Fortnightly on Fridays, the Margins publishes flash fiction by emerging and established Asian, Asian American, and Asian diasporic writers.
Some of the most fascinating, and perhaps strangest and most experimental writing exists in short, finished pieces that were never meant to be novels or full-length stories. Our hope is for the flash fiction we publish to be shared, perhaps read aloud, where flickers of campfire match the ferocity of the page.
Our flash fiction series is edited by Swati Khurana and Yi Wei.
before she could contemplate doing something for herself with her time
This made for juicy morsels of gossip for the goûter at four o’clock
I wrack my brain for ways of describing this pain but nothing original comes to mind.
More things fall from the sky now.
Chow reminded Cheng that a lot of writers drink but drinking does not turn him into a writer.
“I’m a truck driver. Long-distance. I just came back from California yesterday.”
A handful of us scream in recognition like sea flares on a dance floor.
Did she even graduate? Kevin will ask me later, when it’s just us, slumped on our flight back home.
The way she speaks will make you certain that she is the only one still alive.
Even now you can feel her, flickering.
So much of art is speaking, but art can only be made by listening to the world around us, forming our own distinctive definitions of that world in tandem with what we learn and who we choose to look for.
The most important love we have will always be for ourselves and our lives. It is only from this lodestar, our own definition and practice of love, that we can turn love back out into the world and towards our people.
I’ve been reading up on comfort and chaos. I like missing you.
How many times she must have labored to make you stop crying, and how many times she held you, acknowledging your pain as you cried.
We’d video-game or anime-binge or dream aloud about a future as bright as our childhoods.
“A Beautiful Relationship” and “The Price of Freedom”
She looked up at the high walls. There were some things even they couldn’t keep out.
Two days later I asked her if she would love me no matter what before I told her the truth.
There were eleven steps in the program—one less than AA—to be completed over fifteen days.
I know what it is like to travel into the quiet dusk, but don’t know what her fear felt like.
Sundays are our busiest days. While God rests, we work.
Even before the world changed, you couldn’t see her with ease.
The panic and hunger that will rise in you when you see another of your kind, even though together you unlock a different loneliness in your contained camaraderie.
I bring the child closer to me and inhale, prepared for the musty smell of old men. It never comes.
They have many lives, as all apparitions do, and don’t mind sparing a few
When I left, I stretched far enough away that any tethers I had severed. Now a place exists without me.
I killed my old self to see if I would finally return home to myself.
She had a dream the night before about catching a pig, which her father used to tell her was a prelude for great fortune.
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
That’s one thing I’ll say about the aliens: they really appreciate a good bowl of ramen.
I felt no joy out there, not close to the joy I felt in Daiso.
I was alone now, except the mold still had a strong presence I couldn’t ignore.
Astrological insights from twelve of our most recent flash stories
Their beautiful skin is the color of perfection, the shade of impeccably cooked lechón.
I had vowed to be different, but I wasn’t able to escape servitude, even eight thousand miles away in New York.
What if the world was stuck, frozen, and we could go anywhere we wanted, together?
I wonder how the body knows it’s ready to feed another life. Does it even get a choice to be ready?
We—our family—had so little to give each other; maybe we needed to look elsewhere.
We heard a glass break, then saw our mother, saw what looked like tears.
Astrological insights from twelve of our most recent flash stories
You know what I am trying to do for you, Night, she says. I am trying to make life easier.
Looking is not enough. You must run this beauty between finger and thumb.
Wei forgot that he’d given up these aspirations, but he knew they were still possible for her.
She remembers the rituals she had imbued with her own significance: how her ex used to bring her a single flower after every exam, and how she’d watch it wilt on her desk as she studied for the next.
I should have studied their faces as they said goodbye, the way they smelled, the lines on their hands.
I turned around to check whether the llama was still there. There he was, as fluffy and clueless as before, lashes waving as he sat on a tattered red mat thrown on the aisle.
When she opened her door the lived-in smell burst out like gases from a can: fish sauce and charred meat, mildew and a stronger concentration of the musk he had noticed when he got close enough to her body.
When they talk, the five sisters, their words strangle each other, pulling and plucking at the threads of truth.
I feel satisfied, triumphant, knowing I have loved the original donut well, though maybe it was only its glaze that I recognized.
I don’t know what to tell you except that children are cruel and her emails were hilarious.
She selected a single star on which to direct her attention. We are one light, she told herself.
That sweet aroma—one so acquainted with Jabril—was hanging brightly like a piece of the moon within this incantation.
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.
“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.
He collected the past in amber, often describing war memorials as beautiful. He called himself a gardener.
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
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
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