The short fiction of j hardy carroll
“Lau Lum,” Mrs. Gia greeted me. Long time. She smiled and set a dish of banh cuon on the counter, my favorite lunch in the old days. I laughed. “How did you know?” “People don’t change much,” she said in her excellent English. It felt like it was only yesterday when I’d come to say goodbye,…
By the middle of our second year it was down to us and two other teams. Five continents, sixty-odd cities and countless towns, villages, hamlets and burgs. Every step another piece in the puzzle, every discovery a link in the chain. The journey changed us. Who we thought we were. It’s hard to explain. When…
“Lieutenant Hanks? Sorry to disturb.” Flédong was indeed sorry, for he knew Hanks, like the rest of his garrison, was down with griping guts. The culprit was a cask of Royal Navy salt beef purchased from a salvage brig that had fished it up from the wreck of HMS Speedy. The men had been living on…
It took Mama a while to notice, becuase that’s how Mama was. She mostly noticed how she felt about things, and was quick to tell you. The house is too cold. The stew is too salty. It was always something else wrong, not her. She paid attention to the world around like it was a movie…
Dimwitty knew right away that he wasn’t cut out for the military, but he wasn’t cut out for much else either. His Uncle James was a rear admiral and pulled some strings to get him in to the Coast Guard. Basic was a cakewalk and next thing he knew he was on the USCGC Burton…
Derrick was down in the gulch below Twenty-Mile when he saw it, a wall of flames cresting the draw. He cursed the lack of a radio, but they never worked that well up here anyway. The wind roared up the gorge, the inferno drawing air like a well-built fireplace. No way to fight it now that…
I met Gregor in 1989, when the Sun assigned me to Ukraine to cover the dissolution of the Soviet Union. I’d arrived at Donetsk at two in the morning. A gaping hole in the airport roof resulted in six inches of brown slush on the floor as we sorted through the pile of luggage the…
I wait at Jack’s for my client, glad he’s late because I can have one or two more doubles before we get to business. The shakes were bad this morning, so it took more than usual for me to feel like myself. I see him come in, shake his hand. I suggest a drink before…
“Introduce yourself, please.” The man stood up. He was younger than many attending the meeting. “My name is Serafin Martinez. I am a mechanic.” “And how many do you represent?” “Myself and nine others at our shop.” “And your affiliation?” “We are anarchosyndicatists.” “And your foundational ideology?” “We believe that any hierarchy that cannot be…
I take my coffee out onto the front porch to watch the neighborhood go about its morning. I don’t know my neighbors’ names, but I know their weekday routine. The red Volvo full of kids, the bike commuter with the metal clips on his trouser-legs, the old woman across the street feeding the swarm of…