The short fiction of j hardy carroll
Breathe. That’s how you get through anything, Aunt Gertie told me. If you breathe you stop talking to yourself, stop telling yourself that you can’t endure another minute. Focus on breathing and you won’t be thinking. You won’t be worried or afraid. Just stay right where you are. Inhale. Exhale. Just breathe and you’ll be…
“Son, do you love your country?” It’s a hard question to answer. This is not due to my lack of patriotism, but because I’ve just taken a huge bite of blood-rare prime rib that is the Hunters’ Club Friday night special. My interlocutor is Major General Herford Hood, USMC (Retired), my perhaps-soon-to-be stepfather. I…
“Ready to rock and roll?” Clivers yelled. I could see his mustache through his kevlar face shield. “How confident are you the CI is good? You sure we have the right address this time?” “Lock and load!” He slammed the magazine into his MK18. He’d tricked the rifle out with so many gadgets and attachments…
I stare at the snow. “The yard almost looks nice,” I say before realizing there’s nobody to hear the conversation. Habits of a lifetime are not easily broken. His shoes stand by the door, right where he stepped out of them. The fever and coughing kept getting worse, so we decided on the hospital as…
reno’s dad was only a door away and we couldn’t ever talk so in the silence we did what we could, sometimes whispering and in the morning when he knocked his wife across the room made her fall palms-down against the hissing griddle of newly-burnt potatoes we watched the wall, the window, anywhere but the…
His pupils so dilated that his eyes are shining black with a thin corona of brown iris. They seem to be a cave into which I will tumble. My body shakes with an urge to flee, close the door behind me, drive to the airport and forget all of this. Yet the eyes compel me. “Yes,” I hear myself saying. “I wish to hear it.”
She clutches her pearls in what has become a habitual gesture. At least her eyes are dry. Cried out, probably. “I’m glad you came, anyway,” she says, the last word an accusation. “It was the least I could do,” I answer lamely, thinking so that’s what I did. The least I could do. “Your brother was……
Dan pauses in the hallway and closes his eyes to listen. He made more noise than he wanted when he climbed through the basement window. Stealth is the most important part of this operation. He hears footsteps on the stairs, so he slips into the men’s room and locks himself in the stall. His heart…
I. OPERATION RESOLUTE SUPPORT USMC CAMP DWYER, AFGHANISTAN “War,” the colonel announces, “is hell.” He sits behind a metal field desk, a MacArthur corncob pipe jutting from his teeth like a gearshift. Looking at his face, my mind is filled with rugged adjectives. Granite jaw. Iron hair. Steely eyes. The wind howls up the Hemland…
You know me. The name Jimmy B. Jimmy is almost as famous as Mickey Mouse, especially after last November when I was elected President of the United States by the largest margin in American history. But that’s not why you know me. You know me because for twenty-five years I’ve been the infomercial guy who…