The short fiction of j hardy carroll
The boy had disappeared now, his promised bargain an obvious sham. How could I be so stupid? she thought. Then, that should be my mantra. She tightened the strap on her purse and tugged it around so it lay flat on her belly. She imagined this would be how a mother might protect a newborn. Or perhaps…
Old John was safe buried by the time winter fell full, thank God. The bone-break cold came first, terrible weeks of it, the ground iron hard before the first snows came. At first we thought to conserve our coal and built niggardly fires you could snuff with one hand, but Maisie said we would run…
When he first left England he was a young man with no particular destination. He found himself months later in the hills of Cambodia, squatting by a cook fire and sharing millet from a single bowl with three strangers, the act of eating their only common language. His name was acquired perhaps in Tibet or Nepal. By this time,…
I hadn’t yet gotten around to telling her when Janie melted down and had to be taken home. I figured the Saturday Market would be a safe place to break the news, being a public place and all. Bringing Janie along made it a real family affair. Right. We walked around the stalls drinking coffee from paper cups.…
A hundred fathoms down, the sun looks like a ten-watt porch light. The suit, which felt so heavy on the surface, is now a second skin–except the boots, which seem even heavier. You move slowly on the bottom, breath loud in your ears as you clomp through the ooze like the giant in The Brave Little Tailor.…
NORFOLK– MARCH 17 Authorities arrested a man today they believe is the “Forest Skinner,” suspected of committing a series of unsolved murders around Norfolk County during the 1970s and 80s. The suspect, who was wearing what appeared to be a handmade suit of unidentified animal hide, was severely malnourished and offered no resistance. The arrest was the result of a CrimeLine…
The words rolled over her then, crushed her flat as piecrust beneath a rolling pin. She watched him shaping the words with his mouth, this doctor whom she had grudgingly agreed to see after her husband had had what he thought was the last word in their long argument. Go. Now there was another word. Cancer. And…
All my life I seen things different. I look at a place and I don’t see it like it looks now. I seen everything ever happened in that place all at once, like the way you can drill into a tree and count the rings. Some places, like roofs and treetops and the high sides of buildings,…
Have you ever sat in one place and watched it get dark? By that I mean have you sat alone in one place without moving or speaking, staring at a boat or a building or a stadium across the water while the shadows deepen and swell up into the sky until everything turns blue-black? A chill breeze across the…
“I wish they could come in, Mommy. Can you please open it? Just this once?” He used his most persuasive tones, dulcet and utterly innocent. For the hundredth time she told him why the window must stay locked, pointed out what had happened last time. “But I was so young then, Mommy. A child. I’m all grown up now.”…