Flash fiction
about memory.

Memory is not a record. It is a story you keep revising.

The unreliable past · Sense memory · What childhood leaves behind

Memory is the subject that the Tumbleweed Words fiction keeps returning to — not nostalgia, which is memory made comfortable and false, but the actual texture of how the past arrives in the present. The smell of a specific soap. The sound of a door. A voice at a particular pitch. Memory works through the body and through specific detail, which makes it a natural subject for flash fiction, which also works through specificity and through what is not said.

"All he could remember of her was the sound she made when she was reading something that surprised her. Not a word. Not quite a laugh. Something between the two. He had not found a word for it in thirty years of looking."

David — Tumbleweed Words

The memory pieces in Tumbleweed Words use the flash fiction form to enact memory's actual structure: fragmentary, sensory, non-chronological. A memory piece does not need to begin at the beginning. It can begin in the middle of a detail — a specific texture, a particular light — and work outward from there. The Carver influence is strong here: trust the specific detail to carry the weight of the larger feeling.

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.