The short fiction of j hardy carroll
“Mr. Rains?” There was no answer. The assistant knocked again. “Mr. Rains? I have a message from Mr. Wallis.” “Read it to me,” said Rains from inside the dressing room. “It’s sealed, Mr. Rains. The message is for you. From Mr. Wallis.” “If Hal wants to give me a message he can come down and…
She loved the city cloaked in rain and fog. The wet gray mist seemed to her romantic. To me it was funereal, from the back of the cab watching the wipers smear the rain but she was almost giddy sitting on the edge of the seat craning her neck to see the building-tops wreathed in…
At first I denied it, telling myself autumn was coming early. Leaves can begin to turn in July. It had been a dry spring. But there were the birds. In the three weeks since coming here we hadn’t seen a single bird. I took up the satchel of food I’d scavenged from the deserted grocery.…
In which an unlikely set of circumstances leads to the creation of an entirely new art form.
Tsou-Tahi burns with shame. A simple task usually relegated to women, the gathering of medicine herbs. But even at this Tsou-Tahi fails. Time and again he returns to Yatoyenh with an empty sack. The old man shakes his head and retraces Tsou-Tahi’s trail, always finding the plants with ludicrous ease. This time he shows Tsou-Tahi his…
Civilians thought of Green Berets as Army Special Forces. It was more complicated than that. Our orders came from the Agency or the President. Our activities were top secret. Even General Westmoreland had no idea of what we did or who we were. And of course, we weren’t supposed to be in Cambodia at all.…
The old man looked young, even when dying. Worked hard all his life and was never quick to tell anyone about his cancer, never quick to settle his affairs even after the coughing left him exhausted night after night, collapsed in his recliner with Pat Robertson on the TV. You might think he would never…
She sat cradling her mug of tea. From time to time she would lower her face to it, close her eyes and inhale the fragrant steam. This was the tenth night in a row she had awakened screaming at precisely 2:10 am, the tenth morning after she had lain awake with the visions she would…
In January 1946, Corporal Stuart Dulley was discharged from the United States Marine Corps in which he had served since September 1940. His wounded arm had healed as much as it was going to, which wasn’t much. Other men at the hospital were aching to get back to something. Wives, jobs, hometowns. Stuart’s parents had…
I know you cannot speak. Trust me. This is for the best. Perhaps you have heard the stories. That I cut their tongues out and ate them, slit them like grain sacks and swallowed their innards like borscht. Or that I was in KGB and went about on the Moscow trains with the organs of…