01/03/2014 Flash Friday A flash before the bang x3 in Flash Friday

Flash 1

Before the bang was foreplay.

Before the bang was the void.

Before the bang the blood was on the inside.

Man thinks of his life, individually and collectively as a series of foreplay, void, and blood. The letting of the blood, the rising of the blood, the absence of the blood. He builds his myths around these things and his truths; they are the same side of the same coin. His color is tainted by blood, seen through a veil of blood.

Kinship, domain, bondage, all small variances in the blood put a man on one side of those tracks or the other. If I could I would write these things in blood, not to give them import, but to show the way of things.

Flash 2

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Flash 3

The sky was darkish and sparkling with the distant burning diamonds, punching through a distance longer than my own short life, further than I could ever walk. The summer triangle was behind one of nameless thousand peaks in the Canadian Rockies. I don’t know, maybe they all have names, but secret names, not for Yankees or cheechakas.

I had been coasting down the mountain; the engine wouldn’t catch as there was nothing left to burn in the lines. Two O Clock in the morning, gloaming, a dusk that passed for night in the north. Three quarters of the way down was this gas station, unlit, but in the headlights the sign said 24 hour. I coasted to a tank. The sign said honk for service. Phil and the baby were asleep, littered in empty C-Rat boxes.

I honked. I tried to do it quiet. The baby stirred a bit in his sleep.

Nothing.

I waited. Five minutes later I honked again. The same nothing only wider.

I eased out of the car and eased the back hatch open grabbed a hose and a bucket and took a ten from my wallet. I soft walked to an old pickup truck the color of a beached whale and bondo.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” And old man, an old shotgun, an old fear.

“Can I buy some gas?”

Bang.

Prompt The inscrutable face and the stoic face