Fiction

A Smaller Heart

Why does his family piss him off so badly? No clue. All he knows is that he wants to scream. He nestles each fly into his tackle box. In the kitchen, his wife makes tuna-and-tomato sandwiches, their fish smell pervading the living room. She fills Ziploc bags with carrot sticks, washes a matched pair of apples. Once, he would’ve helped her. Once upon a time in their youth. Now, Caro is eight months pregnant, and José, if he’s being perfectly honest, can’t spend a single hour alone with her. He finds it unbearable. Not that he can tell her that. Lately, he has so much he can’t tell her, he feels the words clogging his throat….

Eckleburg No. 21

Eckleburg No. 21 curates a beautiful selection of traditional and genre-bending fiction by Gertrude Stein Award winner, Faerl Marie Torres, Agnes Scott Poetry Award winner, Jessica Melilli-Hand, eleventh century Sanskrit translation by Brishti Guha, artwork by Sandra Shugart and more.

New Mother

You cannot go back. 

Leah had sketched the words on every scrap of paper, every grocery list, even the coupons she handed over at the store, the newspapers she bound with string and set out for recycling.  They, too, bore her new mantra beneath the bylines—four words from a soft-tipped pencil she rarely sharpened….

Pobrecita: A Blanquita’s Guide to Love

  1. You’ll stumble over the pronunciation of her name. When you ask your friend Aida, who is Puerto Rican, how to say it, she’ll tell you that she doesn’t know and that all Dominicans….

Kate Scarpetta grew up in Northeastern Pennsylvania and spent her youth playing sports and climbing trees. She attended Princeton University where she studied under Joyce Carol Oates and Edmund White. Her work has been featured in the Brooklyn Review, SpltiLip, Word Riot, BULL and 14 Hills amongst others. @kate_scarpetta, katescarpetta.com

Second Attempt

Here was the game plan: we were going to sneak into Mom’s house, stuff her cats into sacks, and drown them in the lake. A backyard bonfire for everything else—the towers of mildewed newspapers reaching almost to her living room ceiling; the army of painted figurines standing at attention all over the floor; the endless calendars dating back to the years before Dad died. But Wendell thought the main thing to get rid of was the cats. He said that above all else they were weighing Mom down, making her a harried wreck. I didn’t agree. I thought everything should go except the cats. That the cats are the one item you take away and are then looking at some serious psychological fallout. But then again Wendell and I have never agreed on anything….

Jonathan Sala lives in Connecticut. This is his first publication.

Blue Dolphins

Back when Anna Gil could still walk, she avoided it.

“God gives nuts to the toothless,” she said to the people who visited her, and there were still a few. The others reduced their visits until they slid over and out of the frame of her life .

In the month after the accident, unfamiliar people showed up to express their appreciation, ask questions or spy a little. Beside the police officers, church goers and someone from the city hall who praised her officially, a group of untidy, silent guests also walked in. They huddled in the olive-green corner of her otherwise white and black living room. Bruno, her man, sort of, recognized them as colleagues of the boy’s family, artisans from the art fair, who sold straw hats, bamboo panels, and organic soaps, every item a hundred percent natural….

Avital Gad-Cykman’s flash col­lec­tion Life In, Life Out was pub­lished by Matter Press. Her sto­ries have been pub­lished in The Literary Review, Ambit, CALYX Journal, Glimmer Train, McSweeney’s, Prism International, Michigan Quarterly Review and else­where. They have also been fea­tured in antholo­gies such as W.W. Norton’s International Flash Anthology, Sex for America, Politically Inspired Fiction, Stumbling and Raging, Politically Inspired Fiction Anthology, The Flash, and The Best of Gigantic. Her work won Margaret Atwood Society Magazine Prize, was placed first in The Hawthorne Citation Short Story Contest, and was a finalist for Iowa Fiction Award for story collections. She lives in Brazil.

How to Seduce Your Pediatrician

You must choose. Once the baby makes its way out—and he will make his way out in a splash of fluid after the kind of crowning you won’t soon forget—the moments that make up your life will cease to be ones you choose. It is August. The trees wilt in the heat. The grass burns. Your ankles swell. You hold your belly with your hands, cradle it as if it might detach itself if you are not watchful, as if it might fall away from the rest of you if you let go . . . .

Laurie Foos is the author of Ex Utero, Portrait of the Walrus by a Young Artist, Twinship, Bingo Under the Crucifix, Before Elvis There Was Nothing, The Giant Baby, and The Blue Girl. She teaches in the MFA program at Lesley University and in the BFA program at Goddard College.

Every Day

It has been years since it happened. She is a still mother. Meaning, she keeps her body very still and she still considers herself a mother. She is rigid about this….

Nicole Miyashiro writes fiction and poetry and is an editor for the Pennsylvania Center for the Book at Penn State University. She has published stories, poems, and reviews, including one Pushcart Prize nominee. She created ‘Words of Art,’ an ekphrastic audio poem project, and is writing other stories linked to “Spectators.”

I Will

His friends were also there to see what might go wrong, and Ned was fine with that….

Nicole Miyashiro writes fiction and poetry and is an editor for the Pennsylvania Center for the Book at Penn State University. She has published stories, poems, and reviews, including one Pushcart Prize nominee. She created ‘Words of Art,’ an ekphrastic audio poem project, and is writing other stories linked to “Spectators.”

Less Brave

He’s a man of his word. A man whose mouth shrinks against his teeth when he smiles, as if recently stripped of a mature mustache, and who wears socks with clogs in the summertime to account for Florida air-conditioning….

Nicole Miyashiro has recent or forthcoming work in Clever Girl MagazineLife in 10 Minutes, and Black Poppy Review. She is currently collaborating with The Palmer Museum of Art on her ekphrastic project Words of Art and writing linked stories that explore the origins of the orca entertainment business. Read more at nicolemiyashiro.com.

Eckleburg Workshops in Fiction

Short Story Workshop

Short Short Story Workshop

Novel: From Start to Finish Workshop

Magic Realism Workshop

Writing Sex in Literary Fiction: Are Your Sex Scenes Essential or Gratuitous?

View All Fiction Workshops

About Eckleburg Fiction

Eckleburg runs online, daily content of original fiction and hybrid including work from Richard Peabody, Cris Mazza, Eurydice, Rick Moody, Steve Almond and more…. Read hard. Write hard. “Being a good lit citizen means supporting lit pubs. Donate. Buy. I’m going to show some #AWP17 mags that you need to support…”

FICTION SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

We accept previously unpublished and polished prose up to 8,000 words year round, unless announced otherwise.  We are always looking for tightly woven short works under 2,000 words and short-shorts around 500 words. No multiple submissions but simultaneous is fine as long as you withdraw the submission asap through the submissions system. During the summer and winter months, we run our Writers Are Readers, Too, fundraiser when submissions are open only to subscribers. During the fall and spring, we open submissions for regular unsolicited submissions.

Note: We consider fiction, poetry and essays that have appeared in print, online magazines, public forums, and public access blogs as already being published. Rarely do we accept anything already published and then only by solicitation. We ask that work published at Eckleburg not appear elsewhere online, and if republished in print, original publication credit is given to The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review. One rare exception is our annual Gertrude Stein Award, which allows for submissions of previously published work, both online and print.

 

ANNUAL GERTRUDE STEIN AWARD IN FICTION

1st Prize $1000 and publication. Accepting entries year round. Eligibility: All stories in English no more than 8,000 words are eligible. No minimum word count. Stories published previously in print or online venues are eligible if published after January 1, 2011. Stories can be submitted by authors, editors, publishers, and agents. Simultaneous and multiple submissions allowed. Each individual story must be submitted separately, with separate payment regardless of word count. Eckleburg editors, staff, interns and current students of The Johns Hopkins University are not eligible for entry.

 

ANNUAL FRANZ KAFKA AWARD IN MAGIC REALISM

1st prize $1000 and publication. Accepting entries year round. Eligibility: All stories in English and magic realism no more than 8,000 words are eligible. No minimum word count. Stories published previously in print or online venues are eligible if published after January 1, 2011. Stories can be submitted by authors, editors, publishers, and agents. Simultaneous and multiple submissions allowed. Each individual story must be submitted separately, with separate payment regardless of word count. Eckleburg editors, staff and interns are not eligible for entry. Submissions for the Franz Kafka Award are currently closed.

 

NOVEL AND STORY COLLECTION MANUSCRIPTS

We publish short works at Eckleburg. At this time, we do not publish novel, long memoir, essay collections, story collections or poetry collections. We do offer manuscript workshops at The Eckleburg Workshops. If you are looking to place a manuscript, we can suggest several excellent small and large presses whose excellent books are promoted through our Eckleburg Book Club — i.e., Random House, Graywolf Press, Coffeehouse, Tinhouse, St. Martins Press and more. 

Proud member of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses
Supporter of VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts