The Shape of Something Missing
A Flash Fiction by Khushboo Balwani
This story was shortlisted in the 2026 WestWord Prize
The car moves slowly, carefully, because she cannot bear speed here. The driver exhales repeatedly through his nose. All four window panes are lowered to the same height, not an inch higher or lower. The air circulates in a controlled loop. An ideal trap. She keeps her eyes fixed outward, searching. The dry, cracking salt flats stretch outward, unmoving. The land is so flat she almost believes she can see the earth’s curve. Vertigo rushes in.
The air thickens as the car slows among trucks carrying salt, coal, mica, crude oil. Highway construction claws toward heaven. Burning cow dung leaves behind its sweet, acrid trace. The smells layer until breathing becomes work. A sharp ringing fills her ears, like a disconnected phone line reaching back to another time. Her husband and children speak brightly beside her, their excitement scraping against her skin. They cannot wait to see her birthplace. The boat-shaped house she grew up in.
In the rearview mirror, she catches the driver’s tight expression. She folds into herself, apologetic for the space she occupies. Heat rises. Sweat beads along her temples. Her mouth floods. The nausea comes in a hard wave. She lowers the window and leans out, vomiting carefully, making sure not a drop falls inside.
The driver pulls over near a general store. Everyone steps out. After making sure she is steady, her husband and children make their way into the shop, in search of candies. Relief comes only after they leave. She sits on a bench opposite the shop, reassured by the illusion of stillness.
She turns, taking in the roundabout that once took forever to circle.
It feels smaller.
They have arrived. The boat-shaped house is not far.
Her jaw tightens as she struggles to swallow a lump in her throat. Everything she described to her husband and children exists, only altered in proportion, in form, in ownership.
For the first time, she longs for proof she once lived here—no photos, no journal entries, no one to talk about the past. She wants something to show her family, even if it is only ghosts burned into negatives.
She remains on the bench, gathering herself.
In that moment, her courage is stolen—not by loss, but by continuation. She sits there, thinking about the house and the lives now unfolding inside it.
When she looks up, the shopkeeper is watching her. Affection glimmers in his dark eyes—a quiet recognition for someone who once belonged. He lifts a hand in greeting.
She returns it.
***
The night moves slowly, relentless. She cannot bear its weight. The walls do nothing to stop it; they hold the sounds inside and press them on her. She buries her ears beneath her palms and pillows, but her mother’s broken cries and her father’s shouting seep through anyway. That afternoon, the newly developed photos of her last birthday party from November, when she turned ten, were delivered. She barely had time to look before they were torn into a thousand pieces by her father’s rage. She misses especially the photo of herself and her friends outside the boat-shaped house.
In the dark, she invents other landscapes—places she has never seen—and slips into them until sleep comes in fragments.
The alarm startles her awake with the cuckoo’s call. She bargains briefly with the blanket against the January cold, then remembers: Republic Day. The promise of school—of order—gets her out of bed.
Children stand in neat rows according to age, wearing pressed uniforms. She giggles with her friends when a teacher scolds them for failing to salute properly. The terror of the night dissolves into the wide courtyard and the morning light.
Little children dressed as flowers open the program with a prayer dance. As the sun rises, light spills across the stage. The flowers bloom one by one.
Then—thunder.
A crack. Columns buckle. The stage folds inward. Dust swallows the morning.
She runs. Screams blur with the sound of splitting concrete. It becomes impossible to tell what lies beneath the rubble—debris or children. She calls out her friends’ names. Faces dissolve into a single expression. Uniforms become indistinguishable. The ground that felt solid seconds ago turns treacherous.
Somehow, she reaches the street.
Relief comes first, quick and disorienting. She turns toward her boat-shaped house.
Something is wrong. Streets are askew. Walls split open. In eighty-seven seconds, the world she has known for ten years is altered.
There is nothing familiar to hold on to. Not her friend’s house. Not the shop where a man once sold sweet-sour candies from Dubai.
Her stomach clenches. The relief does not hold. She stops at a bench, searching for stability. The house is not far.
In that moment, her courage is stolen.
She sits there, thinking about the house and its inhabitants, and the possibility of its disappearance.
Above her, a purple kite sways in the dust-grey sky.
Author: Khushboo Balwani is an Indian-born writer, storyteller, and futurist based in Brussels. She has written futures fiction that has been adapted into radio podcasts, audio installations, and video works, and exhibited internationally. She currently experiments to write about inheritance, grief, memory, and the quiet ruptures of daily life.