The short fiction of j hardy carroll
The museum is climate controlled with inch-thick glass between the dioramas and me.This hushes the history. Sobers all the miniature people frozen in time, hand-painted. A birds-eye view, I observe the modeled activity, the huts, the plains. Look: the hunters have killed a deer. I cannot see the women waiting inside the smoky hut, the…
This man, if man he was a devil we were insulted when he finished his painting of evil deeds, attributed. Corpses piled like firewood bodies hacked to bits burned to cinders their dead mouths in open rebuke His certain voice explained it was only a puzzle. Oh, how we hated him We surged and gnashed…
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…
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…
I. American students usually do not know the average age of a soldier which is 15, nor how many mines tear off legs in so many countries where these very young and ignorant and emotional young men fire their machineguns II. The young women will believe anyone who offers anything different than what other women…
Kids together, we come up on the West Side corners, never knowing the clock. Never showing care Way I remember it was mostly summer B-Mo heat hanging on you like a jacket city stink of piss and spilled beer garbage strewn on corners swarmed with flies a cold orange pop was all we want or…
Most of the high-end stores on the Mile use iPads. Supposedly the retail slaves all carry them around so they can ring customers up without needing to go to the counter, but the real reason is they think an iPad makes them look like the rich fucks who shop there. Chip and me had it…
She of course was dying to tell anyone the danger of leaving one’s back to the sea, an element she said with knifing lips, too dangerous, too vast for trust. The proof, she said was etched beneath its mystery if one could see every comma traced in the surf by dancing lovers’ feet, every vanished…
I. now it’s a barn, a ballroom really if I close an eye II. the posts wait in shafts of light swirling with dust III. once she pushed me up against the wall entirely IV. on the phone our faces hang, talking mouths open V. the shadow of me pushes hard against my shoes no…
Jesus rides astride an ass: fragrant fronds burnt to ash.