The short fiction of j hardy carroll
Soft words about how she’s waiting only made it worse. As though her going never counted for shit as though it was only a step in a direction. Why’d they say that I want to know the part about her waiting was just to get me to stop crying, but I think about it now…
Our first winter on the farm, Ellie kept seeing him. We thought she had an overactive imagination spurred by too much television, but Ellie was insistent that Mr. Nervous was real. We would hear her talking to him, open the door. “He just left,” she’d say. Odd things began to happen. Lights coming on in…
My memory was going. That’s what I wanted to believe. I kept losing time. Two hours, then three, then a whole day. I would be in one place and then I would be in another with no memory of how I got there. I talked to my husband about it. He said I was working…
She swore the trench knife she carried in her purse saved her life hitchhiking home. She weighed maybe eighty pounds dirty tight clothes that dared anyone to say shit took the dirty spoon from my dried-up cereal bowl wiped it on her leg tapped out a pile of yellow powder from a film can water…
After the funeral, I made arrangements for the bills to come to my office. Every month, I paid her rent, her electric, even her phone. At least once a day I would call her number and pretend she might answer it, hear her voice on the answering machine. At first I left messages, but then…
Ramón walked across the plaza. The birds no longer sang of hope. Now their noise mocked him, told him what he was. What he would always be. Up ahead the old man was still sitting at his little table in the shade, the same old man who’d offered to tell Ramón his fortune earlier, when…
It’s November again and all over the USA, writers are midway through the marathon of National Novel Writing Month, known cordially as NaNoWriMo. We call it Nano, but some people call it goddamn it’s four in the morning on a weekday and why did I agree to do this? The goal of Nano is to write…
Whitey give the pieces of the Ford wrong names but he knew them by sight by feel, hefting every damned one in a greasy hand folks said he was crazy when he’d slither under her amongst the dirt and spiders spending hours and didn’t say much mostly just whistled through his teeth. It took forever…
“Hello?” “Sorry to wake you.” “Joey?” “Listen. I need you to get over here. It’s Pop.” I sat up. “I had a dream about him!” “Yeah, well. This ain’t a dream. I need you to come to the house right away.” “What happened? Is he okay?” “I––I can’t tell. He’s sitting in the kitchen. He’s…
She looks so pretty, but the martinis are a bad idea. She hasn’t eaten all day and is already halfway through the second one before the waiter comes by for our order. She’s in her ebullient stage, laughing out a story I’ve heard before. I laugh along, watching for the change. I know it’s coming.…