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…
The old man is a charmer loving his barbershop or anyplace where he can stand a story up and make it holler every day there is a little extra he sees but nobody else notices a small thing flashes by like a bug or a day of the week he’ll dine out for hours on…
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…
Repost from 2017 for Christmas. In June of 1999 I was traveling back to Portland after visiting my father in Tucson with my three-year-old daughter in tow. We missed a connection and wound up in the Las Vegas Airport. It was my first time in that city, and in the late hour the airport was almost empty An…
This is a shorter vignette, almost a poem. It dates from October, 1999. The rainy city poised on the brink of a new millennium, floodlit cranes in sharp relief against the blooms of gray mist. The world was full of possibilities for a man just past thirty, full of longing. This little piece brims with some…
One of the benefits of city living is that you generally don’t need a car–f you are willing to make certain compromises. Cargo carrying is one of them. Groceries, laundry and other bulky errands require ingenuity and planning. Groceries especially, since laundry can be put off ad infinitum. I grew up in the supermarket era.…
So, where were we? Ah yes. Procrastination. Seventh grade was chock full of all kinds of nasty shocks for hippie-school me. Doolen Junior High was, i realize now, a pilot program for young inmates who just hadn’t committed any felonies yet. There were guys in the 8th grade who were bused in from South Tucson…
You know the drill. You’re late. You drop your egg into the pan and ruin breakfast, spill your coffee. You ask the question. You know the question I mean. Why MEEEEE??? Who the hell knows? Maybe there’s a lesson in it. Maybe it’s random. Maybe there’s a Loving Divine All-Powerful All-Knowing Supreme Being who really…
New Year’s Eve. For many folks, that means one thing: TIME TO DRINK UP. Not me, though. I didn’t know the extent of my drinking problem until stopped drinking. I was clued in to how bad it was when I told my friends I had sobered up. Every single one of them reacted the same way. “Oh thank God.”…