  In this paper, we investigate a fluid antenna system (FAS)-assisted downlink
non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) for short-packet communications. The base
station (BS) adopts a single fixed antenna, while both the central user (CU)
and the cell-edge user (CEU) are equipped with a FAS. Each FAS comprises $N$
flexible positions (also known as ports), linked to $N$ arbitrarily correlated
Rayleigh fading channels. We derive expressions for the average block error
rate (BLER) of the FAS-assisted NOMA system and provide asymptotic BLER
expressions. We determine that the diversity order for CU and CEU is $N$,
indicating that the system performance can be considerably improved by
increasing $N$. Simulation results validate the great performance of FAS.
