The short fiction of j hardy carroll
The FBI ASAC’s office walls were plastered floor to ceiling with maps of the various open serial murder cases scattered across the country. As the local law liaison, only one of them interested me, the map of central Iowa that had most red circles of any in the room, ten. Ten of the thirteen gone…
It starts when you ascend the stairs, drop your keys square on your foot kick out and send them rattle-clang smack down the three flights your arms full of groceries, you lose it as the bottom of the sack packed by that lazy pit-faced troglodyte at the Shop-n-Sav gives way when the freezer spinach plastic…
Two upon four of us Thank God there aren’t more of us You never escape our kind of poverty, not fully. Nowadays I overhear a woman on the way to the chip stand say she’s starving, see how her bum spills out of her waistband, remembering all them winter days walking to school with my…
Adams slouched in an elbow chair, snoring softly. Jay set down his pen. He sprinkled the wet ink with sand, blew it off in cloud that also extinguished his candle. He held up the document. “Mr. Adams,” he said. “I’ve finished.” Adams started up, blinking. “The proposal? Excellent.” He stood and stretched, not much taller…
Since my seventieth birthday I have assiduously avoided mirrors. I find it is better for me not to remind myself of my appearance, for it belies my inner man. This is not to say that I have the boundless vigor and flexibility of youth, but I certainly feel better than the shrunken visage of sparse…
When Tamura Takashi was growing up, his grandmother told stories of the terrible night American bombers turned the sacred city of Nagoya into a lake of fire. “The next morning was so odd,” she said. “There was nothing left. No buildings, no trees, no people. Only miles of ashes as far as the eye could…
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…
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…