Fourteen flash fiction stories on the places and people that stay with us
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.
Read the full list of stories below.
Stories from top to bottom, left to right:
“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
