They have many lives, as all apparitions do, and don’t mind sparing a few

I bring the child closer to me and inhale, prepared for the musty smell of old men. It never comes.

The witch listened to nothing but her water heart.

All the koi fish in our pond died, except one.

I want to live inside it though: pale birds and fragile light and a novel kind of solitude.

When I left, I stretched far enough away that any tethers I had severed. Now a place exists without me.

All these familiar but strange things that make up his wife.

I don’t remember the trees, though. My sister doesn’t either.

I killed my old self to see if I would finally return home to myself.

The dead decided to live upon us, demanding a second chance.

She had a dream the night before about catching a pig, which her father used to tell her was a prelude for great fortune.

There are ghosts who haunt and ghosts who kill.

I feel him taking my hands in his and kissing them every time he saw me.

There were no windows opened. There were dimmed lights. There were crumbs beneath the table.

Fourteen flash fiction stories on the places and people that stay with us

The groundbreaking art and visual vocabulary of Chitra Ganesh

Most of us who love the past live among what remains.