2007: #racism #nofaithinhumanity
It was an old image. Two black men—you could tell they were black because they were in the light, clothes torn. They hung from a large pendula dogwood tree. Below them a crowd of whites stood, shaded. In the foreground, a man looked, eyes wide, into the camera. One arm reached out, bent up, palm open, like a tree branch reaching for the sun, without the weight of two black men. The man drew wide, radiant, riveting….
Charles is an emerging writer with a poem appearing in Anima Poetry Press, and now with this as his first fiction publication. He’s currently enrolled in the Creative Writing BA program at ASU and will have received his degree by the end of 2017.
I hadn’t played golf since high school and knew I’d be way out of my league in a threesome with budding law partner Matt and
Dr. Dave. They both owned custom-fitted clubs. Still, Night Golf sounded more appealing than my insurance adjustment gig. And it was fun until the zombies came out of the rough….
Richard Peabody is the author of the novella, Sugar Mountain (Argonne Hotel Press), two short story collections, and six poetry collections including Last of the Red Hot Magnetos and I’m in Love with the Morton Salt Girl (Paycock Press). He is the founder and co-editor of Gargoyle Magazine and editor/co-editor of nineteen anthologies including Mondo Barbie, Conversations with Gore Vidal, A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat Generation, Alice Redux and four anthologies of fiction by Washington Area Women, the most recent being Gravity Dancers. He is currently working on Amazing Graces: Yet Another Collection of Fiction by Washington Area Women. He teaches writing at Johns Hopkins University.
Lynn turned the pages of Tehran Daily as she sat behind the counter at Hafiz Hotel. Day after day, for a year now, she had been waiting for the news about the arrest of the person who put the bomb in the station wagon her husband was driving. What had Babak done to be the target of such a crime, had he been mistaken for someone else, who was it who put the bomb in the car? It seemed her life was on hold until she knew the answers, until punishment was inflicted on the guilty. The bomb had been very small, the kind that the police described to her as a “sticky bomb” because the bomber could just attach it to something, but it had been powerful enough to end her husband’s life….
Nahid Rachlin went to Columbia University Writing Program on a Doubleday-Columbia Fellowship and then to Stanford University writing program on a Stegner Fellowship. Her publications include a memoir, Persian Girls (Penguin), four novels, among them, Jumping Over Fire (City Lights), Foreigner (W.W. Norton), Married to a Stranger (E.P.Dutton hardcover, City Lights, paperback). Her short stories have appeared in many magazines. One of her stories was adopted by Symphony Space, “Selected Shorts,” and was aired on NPR’s around the country and three of her stories were nominated for Pushcart Prize. Her work has been translated into Portuguese, Polish, Italian, Dutch, German, Arabic, and Persian. She has been interviewed on NPR stations such as All Things Considered (Terry Gross), and in magazines including, P&W, Writers Chronicle. She has written reviews and essays for New York Times, Newsday, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. She gives talks and readings at libraries, bookstores, universities, high schools, museums.
Maribel tried to picture her parents’ graves. As a child, she had the notion that if you imagined something hard enough it was like actually doing the thing you’d imagined. She saw how the frosted grass sat as stiff as on the back of an old man’s neck. She saw the two slabs of carved stone erected from the ground. She uncupped her hands from around her tea mug and imagined holding barbed roses. She could feel their thorns in her skin, but from a mental distance, as though her hand had fallen asleep and all she could really feel was pressure….
His name was Dario. He came into class and slipped between the desks, like he wasn’t hauling a load of grief. He was nineteen, tall, bean-thin, dark face like a blade, vigilant eyes, patchy beard. The buttons on his pink Polo dress shirt were fastened to the neck. He set a foil-wrapped pizza slice on the desk. I’m gonna have to leave early, he said. I got a funeral to go to….
At your birth, a carefully chosen playlist gives you a lifelong love of The Smiths and a preternatural nervousness toward The Beastie Boys. In anticipation, your family struggles with your slick limbs. Their tension will make you persistently suspect something’s amiss, like you’ve left your phone on the L or been passed over for a career-defining job….
Amanda Marbais’ fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Apalachee Review, Portland Review, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, The Collagist, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and other journals. She’s the author of A Taxonomy of Lies (Bottlecap Press, 2016). She lives in Chicago where she is the Managing Editor of Requited Journal.
Mother had been luckier than me. She was from Goa. When she burst forth from Grandmother’s womb, she flew out of the house with the blue and black wings of a Morpho Menelaus butterfly, and she did not return home until she was nearly six months old. I was born with bee wings on my back, the length of my body, like translucent paper wings of a honey bee….
Richard J. O’Brien lives in outside of Philadelphia, PA. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University. Currently, Richard teaches first-year composition and literature at Mercer County Community College, Stockton University, and Temple University. In the distant past, he served in the US Army before the Berlin Wall came down. After that he attended Rutgers University where he studied writing and literature.
This killer whale broke surface twelve feet out, arching its oily mass out from the water, and then it dove, aimed in our direction. One of us grabbed the shotgun. Our catch was good, but orcas could eat our salmon right through the nets, swarm us in packs of up to forty. We knew the risks. It was the wretched ‘blackfish.’ We’d heard how a pack of them had come up on a whaler’s catch recently, attacking its haul in a fury of relayed darts and tears, mucking up the water with their methodical peeling back of the blue whale’s skin….
Nicole Miyashiro is a writer and editor for the PA Center for the Book at Penn State and has published stories, poems, and reviews, including one story nominated for a Pushcart Prize by A cappella Zoo. She is currently collaborating with the Palmer Museum of Art on her ekphrastic project, ‘Words of Art,’ and has a story, “Smell & Taste,” forthcoming in Clever Girl Magazine.
Across from Sugar Mama’s Dulce Dynasty was The Sexy Burger. The Sexy Burger, what the restaurant was named after, was just that—a big ol’ lump of juicy dead cow drippin’ with enough blood to drown a vampire. That stuff would kill ya, but not before making it rain in more ways than one: making slippery indigestion run down your bowels and out your pooter, and making it rain out from between the customers’ hands like at a strip club, all flicka-flicka-flicka-flicka like and straight into the boss’s oversized pockets….
This is Justin Le’s first publication.
Toby keeps reminding us that he spent six years in a coma. Like we need reminding. Eric tells Toby that he can’t blame the coma forever. Three times tonight we’ve approached groups of girls and three times Toby’s messed things up. He’s a human torpedo, capable of obliterating any conversation in a matter of seconds. I’m determined to help Toby find a girlfriend, but he sure isn’t making it easy….
Brett Jackson lives in San Francisco and is currently at work on a novel. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Per Contra, Vestal Review, and Avatar Review.
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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Supporter of VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts