Flash fiction
about return.

You cannot return to a place. You can only go to where it used to be.

The changed place · The changed self · What remains

Return is the most melancholy form of travel. Departure has energy — it moves toward something. Return moves toward a place that exists in memory as it was, not as it is. The return pieces in Tumbleweed Words are all about this gap: the city that has continued without you, the people who have grown in directions you were not there to witness, the specific quality of recognition that is also estrangement. You know the street. The street does not know you.

"He had been away for two years. Everything he recognised had changed. Everything that had changed he recognised. He stood outside the pub for ten minutes before he went in."

David — Tumbleweed Words — Edinburgh

Return writing requires the writer to hold two versions of the same place simultaneously: the memory version and the present version. Flash fiction handles this better than longer forms because it can exist in the gap between the two versions without resolving it. The story does not need to decide which version is more real. Both are real. That is the problem.

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.