Issue #18 of The Dr. T. J. Eckleburg Review, the first print edition, is now available for purchase. It features the Pushcart-nominated  story “The Women Who Watch,†by Belgian fabulist Thomas Owen, first published in the online version of the same litmag last year. If you’d like to give it a listen instead,
Pete Milan can be heard reading it at the horror podcast Pseudopo
d, giving it all the creepiness it deserves. Here’s an excerpt:
A man was walking by: dreamy, so lost in thought that a blackbird, shooting by like a bullet, almost knocked him off-balance. He stopped, collected himself slowly. From where he stood, he could see the old lady in a sunbeam, spotlit like a person in a play…
Why had this little old stranger—banal, uninteresting, insignificant—caught his eye? As he drew closer, she lost her hieratic aspect. Remaining still all the while, stuck on an imaginary tack like a little gunner, she began to come alive in a remarkable way. Frozen there almost ominously, her gaze fixed on his, exerting a kind of magnetism. Such that, beneath their imperious interrogation, he submitted to what could only be called a strange enthrallment.
Sometimes such gazes meet your own: they seem to know you, seek to pierce your silence. And so, anywhere at all, you might stumble across such women, who stare at you as at someone familiar.
