The short fiction of j hardy carroll
She wasn’t a particularly good nanny, but my parents could afford her. We made do with other kinds of hand-me-downs, so why not a nanny too? I heard she had worked for the Oscars and had taken care of all five boys after Mrs. Oscar died. It never occurred to me that Miss Meyers might…
“I assure you, sir. The hotel will do everything in its power to insure that this matter stays private.” “I certainly hope so.” “It’s just that the reporters are already in the lobby. And down in the parking garage. There’s no way we can get you past them unseen.” “Don’t you people have a service…
“This here is what I got,” the man said. “Old London Underground double-decker.” “What’s it run on?” asked the other. “Petrol,” said the man. “It ain’t been converted.” “No good to me that way,” answered the other. “There hasn’t been any petrol for months.” The man looked wise. “Oh, it’s to be had– for a price.” “Not…
How do you remove every trace? he thought, carrying another box of her junk to the truck and dumping it in. When they had gotten married, the preacher made a big deal of using the word cleave. He said that married people cleaved to each other, that if they broke apart it was like ripping a piece of wood that…
“He’s making a bomb in there.” “No way.” “Then why all the chemicals? Why the bags of fertilizer? He’s like whatshisface. Timothy McVeigh.” “Yeah? Prove it then, Mr. Smarty.” “I can’t prove it yet. All’s I’m saying is we need to watch the place for a while.” “How long is a while?” “I don’t know. Couple days,…
At first, I didn’t even know about it. I don’t have a TV or listen to the radio. I guess I knew when I saw the first cars going past, roofs piled high with bundles and boxes. Sure, I knew the river was up, but it’s been up before. No need to panic. Sheriff came by…
Last thing I remember it was somebody’s birthday. I woke up at five AM to the sound of church bells somewhere close by, opened my eyes against the familiar pain and was unable to recognize a single thing about the living room in which I lay. I heaved myself up off the couch, grateful that…
“It’s doing my head in,” Johnny spat at the television. “Bloody Scotland. We never should have let the bastards back of the net.” Tosh was having none of it. “If you’re going to get all mardy, I’ll leave you to yourself. You don’t give a bleeding shit about football anyway.” “I do when it’s the…
I once found Whitey out in his pop’s garage, just standing there, eyes closed. The garage was kind of a monument to good intentions. Whitey’s pop was a collector of old cars. More than a collector. An enthusiast. When he’d get to talking about them, his eyes would go funny. “Found me a ’02 Wheeler Runabout rotting away in…
My great-grandfather James Lewis was a Millerite preacher, as devout a man as ever lived in the village of Dresden. Washington County had more than its share of devout men in those times. Joseph Smith himself was said to have dug up his golden tablets from beneath a tree on my family’s homestead, though Old James…