The short fiction of j hardy carroll
my grandfather rode up on his motorcycle and tossed me a wrapped canvas toolkit in my dream. Greasy wrenches screwdrivers so old the walnut handles looked like rocks. He knew I was in trouble had been a long time all my old friends had turned against me for reasons of their own and I had…
Your good mood will you mind if it doesn’t last forever? When you get laughing you must know it all has to end sometime spun sugar stays fluffy only as long as it stays dry but sooner or later you find out it’s a rainy climate The Daily Post
The matted grass so dense the fencepost I hammer rings jerking from the peen, waving like a stormborne mast until at last it punches through the clang turned to thud soft and unresisting wounding the hillside Weak now, my hands ache as I stretch them in their rotten gloves twisted and black like river trees…
It is the obvious thing we find may never be understood, a phantom limb that begs to bear weight The last place we look is where we find it. Only a fool would keep looking, then. A bed showing the shape of sleeper is unmade, sloppy. The pea under the mattress is a thing you…
Jamais vu, never seen an odd impression that you see a common thing you’ve seen a thousand times for the first time the face of a relative, say or the face in the mirror But the mirror doesn’t count, does it? Nobody but you knows what that looks like, backwards, with your best expression frozen…
That you said once over eggs the same bird neither blind nor striking disappointed us all Yet again here I mourn debt’s sorrow: an occupant pressed into proper silence whey veins curled in sheets await the occasion yearned to be pinned by anything at all The Daily Post:…
The television is always on these days far too loud in empty rooms I can hear it from outside the house and after dark see the dance blue light throwing shadows on the usually blank plaster look closely it’s Dan Rather again older than ever his Texas mouth made for corn on the cob but…
The tiger is a leopard with painted stripes applied while he sleeps he never wonders about these new markings so like the shadows of the bars of his cage where keepers feed him more than he can ever eat, the stench of the rotting carrion assumed to come from him When told the tricks a tiger…
It starts when you ascend the stairs, drop your keys square on your foot kick out and send them rattle-clang smack down the three flights your arms full of groceries, you lose it as the bottom of the sack packed by that lazy pit-faced troglodyte at the Shop-n-Sav gives way when the freezer spinach plastic…
Soft words about how she’s waiting only made it worse. As though her going never counted for shit as though it was only a step in a direction. Why’d they say that I want to know the part about her waiting was just to get me to stop crying, but I think about it now…