Fabric

They were the green, blue and violet nobody, cleanly clothed and chemically polluted. Streams of pure color, stacked into lines, flashing against them, sound pa...

Volition

Sam looks around his apartment. It’s the size of a motel room, everything is pristine and in order like an exhibit in a museum, yet it reeks of residual secondh...

A Lesson on Pliny

I’ve never been to Northern Africa, but I can promise that the sun was hot. Hot, tripling in size, and the texture of new rust. I stood at the edge of an untill...

Snake Island

The baying of the hounds echoed through the bayou. Chained at the ankles, Robin and Ian stumbled through the murky swamp water. Swarms of gnats and mosquitoes b...

The Boy and the Misunderstanding

The man shakes his head and pounds a fist into the wall in a series of loud thuds. “You…make…me…sick…you…dad…blamed…sissy,” he spits out to the rhythm of his th...

The Neighbors

I weeded the yard around 5 a.m. to avoid the amused eyes of the neighbors, a thirtyish couple that employed lawn specialists, and smirked hello each time they s...

The Creationist

Dan was putting the finishing touches on the first dog the world’s seen in decades. Well, that isn’t exactly true. There are tons of robotic puppies...

1991

Moans came from upstairs, as trouble in the Middle East was blaring from the television. Desert Storm unfolded itself before our eyes, while an emaciated body l...

Horsie

Glenda looks up suddenly. Charlie is dragging a toy automobile across the kitchen floor. “It won’t work,” Charlie says. “Here, let me see it,” Glenda says. Char...

1961

Lemme tell you what happened to me at work yesterday.  The kids and teachers had all gone home for the day, and I was busy sweeping the school halls like I alwa...

At The End Of Lout’s Street

The kids at the end of Lout’s Street called it “Her Road.” It was a quiet, sad street containing a single decrepit house. Ivy and brambles had crawled across th...

Eighteen Dollar Shoes

When the fishing derby was on, you could almost walk across Lake Erie, from Port Colborne to America. Hundreds of small boats, maybe a thousand, resembled stepp...

Note from the Editor, Issue 13

I am very happy to introduce three excellent stories this month! The first, Tim Clark’s “Catholic High School Confessions,” caused a minor dis...

Catholic High School Confessions

I grew up Catholic, and there is much about the solemnity, and pageantry that still inspires awe. There is much that is beautiful in a Catholic Mass, and the ri...

Everynaut

“Hitchhiking ain’t what it used to be, ya know?” said the drifter. “Mmm.” We were cramped in the flight pod of my cargo vessel. I didn’t trust this shabby drift...

License Plate Peon

The ‘64 Jag XKE theft wasn’t worth the sentence but they framed me with five sport car grabs to clear the books I truly believe. I bowed to the judge like an aw...

Note from the Editor, Issue 12

Well, what a year. Counting the stories in this twelfth issue, Bull & Cross has had the distinct honor of publishing 39 sharp, entertaining, touching, scary...

All of the Stars in the Earth

Miller discovered Brutus’s corpse in the hayloft. The yellow tomcat had been scarce for days, well beyond the bounds of his usual secret life. Now he lay ...

Old School

Warfield is old school. He had figured out his methods early, found that they worked well for him, and has stuck with them without deviation ever since. Therefo...

On Second Thought

Arrival: Oxygen. Atomic number 8 sucked into lungs feeling the burn of an element plentiful, flawless in its ability to energize them. They draw it in, obliviou...

Rocket Science

Down the end of my street is a gully that has somehow escaped the ravages of suburban development. It hasn’t been stripped of vegetation and reshaped by b...

Boxcars

Nicholas Laudermilk laid in bed staring into the darkness and listened to the high pitched mournful wail of a train’s whistle in the distance. Unsteadily,...

Katydid

I dug out the hot ground. She started to squirm, so I dug faster. I kicked against the ground and cried out against the hot, the bleak outlook across the wide p...

Heartbeat

DRAMATIS PERSONAE MILO – Narrator MASKED MILO– Chorus member who acts out narration, wears a mask BETH – innocent girl CHORUS – play various characters * (MILO ...

The Art of the Foley

On the front lawn of the hospice, a juvenile seagull picks at the remains of what appears to be a female blackbird. The gull plunges its beak into the breast of...

The Loss of Superlatives

Rosie, an eighty-seven-year-old woman, who lived in a well-fortified home in a remote part of Maine, regretted her charge to eradicate the word “great” and now ...

Red Tide

Craig and Darla Adams drove from California to Arizona, then slipped across the border into Mexico. Their escape route had been nightmarish under a pissing rain...

Dreams out of Bugtussle

People get accustomed to seeing something one way, then it doesn’t matter how many changes you make, they won’t see the change until you make them s...

Yield

We had just sold the harvested mangoes from the small orchard we owned at the nearby lot and the ones that could be salvaged we placed in baskets and stacked on...

At the Zoo

The day following my release from the psych unit, my father took me on a trip to the zoo. We were the only ones there, save for a few mothers and their small ch...

Pens

Mrs. Gardner was kneeling next to LeShawn, a 5-year old self-proclaimed master of finger painting. His fingers with coated with green and yellow paint, and he s...

Palmistry

The gap at the base of the wall dividing their cells was designed as a channel for bloody runoff, but they found another use for it over those dragging, lightle...

His Favorites

It was a day for offerings, but only if she’d get up. From the bed, out her window, she squinted at the receding line of grey trees. Beyond was the yard, anothe...

An Army of Frogs

I’m a dead frog and I don’t say this with any pity or understanding or shame it’s just an observation that people seem to like us, like us a bit too much becaus...

Catch and Release

Mitch asks me when was the last time I kissed a woman. I count my thumb and index finger on my right hand, hold it up for Mitch to see, add years at the end. Yo...

Bubble Wand

(I.) “Mm.” Kim looked around, startled, as he entered his bedroom where his sister was deep in sleep. Her brow was furrowed and she groaned again before rolling...

Introduction to Other Cultures

As the chair of the hiring committee, I kept sneaking the application to the top of the pile, until we had a live interview.  I confess that I was startled when...