November 2009
4 posts
6.
Zachariah Gillam’s hands went numb so he wriggled them up underneath his sleeves and flapped his arms until hands and arms were inside the zone between sweatshirt and T-shirt. His hands found his armpits for ten seconds and his arms journeyed back through two sets of wrist cuffs. He rubbed his hands together and cupped them around his face and blew into them. They were still numb and now his...
5.
The Makpigat Public School was the only place in town with an Internet connection, for reasons nobody quite understood and few bothered to question until Gordon arrived. The story begins in 1986, when Neil the Tech Guy dreamt up a plan to launch a satellite from Makpigat.
The entire set of schematics, from the wiring to the scaffolding, came to Neil in a dream, or so he told Tom. Neil built the...
4.
“Euech!”
Gordon woke up to the sound of his newly acquired dog barfing a foamy orangish puddle on the floor and his new boss leaning on the horn of a snowmobile in his driveway. He rolled over in bed and reached for the clock on the nightstand and knocked over the ashtray instead. The roach of last night’s joint flying across the bedroom into the puddle of puppy puke and it rained ash over...
April 2009
1 post
3.
No matter what time he set his alarm for, Guy Fleurry woke up ten minutes before it went off. This particular morning his alarm was set for six, so the clock showed five-fifty when he flicked the switch to off. He disliked the EE-EE-EE-EE sound so much that his subconscious worked to stop him from hearing it even when it meant jumping out of bed at ten to six. He crept past his parent’s bedroom...
March 2009
3 posts
2.
The information kiosk in the Cambridge Bay Regional Airport was made out of fake logs in the shape of a fake log cabin, a simulacrum of something warm and cozy. The kiosk was also incorrectly named, for it lacked any information on any flight leaving or going into Cambridge Bay Regional Airport. What little information that escaped from the information kiosk was either unnecessary or just wrong,...
1.
Gordon sat and waited in the lobby outside of the office of a man powerful enough to have an entire lobby outside his office. In his nine years of employment he had never known a federal government building to be this nice on the inside, which impressed and worried him at the same time. The carpet had not charged him with enough static electricity to jump start his car battery. The chair he was...
Prologue
A Prologue Regarding the Formation and Foundation of Makpigat, Nunavut, Canada
Makpigat is a place that does not exist. If you look it up on a map, it will not be there. Even if you tried to find it, you wouldn’t know where to start. If you asked an Inuit to take you to Makpigat, he would laugh at you and say there is no such place, or he might take you to a library. No book off the shelves...