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Remains

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

Fiction | Fiction, Flash Fiction, ghosts, Remains
December 21, 2022

In The Margins’ first flash fiction notebook, Remains, we gather fourteen stories by writers who urgently ask: after leaving, what remains? Across the notebook, writers confront death, grief, and the remnants of the ones we know. Flash fiction is a perfect form to capture the elegy of a moment, and these stories are playful, tender, cutting, and funny. Edited by our flash fiction editor Swati Khurana and our assistant flash fiction Yi Wei, this notebook shows how places can be resurrected through the memory and longing of people, and how people carry the residue of places within them. “We who live in diasporas—whether by forced migration, global inequity, or colonialism—make our lives with shards from our family histories or different homes,” writes Khurana. “Writers use remains.”

The notebook features art by Chitra Ganesh.


Editor’s Note
by Swati Khurana

Haunted Penthouse
by Urvashi Pathania

The Funeral
by Tony Wallin-Sato

Ghost Month Zuihitsu
by Sheng Kao

Ash
by Aathma Nirmala Dious

Three Reincarnation Rituals
by Lilian Liang

Two Small Hands
by Zen Alladina

Give Me an EpiPen for Resurrection
by Abhigna Mooraka

Little Crane
by Juliet Way-Henthorne

Postcards
by Elane Kim

A Crack in Their Porcellanidae Shell
by Mandira Pattnaik

Flight of the Buraq
by Yasmine Rukia

Tender Is the Ghost
by Sijia Li

Blue Stripe
by SJ Han

The Omen
by Cleo Qian

About the Art
by Swati Khurana