The car burned down.


It's a strange experience. I was painting; Dad was in the computer room and started smelling something like melted plastic. Thinking that the TV in the garage was somehow burning (how he jumped directly to that conclusion, I don't know), he ran downstairs to the basement to check things out.

He opens the garage door to find that the Horizon, my beloved car, previously loved by my brother and before him my aunt, was smoking under the hood. A lot. So Dad lifted the thing, and a huge flame shoots out, which is (needless to say) rather peculiar and distressing. He tries to deal with this by using the dinky, ancient fire extinguishers we keep around, but those are exhausted pretty fast to no avail, and he tells me to call 911, saying something unsettling about how the Horizon's on fire and "liable to explode." In retrospect, I don't know exactly how likely that was, but since I'm not a fan of being around exploding cars and such, this statement kinda freaks me out. I call.

Two fire engines, a police car, and a fire rescue truck come in about five minutes, and in the meantime, I run around the house trying to grab useful things--Dad's in a t-shirt, so I get him a jacket and gloves, etc.; I grab my camera. The house is filling up with smoke because the smoke from the Horizon is drifting steadily into the garage and outside of the master bedroom. I get the dogs outside and watch the firemen as they deal with my burning car. A mass of neighbors stands around.


After a very long time, the fire itself's out. The driveway is slippery with fire retarding foam, and Dad, who's notably shaken by this whole ordeal, looks like he's having a tricky time with his precarious balance, so I follow him around for a while to make sure he doesn't slip or anything. The fire department gets ownership information, etc. They haul a couple gasoline-powered fans up to the deck to flush the smoke out of the house--a fascinating process, although it made me really really really cold whenever I'd enter or exit the house (those things push air around pretty damn well.) The dogs don't like the fans; the fans are loud. I don't really like the fans either.



The firemen trudge around the house checking on things, diverting airflows by opening windows, etc. The fans have strewn most of the papers that had been sitting on tables or weakly attached to the refrigerator all around on the floor. Our house isn't a house; it's a movie set with strange people walking around very quickly, curtly speaking to each other. Dirt gets everywhere, and the place smells like this horrible, mechanical smoke.

In about thirty minutes, the smoke gets under control, and everyone leaves very anticlimactically. We look inside the car, and it's covered in this horrifying, sulfur-yellow ash, and both of us are tremendously upsetted by this; that car--that cute, stupid car--deserved no such fate.