Flash fiction
about strangers.

The stranger is the person you will never see again, which makes them the most interesting person in the room.

Brief encounters · The unrepeatable moment · What we project

The stranger is the central figure of nomadic writing. When you move through cities constantly, everyone is a stranger — you see people for minutes or hours before they disappear back into their lives and you disappear back into yours. This brevity produces a specific quality of attention: you cannot know the stranger's history, so you read their present with unusual care. A gesture, a choice of words, a way of holding a coffee cup. Flash fiction is the form for the stranger because flash fiction also works with what is briefly, intensely present.

"A punk on the platform chewing gum the colour of her hair. A toothless man watched her move. She spat the gum on the ground — pink — and lit a cigarette next to the no smoking sign. The train arrived. All of this was gone."

David — ‘train in vain’ — Berlin — Tumbleweed Words

The stranger pieces resist explanation. The stranger must remain strange — must not be psychologised or resolved into a knowable character. They pass through and something is left behind, in the narrator, in the reader. Chekhov understood this: the story ends before resolution because resolution is not available. The stranger takes their meaning with them. What they leave is the question.

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.