Flash fiction
about departure.

Every departure is a small death. Most of them are also a relief.

The moment before leaving · Airports at 4am · What gets left behind

Departure is the literary subject that flash fiction handles better than any longer form — because departure is itself compressed, decisive, over before you have processed it. The long novel can follow a character out of the city and across the continent. Flash fiction catches the moment the door closes. That moment contains everything: what you are leaving, what you think you are going toward, and the gap between the two that you will spend the next section of your life trying to close.

"On the plane leaving Buenos Aires I wrote the whole flight. Not because I had things to say. Because the city was still in me and the only way to get it out was through the fingers."

David — Tumbleweed Words — Buenos Aires departure

The Tumbleweed Words departure pieces are interested in the mechanics of leaving — what the body does, what the eye catches, what conversation is had or not had at the airport or the station. Not the emotion of departure but the specific physical grammar of it. Detail as feeling: show the departure and the feeling arrives without being named.

David — Tumbleweed Words Flash fiction and poetry written on trains, in hostels, and in city streets. Published in Litro, Adelaide Magazine, Cleaver Magazine. Pushcart-nominated. Read on Substack.