A man comes in. He is tall and fair, his eyes are a dazzling blue. He looks at the woman. She looks at him. He sits down at the table across from her. She goes on turning the pages of the yearbook, smiling to herself now and then as she reads the autographs written by her classmates long ago. She knows the man is watching her. She tries not to look at him. He comes over to her table and asks to borrow the jar of honey she is using to sweeten her tea. She smiles and says, “Yes, of course….”
Jeanne Shannon writes in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Inside, he found a body with brown hair in an austere cut, nearly the same as his own. The body wore a simple black running suit, no jewelry, not even a watch. The face looked vaguely like Mart’s, and so he went next door for a second opinion.
Curtis VanDonkelaar teaches at Western Michigan University, where he earned his MFA. He’s won multiple awards for his writing and worked as a copy editor with New Issues Press.
The guy at the door doesn’t look like Danny, though a case could be made for the nose. A mashed in version, dramatically scabbed and weather beaten, and the hair, filthy but spiked in defiance. A strange, Dan-like head on a body that would make an anorexic flinch. Withered limbs swimming in cutoffs and stained polo shirt. Dead-end Danny after the rock fight. It couldn’t be, yet the voice assures us it is—the South Philly accent, unmistakable.
Tom Larsen has been a fiction writer for fifteen years with work appearing in Newsday, New Millennium Writing, Puerto del Sol and Antietam Review.
by Penelope Mace
january: hoofin’ whole hog to market street to leaflet to leaflet to yank all the screws in pea coat and mocs no hat thin socks no gloves struck numb nose drip hair a skein but knowing what to do and doing it loving it pick up pick up all discards no litter poe-leese cruising people taking poe-leese take you for fucking littering for fuck’s sake little white chick like you yeh yeh why not not possession not weapons but something thinking of maurice sendak that book she read over and over to her little sis what a smile… in January it’s so nice… slipping on the sliding ice… don’t need chicken or soup or ice got leaflets and poe-leese got people taking got….
Penelope L. Mace has published fiction and poetry in several journals in the US and Canada. She has produced a play Mauve to be released later this year in the Albany, NY area.
I walked in rectangles, city blocks. Not that you were in reach. I knew not only that I would not find you, but that you did not want to be found. With each lap I extended the size of my rectangle, a block farther in every direction. I would find you and you would reject me and I would try to work my way past that, as I had done every time before.
Rob Pierce is the Editor-in-Chief of Swill, and for nine years was one of the editors of Monday Night. His prose has been published or accepted for publication by Swill, Monday Night, Zygote in My Coffee, Five Star Literary Stories, Strange Tales of an Unreal West, and the forthcoming album release by The Ancients.
Turn
by Leon Geist
Wake. Rotate hand then arm. Stop. Reach for side table with stretched fingertips, touch the gold metal lamp base and turn on the light bulb that flickers, lights, flickers. Bad bulb, or maybe it’s not bad at all. It only behaves badly.
Leon Geist lives in North Carolina with a cat. This is his first published story.
Just for a split second, this moment was important. You held the camera at waist-level and peered down into the box’s glass window. Later, you pressed the viewfinder up to your face. Squint. Hold still. Click. You had to wait a while to see what you had done. Early on, you mailed the whole camera off to Rochester. They would return it loaded with new film when they sent your photos to you. Eventually, you took the film to the drugstore, or drove up to a little kiosk in the middle of a parking lot.
Foust received an MFA in creative writing from Spalding University in Louisville in 2008, and a BFA in Illustration from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia in 1985. Her stories have appeared in places like Minnetonka Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Word Riot, and Wrong Tree Review. She lives with Melvyn, her wonderful husband, and Mia, Honey, and Grace, her three spoiled dogs, in the Forest Hill Park section of Richmond, Virginia.
You wake up inside a glass cell again. You don’t know how long you have been here—it has been so long that you remember nothing else. People occasionally peer in at you; sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, sometimes a child, they all look in with the same sort of amusement one feels toward an irate, yet completely harmless, animal in a zoo. You throw yourself against the glass and you shout, hoping they hear you, sympathize with you, and rescue you from this place, but they don‘t.
This is R. Henry Morris’ first publication.
No one loved time like Milton Chesterfield. He loved dates, regardless of what events they marked. He loved all the times of day: dusk and dawn, noon and midnight. He loved the weeks and the months, especially the leap-year fluctuations of February. He loved minutes and he loved all of the hours….
Mike Allen works as the arts and culture columnist for the daily newspaper in Roanoke, Va., where he lives with his wife Anita, a goofy dog, and three cats with varying degrees of psychosis. In his spare time he does a ridiculous number of things, including editing the critically-acclaimed anthology series Clockwork Phoenix and the long-running poetry journal Mythic Delirium. His own poetry has won the Rhysling Award three times, and his fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award. He’s also recorded podcasts for StarShipSofa and Clarkesworld Magazineand participated in local improv theater, where he’s often asked to provide the voice of an Ominous Narrator or play the part of Satan. Photo by Vickie Holt.
Ian Watson wrote the screen story for Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, based on almost a year’s work with Stanley Kubrick. His most recent books are The Beloved of My Beloved, a volume of transgressive and funny stories in collaboration with Italian surrealist Roberto Quaglia, perhaps the only full-length genre fiction by two authors with different mother tongues (a story from which, “The Beloved Time of Their Lives”, won the British Science Fiction Association Award for short fiction, Easter 2010), and the erotic satire Orgasmachine, first begun almost 40 years ago but only available until now in Japanese; both from NewCon Press.
In a different version it was not a pea but a cocoa bean/you came to us in the night/soaked in cold/trembling with fatigue…
Molly Gaudry is the author of the verse novel, We Take Me Apart (Mud Luscious Press, 2009), and the editor of Tell: An Anthology of Expository Narrative (Flatmancrooked, 2010). She curates Walking Man Gallery, edits Willows Wept Press and Willows Wept Review, is a co-founding editor of Twelve Stories, and is an associate editor for Keyhole Magazine. She writes occasional book reviews for East&West Magazine, and she’s currently tweeting a chapter of her new verse novel, FLORA THE WHORE, every few days on Twitter.
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.
Proud member of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses
Supporter of VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts