Petina Gappah’s collection of short stories titled, Rotten Row (2016), describes the everyday experiences of residents of the city of Harare in Zimbabwe as they grapple with the social, economic and political malaise arising from the crisis conditions that started in 2000. The setting of the stories suggests the need to contemplate the space of the city of Harare and the nation within Fanonian (1963) and Dirlik (1997) postcolonial discourses about the trajectories of the post-independence nation state and their impact on the spaces thereof. Some of the stories, especially those set in the post-2008 era portray the city of Harare, as an impacted and almost surreal city space owing to the linkage, resonating with Lefebvre’s (1991) notions on relational spaces, between incremental effects of the crisis conditions and how they have evolved to encompass issues such as migration, the rise of state and individual initiated violence, the sense of a circumscribed city and omnipresence of heavy local governance and police surveillance on people’s movements across spaces, multidirectional travels to eke a living and establish survival networks in the city’s formal and informal economic spaces, and the crafting of narratives and ways of seeing, being in, mapping and to challenge these city spaces. Thus, the stories highlight the intersection between space and how it is lived, mapped, imagined and storied, in a way resonating with notions on the way the evolved ways of spatial productivity intersect with storytelling as a spatial practice (Bieger & Maruo-Schroder 2016; Bieger 2016; Nye 2016). The paper therefore, seeks to analyse how the urbanites make sense of the checkered space and its impact on the everyday travels and survival practices, the nature of urban rhythms and mobilities they craft to make do, and narratives they make about this impacted superfluous fictional Harare space. As a result, the paper, draws on a number of critical issues, such as Mbembe’s (2008) ideas on the superfluous, especially the Braudel notion of the paradox of a lived space characterised by both lack and necessity and the resultant displacements and traumas evident in the contested urban social and spatial ‘multiplicities’. The notions of the superfluous are juxtaposed with those about the crisis of the nation state as discussed by critics such as Fanon (1963) and Dirlik (1997) in establishing the postcolonial condition of the depicted Harare and by extension nation in mapping the unfolding spatial productions and imaginaries. The analysis also considers De Certeau’s (1984) notions on survival techniques and the resistant steps of an ordinary urbanite; and the cultural geographic notions on the storying of space (Bieger & Maruo-Schroder 2016; Bieger 2016; Nye 2016) by residents as they traverse, map and make meanings of the different crisis ridden fictional Harare of the final years of the first decade and early years of the second decade of the twenty first century.