Getting pulled from below

At the very end of the concert a laundromat only a few paces away but around the corner from the building exploded into flame -- but this, as we all discussed afterwards, had happened without any of us noticing. Not even when a fire truck passed us, as we stood on the footpath delaying our departure from this, the final concert, did we think to expect that the fire was somewhere close by. No-one expects to see the actual fire, I heard someone say when we went round the back and our throats began to catch on the orange lit smoke that was funnelling upwards from where we had just been and then, in a matter of minutes, began to seep through glass and brick to fill our houses with a smell that should have been scalded shirt but instead impersonated the floury ash of a gutted gumtree that was nowhere nearby.

And meanwhile, quietly, white suds running down the gutters into the stormwater drain, quivering in a tower for several seconds and then getting pulled from below.