The chorus stopped as fire and smoke rose from their carbon ashes. An anticlimax whose resolution was unsatisfactory. You could still hear their screams continue in in your head, a gestalt reaction to continuity. Morning dew gave way to morning ash, as panicked pockets of smoke rushed towards the airports, ports--anywhere. The insides were filled thick as smokers’ lungs. When the gates closed, and the last airplane departed, the smoke went underground. Trucks full of human cargo meant to pass heavily guarded checkpoints were machinegunned as thick trails left their bodies.
The last airplane traced a jagged path of smoke below the surface of the sea. The remaining smoke within the borders froze still like opaque ice.
Ashley Kjell pressed her face towards copper rusted venetian blinds of the last century, in that gradually decaying house. She tried to think. The footage was incoherent, strobed and deteriorated. Nevertheless, each part meant something, constituent of the whole. There was a day in which things were different, and half of her still lived in that place. She touched the glass with a finger, as fog gave way to a fingerprint. Someday those windows would shatter, taking the fingerprint along with it.
Her parents numbers’ had rang dead long ago. She dropped the phone on the ground. Bought it with smoke extending from from her fingertips. The phone rang.
“Hello.”
“Ashley, how are you? Are you okay?”
“Stephen?”
“Meet me in West Station in 15 minutes. Hurry.”
A pause.
“Okay.”
She went to the foyer, grabbed the shoebox that housed the spare key. Before leaving, she pinned a note to the wall next to the window. Turned on the ignition of the Corvette, and drove away.
It read: Be back soon. Love, Ashley. In another world, there might have been somebody left to read it.
Driving in that car, she said to herself, if smoke trailed wherever there were people to care for, it would be beautiful. Not in this world, where the smoke arose from ashes of corpses. And neither in the previous.
written for a contest on another other site, with the prompt, "all that glitters is not gold".