Day 786: 5 Minute Freewrite: Sunday - Prompt: main street

Since I chose not to give The Posture of Innocence a "happy ending," that leaves space to explore how characters make the most in -- and of -- the ashes...

---

The Ridgeline Fire did to Big Loft something not seen before in its history.

The fire mocked the last of its blue summer days with three days of horrid night, and the thick smoke had anticipated the fall fog until that had arrived.

The fire mocked the streets whose children had never seen snow with a layer of ash thicker than any snow that had ever fallen in the city.

It had dispossessed more than 50 percent of the city's elite – Loftons and Slocums and Slocum-Loftons and other great names, along with Yorks and Lancasters and Madisons of greater name though small in the county – had run for their lives or perished.

Those elite and dispossessed were in shock, months later, for the fire had come from an unthinkable source … for all of the history of the United States, they had been of the class of people who exported violence upon others in order to enrich themselves. Genocide. Slavery. Jim Crow. Prison industrial complex. Assassination of those who had resisted any of the foregoing. In Lofton County, VA, these elite had gladly been present and active in it all.

Thus the living generation was not prepared when Lieutenant Bruce Deadwood, the hitman who had been recruited for them, had turned on them. He had killed 21 personally, and the fire he had set in the Starview, Skyview, and Blue Ridge neighboorhoods had killed 99 more, and also destroyed 4,000 homes with the associated infrastructure to the ground.

The posture of innocence and the supposition of safety had all come down to ashes, in the midst of which was growing new fears … for the first time, Big Loft was becoming an experiment its elite did not want … for what would happen when the common people of Big Loft of all colors discovered that they could get along without the “better” and “best” sort, as James Madison, author of the Constitution, had once described himself and their kind of people? They had already been made mortal. What happened when they were found decadent, doddering, and useless to all good endeavor?

Nonetheless, the aged and queenly great-great-great-great-granddaughter of James Madison who had organized the successful evacuation of her portion of the Blue Ridge neighborhood laughed about all that as she surveyed Big Loft's main street on another gray day.

“Don't you know,” Mrs. Selene Slocum-Lofton said to her whining friend Mrs. Mildred York, “that ash is a component of many excellent soils? So too much opportunity exists for those of us who can shake off this fog of the brain and get on with things!”

“But, Selene, what are we going to do?”

“Everything we can get away with, Mildred -- and since you know how I operate, you ought not be worried.”

Mrs. York calmed down, and then smiled.

“You're going to get us some nice places at a discount,” she said.

“You're still thinking far too small, but, mighty oaks from little acorns grow. Today, I'm just here to make sure your insurance adjuster acts right.”

“You can do that?”

“The sale of his entire foundering company to me closes today. I daresay I can.”

Mrs. York smiled from relief.

“Selene, I'm glad to have you as a friend.”