Flash fiction
about trains.

A train is the only place you are between two places simultaneously.

Transit & threshold · The carriage as confessional · Motion as permission

The train is where most of Tumbleweed Words was written — literally, physically, on a phone or a notebook on an overnight from Berlin to Warsaw or a commuter train out of Edinburgh Waverley. The train creates a specific writing condition that no other location matches: you are physically between two places, you cannot leave, you are surrounded by strangers who will never see you again, and the movement permits a kind of emotional recklessness that a desk in a room does not. Write what you would not write at home.

"I wait for a train that circles the city like bats. At night in Berlin you can imagine anything you want. The carriages are full of inviting people I never talk to."

David — ‘train in vain’ — Tumbleweed Words

The formal challenge of writing flash fiction about trains is the relationship between internal and external motion — the train moving through landscape while the character moves through thought. The best pieces use this double movement structurally: the train arrives somewhere and so does the character, not at the same destination. Read the flash fiction about trains on Tumbleweed Words to see how this works in practice.

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.