Fragments Before the Fall

Fragments Before the Fall: Click title for full story

The Literary Review (Summer, 1971)

Charles Deemer

I WALK a tightrope between two mountain tops over the Valley of the Waters of Fire. The waters are rising and all too soon the flames will disengage the embracing strands of fiber which hold me up, casting me to my fate below — incineration. I stand very still. To move would be to lose my balance and become cinder too soon.

I RECOGNIZE the voice: "Mummy, can I take this magazine to school? It has a story in it that is full of symbols, and Mr. Walker just loves symbols.""

---

This surrealistic and strange story has a very specific history, which I remember vividly. We were living in Portland, our year out of grad school, and I finally was beginning to publish in the literary magazines but not yet with consistency. One day the mail brought six -- count 'em SIX -- rejections at the same time. I was in the small woodsy house we rented outside of Multnomah Village alone. Two of the rejections came from The Literary Review, where I really wanted to be published.

I remember throwing all the stories across the room. I sat down at my big Remington manual and pounded out this "story" in the time it takes to type it. It came quickly, it came from the heart. It's the closest thing to a Poetics that I've ever written, before or since. I typed it and didn't even reread it. I put it in an envelope and drove straight to the post office and mailed it to The Literary Review. Take that! I was thinking.

They did. A few months later, I got a letter accepting this. A rather amazing story.