Flash fiction
about insomnia.

Three in the morning is a different country. The currency is regret.

The 3am mind · Cities at night · What wakefulness costs

Insomnia is where a lot of Tumbleweed Words was written — not romanticised insomnia, the creative night owl, but the actual condition: lying awake in a hostel in a city where you know nobody, listening to someone else's city going about its business outside the window, unable to do anything but think. The 3am mind has a particular quality: it is honest in the way that daytime is not, it will not permit the comfortable story, it insists on precision.

"At three in the morning in a Lisbon hostel with the window open I could hear the trams. Not see them. Just hear them. They sounded like something that had been happening for a hundred years and would go on happening after everything else had stopped."

David — Tumbleweed Words — Lisbon

Insomnia writing in flash fiction works because the insomniac's mind is already doing what flash fiction does — cutting from image to image, refusing resolution, returning to the same thought from a different angle. The form matches the content. Write toward the thing you cannot stop thinking about at 3am. The flash fiction is already there.

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.