The short fiction of j hardy carroll
Reposting this story from 2015. For some reason it gets hits throughout the year. Maybe it’s the photos. This was something I originally wrote more than twenty years ago, one of my first short stories. Full disclosure: the first bar I ever drank in was a strip club, Daddy Jack’s Blue Note in Tucson, Arizona.…
God shows his irony by allowing me this beautiful place and all the time in the world. I have outlived my compatriots and peers, my lovers and wives, my children, and even my enemies, but this itself is no reward. Indeed, there are mornings when the floor of my sleeping chamber is slick with frost…
Note on this story: It’s one of the Überhaus Diaries I wrote in Portland during the late 1990s. The photo Karen selected this week is the inside of a bar around the corner from where I lived in Portland. The Überhaus was perhaps the last bandit lofts in the city, a 2000 square foot apartment…
Your bookshelf says more than you know
The poet James Galvin once told me this story about when Faulkner won the 1949 Nobel for literature: There was a cub reporter in Oxford, Mississippi who was nuts about Faulkner, so his editor sent him to tell the great author that he had won the Nobel. The kid, delighted and nervous to meet…
In the late spring of of 2013, my father was stricken with a swift and sudden illness that took him from a reasonably healthy 76-year-old to a bottled oxygen-dependent invalid in a matter of a few hours. In a few weeks, he was dead. In his final days, he was unable even to speak. My father, a…
“Ladies and gentlemen, we got us a real surprise today.” The announcer’s voice rolled across the stands, tinny speakers creating an echo at once grand and ridiculous. Ethel knew what was coming and made a face, darted a glare at Fonty III. “I swear, Aunt E,” said the boy. “I got nothing to do with this.”…
May closed the cash drawer. It would not close. “I thought Henry fixed this,” she called to the back of the shop. “He did,” answered Joy. “Which means it’s broke in a new way. I call it Henry fixed.” She came behind the counter, bumped May out of the way with a friendly hip. “You got…
Captain Fitts gripped the makeshift lectern and stared grimly down at the boards on which were inscribed the Articles of War. In a terrible voice he boomed “Article Twelve: Every person in the fleet, who through cowardice, negligence, or disaffection, shall in time of action withdraw or keep back, or not come into the fight or engagement,…
It’s been a long time since I posted anything that wasn’t part of some prompt or other. My girlfriend says I’m addicted. Maybe so. There is something refreshing about flash fiction. I’d never done it before on any regular basis. In fact, I used to make fun of it. I’ve changed my mind recently. It’s…