March madness and literature

The Big Dance, male version, began tonight. One team was Fairleigh Dickinson University, which rang a bell. After a moment, I remembered: the university publishes The Literary Review. This journal was one of the first to welcome my literary short stories.

When I dropped out of grad school to see if I could write, I made a list of literary magazines I wanted to publish in. Two at the top of the list were Prism International (U of BC) and The Literary Review (FDU), chosen because both were international, publishing world lit. That meant non-American readers. I think I had a gut feeling that my work would do better over the ocean.

At any rate, FDU came from behind to win and so move on.

Here are my stories from FDU's The Literary Review:

Fragments Before the Fall (1971)

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."

YOU, my friend, have not believed me from the beginning. But you say you do. And that makes you a phony.

Prey (1973)

Mr. Harding is leaning on a rake as the car pulls up to the mailbox. It is morning in an Oregon spring, the trees are green, pink and white, the earth is chocolate, the sky is light blue. There is no wind. Although the tips of the firs can be seen to sway gently from time to time, there is no wind below, where Mr. Harding leans on his rake. It is April, and the snakes are coming out of hibernation.

The stray cat, the one Helen called Butch, was sunning on the mailbox until moments ago, which is why Mr. Harding stopped raking to wait for the car to come into view from behind the cluster of trees up the street. With a sense strange to him, the cat is able to pick out the mailman's car; or at any rate, it never scampers off its sunning perch when the passing vehicle belongs to a neighbor. When Mr. Harding saw the cat jump to the ground and run across the yard, coming toward the mound of mulch in back, he figured the mailman was near. He stopped working to lean on the rake and wait.