map Macro-Fiction Archives

The Wreckers

Issue No. 246 ~ November, 2017

Being a wrecker and living in the Exumas can be a tough, invisible life. You go up and down the broken chain of Bahamian coral, day after day, trying to beat the natives to the good spots, searching for wrecks. It is salty, lonely and …

Crystal

Issue No. 246 ~ November, 2017

We drank every day. We took any drug we could get our hands on. We had sex wherever we wanted and never once were we ashamed of someone seeing us. We hated ourselves at times. She cut her wrists, and we both thought of suicide, …

One Oar

Issue No. 246 ~ November, 2017

Charles found the boat stuck in the sand,  after a storm pushed it ashore. The hull solid enough to float. No one came up through the waves calling for it. The way the boy saw it, the boat now belonged to him. Grandfather slept upstairs. …

The Studio

Issue No. 246 ~ November, 2017

Last year they brought an old tugboat to the surface, refurbished it, and turned it into a bar. The inside is solid wood with heavy beams coated with multiple layers of antique white paint. A huge wooden figurehead hangs from the ceiling. Her chest arches …

Cancer

Issue No. 246 ~ November, 2017

The doors down the long, stifling hallway stood tall dark, thick, and heavy as a castle’s. Franklin stopped at the next door, got the picture ready he had come to show, and knocked. There was no answer. He cracked the door open. A woman sat …

The Is of Things

Issue No. 245 ~ October, 2017

This knows. This traces the broken web where each is lost to the many and little is known. And nothing is known once each is boxed in the ground, locked away and silent, finished with goings-on. But this knows, this was never boxed away but …

Paperless

Issue No. 245 ~ October, 2017

Niles Oberlin smiles at the cleaning lady as he pours his morning coffee at the company sink. “I can’t believe that employee of mine did such a stupid thing,” Niles says. The woman smiles and nods. She doesn’t speak English very well and is more …

The Swimmer

Issue No. 245 ~ October, 2017

Tyler placed his hands together above his head, his naked torso a diamond vision to behold, and bent his knees as if a wooden mallet sent from heaven tapped him right there. It was a variant of a standing lotus position that he had perfected. …

Visitations

Issue No. 245 ~ October, 2017

She was cartoon comical, my Auntie Verna, but darkly so. Auntie Verna came to visit us in Dryden, Ontario, unannounced, every year or two, her fortunes always in apparent flux. In 1960 she arrived broke and mascara-smeared on the bus from Minneapolis; in 1961 she …