The short fiction of j hardy carroll
“Well, I sure ain’t sorry to see it go.” The old man sipped his beer, wiped his mouth on his jacket sleeve. “Even if they just put up something worse. Which they will.” Jessup moved his knight. “Ha! Bet you didn’t see that.” He ignored the board. “That goddamned mural always reminded me…
Ellery tugged my sleeve as we walked through the park on that last golden day of autumn. “Daddy, why is that man all alone?” He was five then, full of questions. If I didn’t answer quickly I knew he would race over and ask the man himself. That was Ellery in a nutshell. Impulsive to…
Shards of glass and ribs of jagged metal, splintered two-by-fours, sheets of galvanized roofing from a barn twenty miles away. Wreckage as far as you could see in any direction. “Look at the trees,” she said, sweeping the vista of twisted stumps and branches with her hand. “Yet the McDonald’s is unscathed,” I said. “Wonderful.”…
“Where did they go?” she asked again, her voice tight with ensuing panic. He shook his head. “Maybe they thought we got lost and decided to look for us.” “But we’ve only been gone a half hour.” Her eyes were wide as she scanned the empty desert rippling with heat. “I wish we’d brought water.”…
I admit I was a little drunk when it happened, so I am not perhaps the most reliable witness. There was a girl on the cruise, much too young for me, not that this fact lessened my interest. I had managed to convince her to come ashore with me to a small café I knew…
The windmill howled like a man being boiled alive, blades turning fast as an airplane propeller, dry gears gnashing as the fan-tail whipped against the fresh black gale. A moan of the tornado sirens in town started up, fought the wind to drift across the fields to my porch where I sat in my cane-back chair…
The old woman held up a hand demanding silence, her gauzy sleeve almost trailing into the candle. I had a hard time not laughing, but Cherie was wearing what I recognized as her “church face,” somber and pious and overtly attentive. If she was allowed to talk she would likely have used big unfamiliar words and slathered…
He noticed as soon as he came into the room. “My bottles. What have you done?” “Now, Papi, don’t work yourself up. She’s only trying to make it nice. Such a good granddaughter she is for you!” He grunted, limped from the room. “I saw them in a box,” the girl said. “I thought they’d…
The photograph does not tell the story. The faces, improbably fresh, betray little but youth. The uniforms are new, the flying boots unbuckled over battledress trousers. One fellow wears a jaunty scarf tied around his neck in the manner of Errol Flynn or Douglas Fairbanks as he leans against the ops shack in an attitude of…
The snow was deeper than it looked, cresting the tops of his thin shoes, soaking his socks until his toes were numb except for the occasional needle pricks of cold. His hands were warm enough, deep in the pocket, wrapped loosely around the coil of rope. With irritation he saw that, on this of all…