The short fiction of j hardy carroll
Anue stands as he speaks. The leader of the Cord People, he is a lean man with both sides of his skull shaved clean, his face painted ochre and crimson. He holds aloft a bundle wrapped in deerskin. “I tell you this. Our enemies the Hadenosaunee have already made an alliance. Not with the French,…
“Abel and Moses won’t be coming today,” she said, reading the note the boy had given her. “They’re down with the itch.” “Goddamn them shiftless sons of bitches,” he said. “We got three days of harvest, and they got to be sick.” “Doc Jenks thinks it’s some kind of Negro smallpox,” she said. “Most of…
I wanted to be a Marine since I saw that Iwo Jima picture. I joined on my eighteenth birthday, June 14th 1949. President Truman had integrated the armed forces the year before. During boot camp they treated us Negroes the same as the white boys, which is to say like shit. I was part of…
My father was in one of his moods. Arms crossed, he sat in the front seat glaring at us through the windshield. “Why is Grandpa mad?” Buddy asked. “Doesn’t he like camping?” “Obviously not,” Cliff said. “Why’d we bring him then?” I looked at Cliff. “He can’t stay alone, Bud. You know that.” “Why not?”…
The Breslau Centennial Hall had been designed to hold twelve thousand people, but three weeks of relentless campaigning by the Brownshirts had swelled the throng to twice that number. Hundreds of swastika flags hung in rows from the ceiling, and Goebbels had strategically placed dozens of agitators throughout the crowd. They knew their instructions to…
She searched for the right word. Hostility? No, that wasn’t right. Indifferent? She’d once read that the opposite of love wasn’t hate at all, but indifference. Was that what she felt? It was hard to say. She listened to him in the shower singing his same old shower song. Skylark, have you anything to say to me? He would…
Père Sebastién was grave as he listened to the young novitiate unburden himself. The boy seemed on the verge of tears, but it was all Sebastién could do to repress a smile. Such old stuff. Still, it was his duty to hear him out. When at last the boy’s torrent of guilt and remonstrance seemed…
“I need to stop a minute.” “You want me to lock the wheels?” He grimaced, I can lock my own goddamn wheels left unsaid as he reached down and flipped the levers that would keep the chair from rolling down the hill once she let go. It was steep enough to be dangerous, the pine needle…
I didn’t listen because I never listened to him, but I saw he didn’t care, his gaze drifting past my face to the construction on the street behind us and back, then down to the beer I bought him, talking the whole time. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. It was the last…
The Maps Room was unrecognizable. Desks and tables had been pushed aside for a large Oriental carpet encircled with richly brocaded cushions. Smoke rose from the hookah bowl and mingled with the fog of tobacco hanging from the ceiling. I made out Sykes sitting on a cushion. He saw me and extended a hand. “Be…