The short fiction of j hardy carroll
The skylight blazed hot on her face. She opened her eyes. Pain. Oh God, she thought. Not again. She raised up on her elbows and looked around. She was lying on a butcher block table, pots and implements suspended above her as though dropping randomly from some airborne kitchen. Tamping down a swelling nausea, she sat up…
Kitty sometimes wished she’d at least kept a photograph of the grandchildren. They were strangers anyway, so it wasn’t like she’d have a framed picture of Michael or Kathy hanging on the wall. Just a picture in a drawer of some children. She closed her eyes and thought back to when she’d burned everything. It…
Germaine opened the door and shook his head. “Really?” I said. “Do you know how long my flight was?” “Sorry, Stephen. Even the doctors thought this was the real thing.” “This makes nine false alarms, Gerry. Nine.” “You didn’t have to come.” “Bullshit. I have to be here. We all do. Who does this? What…
Luz stood in the foyer with her eyes closed, breathing the old smells, corn and beans and singed chiles, beer and smoke and sweat. She smiled, remembering how Oscar had kept it a secret while he lined up the loans, how he’d led her in blindfolded. It had been an empty room then, not much…
And just as suddenly as it appeared, it was gone. Dwight raised his head and looked around. Everything was broken and splintered as far as the eye could see. Tufts of insulation hung in the still air like so much snow. The church had vanished, the bare foundation and its few reaching fingers of twisted…
Some kind of Buick, left in a stream. It used to be somebody’s dream. -Adrian Belew Chandury walked from the office to the his aged Honda and propped the broken hatch with his shoulder while he set the box beside the others. He let the hatch drop and stretched his sore back. The motel looked…
The drone of the airplane seeped into my dream. I bolted awake and smacked my head on the branches of my makeshift lean-to. The pain in my leg roared through me, a blinding streak of red that fogged my vision for a second. But the plane was real. I gritted my teeth and started to…
“It will only be for a few weeks,” she told them, raising her voice over the wails of the other children. “Be brave for Mummy.” “And Daddy too,” said Christiana. Maude looked at her daughter as though for the first time, the blue coat buttoned up as though it was already winter, the way she…
Ndugu studies his watch, the first he has ever owned. Real gold, the man told him, holding up a magnifier so Ndugu could verify the truth of his statement. A Rolex, no less, and only thirty dollars. A day’s wages, but Ndugu’s room and meals were provided by his cousin, so he reached into his…
I smoke a cigarette as I walk along the Quai Saint-André, cupping it in my hand. I have always smoked this way. Done everything this way, really. Concealment. I watch a grain barge chugging up the St. Lawrence churning brown froth as it passes. I flick the butt into the river and turn back toward…