The short fiction of j hardy carroll
Gustav walked on, flecks of snow stinging his cheeks like spits of sand, the rhythmic crunch-crunch of his boots accompanying him like a funeral drum. Your novel, sir, is a mixture of genuine truth and private grouch, Strindberg had told him, but too much of the latter for them to consider publishing it. What now, he…
She crouched under the bridge, cold and hungry and scared. The only bag she’d been able to find was the Pan Am carryon her real dad had brought her as a souvenier, blue and white with a globe. She looked around her bedroom and thought of what she most cared about that would still fit…
“You about finished writing, Major? The men is chafing to get this next stretch over with.” “Just a moment more.” Powell dipped his pen into the inkhorn and scratched away at the page. “I don’t think them Howard boys and Dunn is coming back, Major. Yesterday scared out their Jesus.” “Yes. Can’t be helped. Some…
Daughter You will have questions I cannot answer except to say that reality is but an illusion, a projection of our expectations. We are taught to make our eyes glide over the world, to create symbols and labels so that we can more easily dismiss them. We are trained to turn our awareness inward, towards…
How long am I here? An eternity. There is no time but now, and now lasts forever. There must be hundreds in this place, though I never see anyone. I know from the screams that come through the walls. I see only the guards when they come for me. Sometimes I am hooded and led to…
I placed my finger on my king and gently toppled him. Dr. Tartov studied the board. “You revealed yourself in your opening,” he said. “The Latvian Gambit is almost never employed by black because it allows such an early advantage for white. I was surprised to see it because it is always reserved for tournaments,…
As always happens when a dictator falls, there were rumors that he had escaped. Conflicting reports of the exeution, confusing photographs, a lack of a gravesite. He had held us in his wicked grip for twenty-five years. Countless victims arrested and tortured, thousands shot or merely vanished, Romania turned to a nation of informers leaping…
The dew lay heavy on the grass, the lowering clouds a harbinger of afternoon thunderstorm. As previously arranged, the boatmen and surgeon turned their backs to the principals, for these affairs were now a prosecutable offense. Van Ness produced the walnut case, a fine set of Wogdon & Barton’s finest pistols. Pendleton selected one and…
I cruised the Lower Ninth in my rented Ford, first time back since Katrina. Everything was gone. When I found it at last, Jeffus sat high on his porch sipping julep from his big tin cup. House looked much the same, though the boards was new and the paint fresher. “How was your house spared…
George greeted me with his usual smile, ushered me up onto the shoe bench as he got out the tin and rag, his long fingers deft and surprisingly unstained. “You still got any shoes with me?” he said, peering up. “I know I had those oxfords.” “No, you finished them last month.” I looked at the…