The short fiction of j hardy carroll
She swore the trench knife she carried in her purse saved her life hitchhiking home. She weighed maybe eighty pounds dirty tight clothes that dared anyone to say shit took the dirty spoon from my dried-up cereal bowl wiped it on her leg tapped out a pile of yellow powder from a film can water…
Whitey give the pieces of the Ford wrong names but he knew them by sight by feel, hefting every damned one in a greasy hand folks said he was crazy when he’d slither under her amongst the dirt and spiders spending hours and didn’t say much mostly just whistled through his teeth. It took forever…
my horrible face leers to suit my stagger seems to know all the particulars seen from the side my horrible face looks noble and heroic, especially while lying so approach my horrible face with caution The Daily Post
a shell and a shell and a shell all you can do is guess guess right, once it’s all over but you don’t ever guess right do you and all you do is guess who’s waiting who’s coming who’s left The Daily Post: Peek
the window is the window: the glass, the same the wall, the same the same house the same sea, never the same, not for a moment not the air, nor the water. when I close my eyes to the window’s glow the sea takes everything: my lungs, my hair, my hands on the table the…
You mere scarecrow again and again in my youth You, bully, your shotgun in my face I found a way to back down, with grace Oh you wise men said this as such would happen again and again, a safe bet and you bet on it and the bookie called all the clever fellows…
The museum is climate controlled with inch-thick glass between the dioramas and me.This hushes the history. Sobers all the miniature people frozen in time, hand-painted. A birds-eye view, I observe the modeled activity, the huts, the plains. Look: the hunters have killed a deer. I cannot see the women waiting inside the smoky hut, the…
This man, if man he was a devil we were insulted when he finished his painting of evil deeds, attributed. Corpses piled like firewood bodies hacked to bits burned to cinders their dead mouths in open rebuke His certain voice explained it was only a puzzle. Oh, how we hated him We surged and gnashed…
She loved the city cloaked in rain and fog. The wet gray mist seemed to her romantic. To me it was funereal, from the back of the cab watching the wipers smear the rain but she was almost giddy sitting on the edge of the seat craning her neck to see the building-tops wreathed in…
I. American students usually do not know the average age of a soldier which is 15, nor how many mines tear off legs in so many countries where these very young and ignorant and emotional young men fire their machineguns II. The young women will believe anyone who offers anything different than what other women…