The short fiction of j hardy carroll
Breathe. That’s how you get through anything, Aunt Gertie told me. If you breathe you stop talking to yourself, stop telling yourself that you can’t endure another minute. Focus on breathing and you won’t be thinking. You won’t be worried or afraid. Just stay right where you are. Inhale. Exhale. Just breathe and you’ll be…
In honor of all those soldiers, Marines, airmen and sailors who are dying in the name of America, I give you an excerpt from a story about Stuart Dulley, a young man who joined the Marines in 1940 and got caught up in the hideous machine of war. Stuart decided Navy nurses were all the…
For Hemingway’s birthday, a bit of his flash fiction (before it was called that). Cat in the Rain, from 1925, is a remarkable study of using the unsaid to tell a powerful story. This is similar to the more famous Hills Like White Elephants. I like this one more. CAT IN THE RAIN There were…
This is an excerpt from a story I wrote in 2013. It is just a little too long to be published by a literary magazine (assuming that’s even an option). The character, Stuart Dulley, appears in four stories so far. Stuart Dulley left the office with his hat in his hand and the list…
Balzac was reputed to have drunk fifty cups of coffee a day. He worked continually, though not quickly, since he was obsessed with revision. He was known to rework particular passages many times as one would a poem, perpetually tinkering with individual words and phrases until he felt he could do no better. I’m sure…