Code Red

She couldn't help her smile. Walking down the street, she wove her steps between demolition crews, a crying child, gliding below the iron girders that swung precariously over her head. She smiled, oblivious to the warnings, curses and surprised yells that accompanied her path.

She ran across roads, ignored 'don’t walk' signs, and didn't wait for her change. In response to words of praise and magic and prophecy from old women with cards and parrots, stones, candles and withered flowers in bunches she let 20-dollar bills rise from her palms like setting doves free. The women took one look at her face and put away their potions with a laugh.

Musicians followed her down the street, making the grand sound like it was an old time Mardi gras. Mothers held their children to her smile, eager for blessings. Young men threw phone-numbers, roses—One slid down a drain pipe and pelted after the procession, chanting like it was high mass and arsenal vs. juventus in 2001 at one and the same time.

She walked by, and big men, dressed in sleek suits and scented with rehearsed speeches, passed bills to save children in Uganda, then donated their yachts to Bangladeshi NGOs. One man smiled and dialed a number: instantly bombs filled with cherry blossoms and iris petals exploded gently over Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and the ancestors of the people there rose up from the old tombs to share tea with the toddling dalai lama, lately discovered playing a flute on a tuna long-liner.

She climbed the stairs to her terrace, and faeries woke in Stonehenge, and played dusty pipes that had long since grown into trees, and all the Irish came out and swore by Odin, Thor and Balder that they had forgotten how to spell 'Ulster unionist'. For the first time, more Guinness than Bud was drunk; the lochness swam to Sea World and set Willy free.

Once on top of her water-tank, she danced and sang; Buddha smiled, stretched and woke. Gandhi danced the Cheraw, Harrison and Lennon sang let it be, backed by the invisible choir. Noting the sudden global warming, Wolfowitz and the CIA announced a code red, anxiously. The President announced on national television that the world was under threat from someone dangerously in love. She closed her eyes, thought of his face and kissed the night air.

On the other side of the world, he woke in that instant, and realized he had been smiling in his sleep. At that exact moment, a doctor named Patel discovered a cure for AIDS, and superman deflected an asteroid hurtling towards Iran. He sat down at his laptop:

"You won't believe this, but I think just saw you in my dream. Come online?"