Example #2, goes on too long, still under a 1000 words (definition of flash) and took under 45 minutes (definition of the exercise) in Examples of flashs past

She ran barefoot over the rocks and old ties sticky with creosote and tar. I heard her coming. I wanted her to come. It wasn’t the hard pad of calloused skin ticking across the rocks, and ties, and weeds and creosote. She kept shouting his name. I had been squatting for hours waiting for someone to come. To be honest I was expecting her.

His place was a corner in this warehouse by the tracks. It smelled of last century’s pig’s blood and grain and wet cardboard. Some windows were left broken, some broken so long ago someone had bothered to board them up. Three walls the depth and width of a pallet. On one wall a picture album was tacked up by the front and back cover, on every page but two he had written twelve months of a calendar year in boxes inside a rectangle just like those plastic cards insurance agents hand out. He had the card pasted into the upper right margin. It was all the same year, 1981, and he had written it backwards. On the opposite wall a picture album the same size and shape, tacked up the same way directly across from the other. On every page but two was a mirror or piece of a mirror, different sizes and shapes but all thin enough to paste on a photo album.

Between them was a dirty old mattress, bare and stained. It filled the space. He had written on it with some permanent marker. The words were cramped and overlaid and even with the flashlight I couldn’t make out what any of it said.

She didn’t pause at the door, she ran to me, slick with sweat but her breathing light as air. She searched my face.

“You don’t know me.” I said.

“Do you have a gun?”

“No.”

She sat on the bed, cross-legged so she faced my profile. I turned to her and crossed one leg under, the bad one out stiff like a dead fish.

She pulled a deck of cards from her pocket, Bicycle, blue. She handed me three cards, one at a time, face down. The fourth she laid in my open hand face up, eight of clubs.

“So what do you want?”

I didn’t know how to answer that.

“What are you doing here?”

“The family, his family …”

She handed me another card face down.

“They … hired me to …”

She handed me a card face up, three of diamonds.

“Hired you to do what?”

“Find out.”

“Eight of clubs three of diamonds, find out what?”

“Are you, were you, his girlfriend?”

“Find out what?”

“What happened?”

She laid the deck on the mattress and stood up, fluid, from the knees, and walked away a few paces and walked back, looking at me from above. I moved my leg, the bad one; I don’t know why I just did.

“Nothing. Nothing happened. No, I’m not … I wasn’t his girlfriend. I … free souls.”

“Why are you here?”

“Why are you?”

“I already told you.”

“No, I mean I’m here because you are.”

I braced my arms against the wall the stood up shaking the feeling back into my legs.

“The flashlight, I saw the flashlight, I’m right across the tracks, under the bridge. I have to … be close by. Three days and I’m gone. I’ll be gone. Soon.”

I opened my arms palms up gesturing to the walls, the mattress, the ceiling, everything. “So, what is this? What happened?”

“I don’t know. He died. His friends they asked for me, so I came. I don’t think it was bad, he didn’t look bad.”

“Bad?”

“He wasn’t hurt. His friends they weren’t anxious, just … sad.”

And the silence grew between us, uneasy and dark. I had lived my life up until then not understanding the phrase blanket of silence’ it was a blanket of silence. Muted, claustrophobic, damp, itchy.

“So, you put him in an abandoned boxcar and set it on fire.” I said because one more second under that blanket would have ended me.

“That was two days ago. You are the only person to come. You don’t work for the family. You didn’t even look at the shrine.”

I tapped the blood back into my bad leg to keep the silence away.

“No, I mean yes. I came for you.”

“Oh. One more day. I have a stew back at camp, hungry?”

“Thank you, no. Have anything to drink?”

“One more day. Come, you help with the last prayer.”

“I … ok.”