The short fiction of j hardy carroll
“What do you want?” His eyes crinkled above the grizzled beard. “Another of them beers, for starters.” I pulled a can from the six-pack and handed it to him. He sipped, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, set the beer on the tarp. He peered into the sky. “Looks like we’re just…
Bob was seven years sober when he drifted out onto the lake, thought about turning his boat over. Seemed like a good idea and he didn’t feel like waiting for a better one. I drift now over his same lake, once a river canyon now dammed by industry and the needs of leisure. My skiff…
“This was it?” “Yes. The fourth floor. You cannot count the times your grandmother would carry the bags up those stairs. Hundreds. Thousands.” The girl looked up the block. A group of Puerto Rican teenagers sat on a stoop, boys and girls both wearing the same white t-shirts and baggy khaki pants. A boom box thundered…
We went down the steel stairs, down and down. “With these levers, you can control the whole hospital.” He burst out with a braying laugh. “I’m kidding. I have no idea what they do. In here, now.” He opened a door leading off the corridor. The room was dark and clean-smelling. “Can we turn on the…
“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…
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.”…
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…
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 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…
Marriage must fight constantly against a monster which devours everything: routine. ― Honoré de Balzac “Look! That couple from the hotel.” I followed her gaze. We’d seen them almost daily since we’d been in France. We guessed they were perhaps on a second honeymoon. “They don’t look happy,” I said. “No, they don’t,” she said,…