Last week I had a dream that my brother/sister and I helped an old man, our father, detonate a nuclear bomb. It was small. So small that we could ignite a fuse and run for safety. I wasn't me, and they weren't my actual family members. I half participated and half watched from above, disembodied.
We set it off in an arid and seemingly deserted scrub land with low hills.
After detonation I knew I had to separate from them since people would be looking for us. You are not supposed to detonate nuclear bombs. I needed to run back to town and blend in.
I went to a supermarket and found the pharmacy counter in back. It was crowded with people waiting for medical care and prescriptions. This was a post-apocalyptic border town and everything was shabby, broken, and overused. I wanted to ask a doctor on staff what the symptoms of radiation poisoning and leukemia were, just in case I got sick from playing with nuclear radiation. I wasn't upset about it. It bothered me more that a big red combination scale/heart monitor device was cracked and broken, unusable; unable to help any of the needy people in the crowd who shuffled along in line, depressed and unwashed.