Flash fiction
about hotels.

A hotel room is a room where someone else's life was happening yesterday.

Temporary rooms · The borrowed life · What people leave behind

The hotel room is the most literary space in the nomadic life — because it is genuinely temporary, because it has been occupied by thousands of other people whose traces are faintly present in the wear of the furniture and the marks on the walls, and because you are in it with nothing to do but notice things. The Tumbleweed Words archive has more hotel and hostel pieces than any other single setting. This is where the writing actually happens.

"The hostel in Warsaw had a photo wall near reception — guests who had left something behind. Not lost property. Photographs. Polaroids, prints, phone photos slid under the glass. Everyone smiling. Nobody looking at the camera."

David — Tumbleweed Words — Warsaw

Hotel flash fiction is interested in the traces of previous occupants — the indentation in the pillow, the previous visitor's book on the shelf, the television set to a channel nobody in this country watches. The temporary room holds permanent evidence. Flash fiction, which is also brief and leaves things behind, is the natural form for this material.

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.