In that moment who was to say what belonged to me—Munir’s mouth, my luminous skin color, a setting sun, the shady place we were in, I could never tell anyone.

Your mother always told you stories as she oiled your hair: of her youth, legends and fables, immigration, your father’s business ventures.

Like if we shared any of the same interests I could tell him how I recently learned that Kubrick in his younger days used to wander around New York City and play chess in parks

“Scared, Starlight?” my big brother said smiling at me as we’d strapped our harnesses into place. “Don’t be.”

It is 10:40 a.m., I stare up at the ceiling, a collection of imprints. I am trying to count how many animals I can see sheeted above my head in all four corners.

Astrological insights from our inaugural twelve flash stories

Hot outside, cold inside. Hopeful on the outside, forlorn on the inside. Or was it the other way around?

One day the woman wakes up and she can’t say exactly what it is that’s changed, only that she knows it all has.

They thought me the oddity, though they were the ones depriving themselves of air. I watched them with the same curiosity that they watched me. How? And why?

These days I’ve grown tired of my heart, how much feeling it has required, and would much prefer to laugh.

In the shelter of our happiness, his shell shone brighter and brighter until one day, it split open and crumbled into dust to reveal a baby, golden skinned and blinking up at me.

Sometimes she grew so nervous that she had to sit in her room for hours until her hands stopped trembling. She wondered if her daughters ever thought about her.

That spring my wife covered the walls of our living room in newsprint.

She should moisturize more often, drink at least three liters of hot water with lemon each day, and wear silicon sheet masks to bed to hide the stigmata of a woman who was everything.

And though I knew it was someone’s son, I unburied the rooster in the dark and kick-started a fire and roasted it on a spit, my fingers lamping with grease.

The sunflowers fall, right along with their mason jar, in the middle of the night. Their heads too gloriously full of early July. How they seem to know everything, except the virus.

He collected the past in amber, often describing war memorials as beautiful. He called himself a gardener.

Five American Fables

As we kick off a new fortnightly series on The Margins, what experiments with the Instant Pot teach us about the art of flash fiction

The hagwon director was the most successful woman we knew at the time… Her short hair was perfectly coiffed, her full lips painted red like a Western woman’s.

Fabulism as conflict, punchlines, symbolic white space, and more