The short fiction of j hardy carroll
From the archives People are spending so much of their lives doing things they’d rather not be doing. I’m not sure if all of history has been like this, but now at least it seems that a big chunk of the populace is being forced to do things for which they have no passion. In…
Disclaimer: this story is based on real events, but is no way are a journalistic recording of what actually transpired. Harvey High was a real person and we had this conversation. That’s all I will admit to. I heard Harvey High died a few months after this story took place, but I might be wrong. I sure…
Reposting this story from 2015. For some reason it gets hits throughout the year. Maybe it’s the photos. This was something I originally wrote more than twenty years ago, one of my first short stories. Full disclosure: the first bar I ever drank in was a strip club, Daddy Jack’s Blue Note in Tucson, Arizona.…
When I was a kid, I’d sometimes get my hair cut at Johnny Gibson’s barbershop. Johnny was a Tucson legend, and for a kid like me his shop was a Shangri-La. He had a real live shark that swam in an aquarium, photos of soldiers and race car drivers and Indian chiefs. Johnny’s chair was…
I couldn’t help but look at the calendar as the day approached. Three more days. Two more days. Though only ten, she felt it too. Only once did she ask me why she had to go, why she couldn’t live with me. The question floated over my sea of bitter resentment me like a scrap…
Corporal Cobbs rode into the camp, his mare lathered by the hard going. Sergeant Collinsworth stood to unlatch the gate. He nodded as Cobbs led in the long column of prisoners, the other men of the platoon riding alongside the ragged group like drovers, calling out to keep them moving. Cobbs dismounted and limped over.…
Note on this story: It’s one of the Überhaus Diaries I wrote in Portland during the late 1990s. The photo Karen selected this week is the inside of a bar around the corner from where I lived in Portland. The Überhaus was perhaps the last bandit lofts in the city, a 2000 square foot apartment…
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.…
You mere scarecrow again and again in my youth You, bully, your shotgun in my face I found a way to back down, with grace Oh you wise men said this as such would happen again and again, a safe bet and you bet on it and the bookie called all the clever fellows…
When I met Doc he shook my hand like a man, told war stories with a southern accent. My best friend Reno introduced him to me. Doc, he said, was cool. Doc had a nice house, a marble sculpture. Greek boys wrestling, masculine furniture, heirlooms and aged books, a Colt’s revolver on the nightstand next to a…