Stories

Fishing nets fluttered on a light breeze whispering off the Lakshadweep Sea. Four men operated a complicated system of counterweights to dip for choora, the rich tuna they sold along the waterfront. Traders from the court of Kublai Khan had introduced these devices to the Malabar Coast seven hundred years ago, and they’d been used…

The Columbia, a thousand feet beneath me, snakes to its source through basalt cliffs, high prairies, and Canada’s Rocky Mountains. Elusive memories shift one direction, surge another. “Come.” My father summons after fifty years time. Did he always call this way when I was a boy? Not question, but command. I yearned then for the…

Steel Man.MacGuffin.Summer2015.Vol.XXXI, No.3    

Oatie He shave in long slow pulls; tighten his face so the blade can’t snare up against the skin of his neck, seventeen inches thick like a bull. He watch himself in a mirror fragment jam up against a knot in a twisted tree, hold fast at the bottom by a vine. Almost nineteen, he…