There are two main ways to find publications for your story.
If publishing your short story were your religion, the annually updated "Novel & Short Story Writer's Market" would be your bible (see Resources). It lists thousands of magazines, with short descriptions of each that should be enough for you to know whether you're interested in submitting there. Because you've figured out what kind of magazine you want to publish in, you should be able to use the Writer's Market with no problems. Just flip open to the section on Small Circulation Magazines and find the ones that sound right for you.
You can find print and online magazines on the Web, too. Google's magazine listing is a fairly comprehensive and well-maintained list of magazines with websites (see Resources). Again, they're broken up into categories, and knowing what kind of magazine you're looking for will help you wade through the endless possibilities.
Most of these magazines will make available a set of writer's guidelines that will let you know both what they're looking for and what format requirements they demand. They use these guidelines so they have to do as little work as possible. Some of the guidelines are industry-wide: Don't send your only copy of the story, double-space your manuscript, print on one side of the page in a clear and simple font, and include a brief cover letter.
Some magazines can be incredibly picky about some of the specifications, such as demanding paperclips rather than staples or that your name not appear anywhere on the manuscript, so it's important that you get your hands on guidelines for every publication to which you submit your story.
One of the most common requests made in these guideline pages is for "No simultaneous submissions." That means that if you submit your story to that magazine, you're not allowed to send it to any other magazine until you get a response. Unlike the other guidelines, you can almost certainly ignore this. The odds of you getting published in even a single magazine are fairly low, and two at once would be uncanny, but simultaneously submitting does risk blowing your relationship with the magazine. In the rare case that your story is accepted at two publications, just call or write all the other magazines considering your story and tell them not to bother. You probably won't encounter too much resentment. Send your story to 10 to 20 magazines.
It's very important to look at the publication at least once before you send it in. Editors like to say that the No. 1 thing they look for is familiarity with their magazine. Don't bother trying to read through 15 previous issues, though. As long as you have a decent idea of the kind of fiction that they print, you'll be fine.
Finally, remain realistic, but still only submit to publications that you respect. It's better to not publish a story at all than to see it in a lousy publication.
Here are some publications you might want to consider: "The New Yorker," "Zoetrope: All-Story" (Francis Ford Coppola's publication), "Painted Bride Quarterly," GlimmerTrain (an online publisher), "Skive Magazine," "Storyteller Magazine" (Canadian), "Zyzzyva" (a West Coast publication), "Conjunctions," Theatlantic.com, "The Believer Magazine," "Libbon" and Firstwriter.com (numerous magazines).
