Crow & Cross Keys is a new, online literary journal that plucks fiction and poetry from skeletal trees and gives it a place to take root.
Send us your skeleton keys, your tar-black feathers, send us your calcified forests and ramshackle castles. Take us somewhere beautiful and dark and strange.
Latest
Tree of Shared Water and Sun—J.R. Allen
Voice crooned in low-throated groans when we buried boy in sterile dirt. And there, between broken stumps where grass won’t grow, us two stood over quenched son with paper-dry skin. Only his face still left all unsoiled, all chipper-tune and wound tight at cheeks, skin taut over young bone frame.
Featured Flash
Solid Wall but the Wall Is Made of Hands but the Hands Are Made of Sheetrock—Sean Noah Noah
The girl named Minus can start hands with her fire. She strikes matches against her skin to light them. As they burn, the flames don’t sputter. They’re overconfident for their size, conical little jets of fire like what comes out of the end of a blowtorch.
The Guilty Pleasure of Parthenope—Kathy Hoyle
He wakes, pushes himself up to rest on his forearms, his pale shoulders jutting like scallop shells. He blinks against the blur– blue water, to no avail. Everything moves in flux, rippling in slow time. Whispers dance around him, muted echoes ebb and flow. He blinks again, tries to focus, but the world remains a curved and fluted half-dream.
Featured Poetry
Rust Belt Jessie’s Taxonomy of Ghosts—Jessie Lynn McMains
Trying to classify inherently unknown entities whose very existence and nature remains unproven is a fool’s errand: How many types of ghosts are there? As many as you want there to be.
—Benjamin Bradford, The Curious Question of Ghost Taxonomy
She Tells People That She Doesn’t Believe in Witches—Wyeth Renwick
She tells people that she doesn’t believe in witches, but / she doesn’t laugh as hard as the others at the old / woman who yells at kids walking by her herb garden.
Featured Stories
The Witch’s Daughter—Rachael Llewellyn
They called her the Witch’s Daughter, but in truth, she was just a little girl.
From the tales in town, I’d expected to see a monster. Some terrible misshapen thing, too horrifying to behold, too scary to even begin to describe. From the stories, I expected bulging eyes, sharp white teeth, claws, an inhuman snarling voice, a hunched back and webbed toes.
So when I came to the place where they kept her, I peeked through the window to the little black room where she was held. There were no bulging eyes and sharp teeth. She was just a normal looking little girl.
The Spider—Vera Hadzic
Heartbreak is a spider resting in your chest. I read an unhealthy amount of romance novels, and I know what heartbreak is supposed to feel like – a crack in your ribcage, a sharp, stabbing pain that splits your soul in two. I expect it should feel as though something inside you is broken, but I can’t feel any breakage.
Would you like to see your work featured among our plume of feathers? Head over to our submission page, we would love to read your words.
If you like what you see, pop us a tweet at @crowkeys or tag us on instagram at @crowcrosskeys. We want to hear from you!
