Flash fiction
about grief.

Grief is not a feeling. It is a reorganisation of everything.

Loss & its grammar · The ordinary made strange · What grief does to time

Flash fiction handles grief better than almost any other literary form because grief is itself non-linear, fragmented, constituted by absence rather than presence. A novel about grief must move forward through time. Flash fiction can exist entirely in the suspended moment — the Tuesday afternoon three weeks after, when you go to say something to someone who isn't there. That moment, caught exactly, is the whole thing.

"The morning after the funeral, she moved all the furniture. Nobody asked why. Nobody was there to ask. She worked through the afternoon and by evening the room looked exactly the same, only wrong."

David — Tumbleweed Words

The Tumbleweed Words approach to grief in flash fiction follows the Carver principle: render the ordinary strange, make the domestic uncanny, allow the emotion to arrive through the specific detail rather than the named feeling. Do not write that someone is grieving. Write what they do with their hands. Write what they eat for breakfast. The grief is in those details or it is nowhere.

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.