The short fiction of j hardy carroll
When I was a kid, I’d sometimes get my hair cut at Johnny Gibson’s barbershop. Johnny was a Tucson legend, and for a kid like me his shop was a Shangri-La. He had a real live shark that swam in an aquarium, photos of soldiers and race car drivers and Indian chiefs. Johnny’s chair was…
Our first winter on the farm, Ellie kept seeing him. We thought she had an overactive imagination spurred by too much television, but Ellie was insistent that Mr. Nervous was real. We would hear her talking to him, open the door. “He just left,” she’d say. Odd things began to happen. Lights coming on in…