Caribbean & Diaspora Storytelling
Original Fiction · Caribbean & Diaspora
Stories from the House
Original Caribbean short stories rooted in memory, inheritance, folklore, land, family, and the things that refuse to remain buried.
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Nos. 01–18
A Maroon House Collection
The Unquiet
The dead do not always leave.
Caribbean ghost stories
What remains after mourning ends?
Some dead leave. Others remain — in houses, rivers, family rituals, and the lives built around their absence.
The Unquiet is a collection of stories about grief, haunting, ancestral presence, and the uncertain boundary between keeping faith with the dead and refusing to let them go.
A Maroon House Collection
The Houses
Every house is keeping count.
Land and inheritance
What does a building remember?
The Houses is a collection of short stories about the places families live in, and what those places keep a record of — a wall, a room, a doorway, a line drawn in pencil and gone over so it will not fade.
Each story stands alone. Together they ask what a building holds on behalf of the people inside it.
A Maroon House Collection
The Ancestors
The archive is not neutral.
Records and genealogy
Somebody wrote it down. That is not the same as getting it right.
The Ancestors is a collection of short stories about the record itself — the registers, the clerks who kept them, and the families who come looking generations later.
A name heard once and written down wrong can outlast everyone who knew better.
A Maroon House Collection
The Heat
There was no one to be quiet for.
Desire and privacy
Privacy was never a right. It was something you took in the gaps.
The Heat is a collection of short stories about wanting, in households built for everything except that — shared rooms, thin walls, a door that does not close properly.
Each story stands alone. Together they ask what a person does with desire when there has never been anywhere to put it.
A Maroon House Collection
The Crossing
Somebody goes. Somebody stays. Somebody counts.
Migration and departure
The passage cost seventy-five pounds and they had forty-one.
The Crossing is a collection of short stories about leaving — the fare that had to be assembled rather than saved, the one who went first, and the one who waited.
Each story stands alone. Together they ask what a family gives up to put one person on a ship, and what it becomes while it waits.
A Maroon House Collection
The Living Caribbean
Four countries. Three time zones. One group chat.
Family and diaspora now
Somebody has to make the arrangements. It is always the one who lives nearest.
The Living Caribbean is a collection of short stories about Caribbean families as they are now — London, Toronto, Fort Lauderdale, New York, and whoever stayed.
Each story stands alone. Together they ask what a family is once it stops living in one country.
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From the House
New fiction
The Unquiet · Ghost stories
The Nine-Night
After Miss Ivy dies, her granddaughter Althea prepares the house for nine nights of mourning. But the chair still rocks, the cup will not remain where it was left, and the final ritual asks Althea to release more than the dead.
On the ninth night, the family must persuade the dead to leave. Althea has other plans.
Read the storyThe Houses · Land and inheritance
High Water Mark
The marks start at the height of Enid’s ankle and climb the kitchen wall like the rungs of a ladder no one could climb. Beside each line, in her small slanted hand, is what that flood took.
For every other flood in that house she had written down what the river took.
Read the storyThe Ancestors · Records and genealogy
What the Clerk Wrote
Errol has four days in the record room at Spanish Town and a folder holding everything four generations of his family knew about itself. What he finds is a clerk’s handwriting, and a name that is not the one he came for.
“Nancy,” he said. It was not her name.
Read the storyThe Heat · Desire and privacy
Sunday Clothes
Kadian has gone through the barrier at Norman Manley, and Yvonne did not cry, because one of them had to be the one who did not and she has been that one for nineteen years. They drive home to a house with no one in it.
For the first time in nineteen years, there was no one to be quiet for.
Read the storyThe Crossing · Migration and departure
Two Tickets
The passage costs seventy-five pounds and they have forty-one. They count it twice on the step — once in hope, once properly — and then decide which of them is going.
“Then you go,” Merle said.
Read the storyThe Living Caribbean · Family and diaspora now
Mummy Arrangements
Pat starts the group forty minutes after her mother dies, because somebody has to. Four countries, three time zones, and every argument the family has been avoiding for thirty years, in a thread nobody can leave.
“I am not asking, I am telling you. The 21st.”
Read the storyThe Unquiet · Ghost stories
River Mumma
Faye is thirty-four when her grandmother dies, and thirty-four when she learns she was paid for. What was given, and to whom, is the thing the family has never said out loud.
“You is the one they take out of the river.”
Read the storyThe Houses · Land and inheritance
The Same Name
The reading room takes eleven people and that week it had two. Andrea has the table by the window. The Scotsman has the table by the door. They are looking for the same surname, for opposite reasons.
“Mr. Malcolm,” she said.
Read the storyThe Ancestors · Records and genealogy
Apprentice
On the first of August they are called to the works yard and told they are free, and then told the conditions of it. Rachael listens carefully, because the important part of any announcement comes after the good part.
Two books. One of them is in an archive in England. This is the other one.
Read the storyThe Heat · Desire and privacy
The Long Way Home
The bus gives out in Savanna-la-Mar at ten past nine in the morning, in the rain. Simone is in the car park opposite with a Corolla, two boxes of her aunt’s things, and most of the island to cross.
He knew exactly what his face was doing.
Read the storyThe Crossing · Migration and departure
The Other Direction
Nathaniel goes to Panama in 1907 because a man comes to the square with a paper and reads out a wage. He works out in the first week that there are two payrolls on the Isthmus, and which one he is on.
The record of a family that made three crossings.
Read the storyThe Living Caribbean · Family and diaspora now
Load Shedding
The current goes at twenty to seven — the fan first, then the fridge, then the small green light on the router. Novlette is standing at the stove. Outside, the whole street comes to the wall.
She has watered them every morning since, regular, and they have not died yet.
Read the storyThe Unquiet · Ghost stories
The Empty Chair
Papa Vernal dies on a Wednesday in 1994, and the following Sunday Grandma Ruby sets the table for six. Thirty years later somebody is still setting it, and nobody can quite say why.
We not going to be the ones who stop.
Read the storyThe Houses · Land and inheritance
Family Land
The buyer’s man comes twice before anybody takes him seriously. What he wants is one signature. What the family has is twenty-odd people in four countries and no will.
“Did he? Or did he just never make a will?”
Read the storyThe Heat · Desire and privacy
Six Weeks
On the last night Racquel cannot pack, which is ridiculous, because she has done the same suitcase eleven times in six weeks. The room in Woodbrook had become hers in the way a room does.
Then Andre came around the end of the barrier, and she let go of the trolley.
Read the storyThe Crossing · Migration and departure
Bushwick
Six of them in three bedrooms on Halsey Street, with a bathroom system more organized than the hospital. Nobody’s family knows it is six. In the letters it is always my place.
We had told them nothing true and everything true, and we knew exactly which was which.
Read the storyThe Living Caribbean · Family and diaspora now
The Route Taxi
Fitzy runs the route between the town and the bottom of the district. The car seats four and carries five, and nobody has ever once discussed it. One Thursday in October, from about half past one.
That is the district. All of it in a car that seats four and carries five.
Read the storyThe Ancestors · Records and genealogy
Wrong on Paper
The family story is four sentences long and has never changed in Delroy’s lifetime. Then he finds the paper, and the paper does not agree.
“I tell you that already.”
Read the storyEvery story is published under a house byline, Maroon House Editors. The press itself is the author.
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