The short fiction of j hardy carroll
Valentine’s Day was a Sunday that first year, I remember. The cat marked the occasion by presenting us with three headless voles left on the doormat. We didn’t think anything of it, since some cats are like that. It’s in all the books. But the next holiday, St. Patrick’s, he presented us with a brace…
The healer stood over the bed, enshrouded in smoke from the bronze brazier he dangled over the prostrate king. Erwald lay on his royal bed of heather, wracked with fever and calling out in a strange tongue none could understand. Garth leaned in the doorway, his face a placid mask that betrayed none of the dismay he felt.…
April showers, they say. It had not stopped raining since December. It might slack off some, drop to a drizzle, but then it would start back up stronger than ever. The ground was all thick mud where it wasn’t standing water, the trees bending with the weight of their swollen branches. I figured Pa was all right…
Sunday morning all us survivors meet at The Grand Canyon Cafe. Ah Su takes good care of us. It was her uncle opened the place back in 1942. Route 66 was just a two-lane road, though it did reach all the way to Chicago even then. At first it was strict Chinese, but Flagstaff used to be a working…
Espen Berg had no friends to speak of, no family. Her life was lived in a series of small circles. The market, the pharmacy, the church. Even the friendliest townspeople ignored her, having been repelled by her disfigured face and violent silence. She died unmourned, her body discovered by chance when Pastor Ølveg stopped in to see why she…
The notice of eviction was right where I’d left it, taped to the door. She had changed the locks, so the master key didn’t work. I looked at the city constable. “You want me to knock again?” He shrugged. I knocked so hard my knuckles rang. “Mrs. Mulwray! The constable is here with me. You…
Nona Amelia liked to tell me how she was born in that very room the night McKinley was shot. “My father said they came after anyone they considered to be an anarchist. His own brother was arrested. My father said it is because our name sounded foreign.” I remember her piano cluttered with framed pictures…
Her writing desk stood in the corner. It was too elegant for the room, polished cherry bound with gold. She told me it had been her grandmother’s, passed down through the generations, implying it would be mine. She always wore the key on a slim golden chain around her neck. The funeral director had given it…
The Night Manager exuded quiet confidence, taste. His Gieves & Hawkes suit was impeccably tailored, yet not at all ostentatious. The subtle pattern of his Brioni necktie quietly matched the hotel wallpaper. In five languages he would give guests comfort, guidance, bits of colorful lore about the city or the hotel itself. He solved problems efficiently,…
I passed the stunning Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square without seeing it. A quote from Anna Karenina rolled through my mind, where Levin avoids “any long look at her as one avoids long looks at the sun, but seeing her as one sees the sun, without looking.” I was like that with Red Square. With all of…