The short fiction of j hardy carroll
The Egypt Air flight from LaGuardia was delayed six hours for mechanical trouble, but the real trouble came at customs. The official scanned her passport, held it up against a clipboard. “Excuse me, Miss,” he said, and disappeared through a door. He returned with two soldiers carrying machine guns. Amaka was led back to a small room…
Word comes down from our senior officers to prepare for evacuation. We busy ourselves making rucksacks and gathering our belongings. I linger in the room and pry up the floorboard to my hidey hole. One of the cartons of cigarettes is missing. In its place is a small German army musette bag. I open the flap.…
She agrees to meet me at the museum. I know the second I see her. It’s on her face. Doom. I smile anyway. “You remember this place?” I say, as though nothing is wrong. As though last night had never happened. “Our first date?” “It wasn’t a date,” she says. “We need to talk.” “We…
The grass was heavy with dew as we walked across Phoenix Park, the sky pale with the false dawn. What it would have been like for them? The two black carriages parked beneath the trees, their seconds pacing the grounds as they loaded the pistols and checked the flints. Fitzgerald would have preferred they use small swords. Two…
Ramana held the image of the insect in his mind, his full attention on the grasshopper, remembering not only the careful hours of detailed observation but also the many other times he had seen the colorful creatures during his childhood in the mountains. Titighodo, they were called, used as medicine by the village elders. His brother Venka had…
She could see the pottery shop owner was Mexican, but she did not tell him how she had gotten to Arizona. There had been sixty of them who met in Reforma to begin the journey through the desert night. They each carried two gallons of water. Their coyote set an impossible pace to cover maximum distance while it was still dark and…
My father’s hardness ran so deep that anything tender in him was trapped like a bug in amber. Certain angles you might see it, but kindness and compassion were dead relics buried inside him. This no doubt served him in his role as constable, but didn’t make him shucks as a father to three motherless girls.…
The boy stares into the wake as the keelboat churns slowly up the river, the twin motors groaning in the current. An endless green canopy stretches away on every side, clouds of birds erupting from the trees as the boat passes. He watches the Captain’s broad back as he turns the wheel against the water. Mama…
I got off work early and arrived around midnight. The leaden sky was pregnant with snow, the cold air stinging my lungs. Uncle John had pulled strings with the nursing staff to extend visiting hours, since Grandma had always been a night owl. I entered through the ER and made my way through the dim hallways, glancing through…
The itching was almost unbearable. The starched Arrow shirt chafed against the new irizumi tattoos that covered Takahashi from waist to collarbone, the final stage of a five year initiation into the Sumiyoshi-Kai family of Yakuza. The thought of his four thousand years of Samurai lineage did little to relieve his discomfort, and he longed for his uncle…