Flash fiction
about fog.

In haar, Edinburgh becomes a city you can only partly see. The rest you have to imagine.

Edinburgh haar · Partial visibility · What the hidden city suggests

Edinburgh is a city of haar — the sea fog that rolls in from the Firth of Forth and makes the castle disappear, makes the Old Town strange, turns the familiar into something half-imagined. Fog is a literary condition as much as a meteorological one: it produces partial visibility, which is the condition of all good fiction. You cannot show everything. The reader's imagination fills what is withheld. Fog, in Tumbleweed Words, is the landscape of the unsaid.

"The castle disappeared into haar at nine in the morning and didn't come back until Tuesday. The city went about its business. The castle was there or it wasn't. Both were fine."

David — Tumbleweed Words — Edinburgh

Fog writing in flash fiction is formally interesting because it gives permission for the kind of deliberate withholding that defines the form at its best. What is not seen is not nothing — it is more than what is seen, because the imagination supplies something specific to each reader. Write toward the fog. Let it take things.

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.