by Annam Manthiram
My mother likes to talk about her time in New Mexico when she was a kid, drank grape soda out of the bottle every day until it stained her teeth, and amassed bugs like a crazy old lady gathering cats. She was one of the lucky ones – most of her childhood was spent among a forest near the Rio Grande, climbing trees with thick stalks like elephant legs coming up from the ground and leaves like chemically-altered hair picked with a comb.
My sisters and I lived among the skin-lamps of earth. The They walked by on rattlesnakes, alligators, eels, cows, trade-beads of ivory and ebony — all words for the bones of the living. Ordered to dance, we raised whichever limb we could risk. Our anonymous aphorisms greatly comforted the nation: Consume & be happy. Everything …
It is the silken hour of morningtide as a fat, polka-dot spider crawls along the edge of a dust and plaster-encrusted windowsill. Briefly, it pauses to examine a vertical, paint-smeared iron bar: one of three that obstruct an easterly view out of a small, broken glass window, above a narrow, rectangular bed, where a short, thin man lays sleeping, sleeping still. Then, forward-march, and the spider moves from light into shadow, from shadow into a thin, tapered crack of crumbling mortar that flakes and falls in a spatter of powdery ash upon the twisted countenance of the sleeping man.
A man jumps off a cliff. I’m gonna need some wings, he thinks. He reaches into his backpack to get some things — wood, nails, a hammer, some string — and then gets down to work building. That ground is coming up awful fast, he thinks, I’d better work a little quicker. The wings he’s …
Continue reading “On the Way Down: A Story for Ray Bradbury”
We always called that rusty metal shack the Brewster house. It is in fact, a disused brooder house, which is a kind of shed for baby chickens. Thing leans wild, full of bent metal and cogs and boxes and dirt. It is a fortress of bees. An academy of mites. Not one thing do I understand.
On the playground the other kids jumped and scuttled, pushed and pulled, leapt and climbed, gamboled for His clothes. I was other, the boy who ran with a stick up his ass, who lost every competition, who could not, COULD NOT, cross the monkey bars. I burned in shame, a candle growing uglier and more useless as it consumed itself. Lita ran like the airstream, bested the boys at every contest. She was beautiful, a diamond on the diamond. She friended me even in my craven otherness.
Corey Mesler has published in numerous journals and anthologies. He has published two novels, Talk: A Novel in Dialogue (2002) and We Are Billion–Year-Old Carbon (2006), a full length poetry collection, Some Identity Problems (2008), and a book of short stories, Listen: 29 Short Conversations (2009). He also had two novels released simultaneously, March 31, 2010: The Ballad of the Two Tom Mores (Bronx River Press) and Following Richard Brautigan (Livingston Press). He has also published a dozen chapbooks of both poetry and prose. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize numerous times, and two of his poems have been chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. He also claims to have written, “Judy’s Turn to Cry.” With his wife, he runs Burke’s Book Store, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He can be found at coreymesler.com.
I don’t know why Shiranui tolerated the ringmaster pushing him around, making him do all those crazy publicity stunts. Shiranui was huge, even for a sumo wrestler, but maybe he was ashamed of being in the circus–loss of face or whatever–and so he didn’t argue.
Fuegos artificiales, copas de champán, besos al aire que dejaban empalagosas estelas de perfume caro a ambos lados de mis mejillas. Escotes, perlas, trajes de Armani y de Dior, o de algún nuevo modisto de nombre impronunciable que hacía furor en New York últimamente. Todo el mundo empeñado en ser muy cool.
Fireworks, flutes of champagne, fleeting kisses brushing sickly sweet perfume on both sides of my cheeks. Cleavages, pearls, suits by Armani and Dior or some new stylist with a jawbreaking name who was lately the buzz of New York. Everyone was resolutely cool. Slick-haired guys in formal gear talking into mobiles so small their hands almost hid them; and what a show of Ipods, Iphones and all the other ‘I’s and gadgets imaginable without which naturally life’s impossible today. On some website I’d read that today’s male deploys a load of high tech to massage a sexual insecurity. If so, this room hosted impotent machos, a masquerade of gleaming smiles and sunbed tans.
by Winona Wendth
The offices of Fuchs, Felix, and Anuran are normally damp. The building’s maintenance crew installed a complex system of de-humidifiers, but they don’t work well in the muggy Virginia heat. Felix, Fuchs’ corner of the building suffers most; they are on the northeast side and do not benefit from the broad light of the southern sun.
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?
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.
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