The short fiction of j hardy carroll
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…
Vulture A noncombatant, he wasn’t exactly a coward. His parents were Quakers. He, bungling, washed out as a medic the very first week. but the Navy had him regardless, and he stayed back on the boat when the Marines hit the beaches. They knew he was bad luck and did not say goodbye. …
not so old to yet be sick of yourself the everyday way you do things leave them wanting, whoever they are take in an old tom because you cannot bear to come home to an empty house, you leave his balls on so he sprays and sprays until you lock him out sit in an empty…
Bob was seven years sober when he drifted out onto the lake, thought about turning his boat over. Seemed like a good idea and he didn’t feel like waiting for a better one. I drift now over his same lake, once a river canyon now dammed by industry and the needs of leisure. My skiff…
From May 1999. Dating in a nutshell. sushi date I watch Masa slice the fish draw his knife quick along the gleaming belly it seems to move itself as I float forever on your voice the soft curve of your lips cradling words full of recent events devoid of meaning God you are beautiful your eyes, way across the table…
In the late 90s. Portland experienced a “heroin renaissance” when a lot of cheap junk saturated the city. It took a toll. I would see junkies nodding in doorways, or sometimes doing the “junkie lean” in the middle of the sidewalk. When high they were ethereal beings. They seemed to dwell on a different plane. Their edges…
true strangers, they since in the city the dark before the dawn is lit just the same as winter evenings since nobody is fooled by some little thing they themselves remember doing still, once since lying about an apartment makes you leave everything early and alone to walk in the dark, cursing since every single…
Milk From a Bucket Once I ate cites whole every step a rending tear, tight jaws around fabric of flesh a whited glare sluicing strangers’ faces dry of all but haste the every flavor quick forgotten, ground to ash harvests of cabbage grown from small seed watered all the dry summer only to be hacked…
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 island of garish casino machines…
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…