The short fiction of j hardy carroll
Troy loved his headphones. He wore them all the time. Noise canceling, with incredible dynamic range. He bragged that they cost a month’s rent and were worth every penny. That’s why he just sat there when it happened, staring at his screen, typing lines of code and drinking his Mountain Dew. He didn’t hear the alarm,…
The old man is a charmer loving his barbershop or anyplace where he can stand a story up and make it holler every day there is a little extra he sees but nobody else notices a small thing flashes by like a bug or a day of the week he’ll dine out for hours on…
They are waiting just over the horizon, swords in hands, capable of anything. So we scurry to our secret rooms strip the larders bare for fear that all will soon be lost
My father told me he spoke to ghosts as easily as people. Coming from him, this did not seem crazy. He mentioned a conversation he’d had that morning with his grandfather, retold the joke he had heard. The fact that his grandfather dropped dead on the golf course on an April day in 1927 was of…
IN THE END, he stopped talking about it. Nobody had believed him, and one old friend had gone so far as to question his sanity in print. There was was a savagery in the piece that make it more like betrayal than incredulity. And it was incredible, the more so in that out of the millions of camera phones…
The Subadar sat cross-legged on the floor of the dugout. The Germans had spent twenty-three of the last twenty-four hours lobbing shells at our trenches, and the sudden cessation made Captain Floyd nervous enough to send a scouting party into no man’s land to see what was up. The rest of us waited. I was…
Sunday, January 16, 2005 Talked to Chris Morris on the phone about aliens, the end of the world, the meaning of both our lives, growing older, philosophy of Marcus Aurelius, my father, women in general and particular, the law, Oregon, the midwest, world culture, American history as it relates to the current situation, the spiritual…
With strong purpose one more of the heroes talks before and after, looks to build and make the broad shoulders real, and smokes against her hat and flattened flannel on a steam locomotive headed out west, towards some station of glad soldiers getting hearty hugs and more, Ernie Pyle writing about how the boys walk…
I read about how infantry guys in WWII were envious of the Air Force crews because they flew their missions and went back to bases in England, whereas the infantry experienced total war 24/7. Ah, technology. I’m in the infantry, but on detached service to an agency I can’t mention. We sit in a dark room in…
Sewing shirtwaists nine hours a day, Monday through Saturday for seven dollars a week. There was more than five hundred of us on the ninth floor. Bosses told us we was lucky to have jobs at all, bunch of dumb Dagoes who couldn’t speak no English, and women to boot. That Saturday afternoon, one of the foremen was careless with his cigarette. The…