Migrants, refugees, and other asylum seekers inhabit Edwidge Danticat’s collections Krik? Krak! (1991), The Dew Breaker (2004) and Everything Inside (2019). These figures are often excluded from the nation-state, stripped of their political rights, of any form of citizenship. They are dispossessed of their belongings, shrunk to ailing bodies that dwell in limbo spaces between countries, cultures, languages. They can be guests, or become their own (g)hosts, as their hosts’ hospitality is parasitized by their hostility (hospes and hostis both derive from the Latin hostire, see Derrida, De l’hospitalité). Danticat has chosen the short story and the short story cycle to address more specifically this distress. Why such a choice? What, in such a context, could only be expressed through these genres? This article gives added focus to a selection of stories to understand how the figure of the refuge seeker is one that interrogates the very core of our societies and can help us reinvent them.