Previous Challenge Entry (Level 3 - Advanced)
Topic: WALL (02/17/22)
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TITLE: Tom Bullet to the Rescue | Previous Challenge Entry
By Carrie Brannon
02/24/22 -
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“I can’t write. I can’t think of a single thing to say or to put on the paper.”
He looked at her in his wise-beyond-years way, one eyebrow lifted high, and said “You always have something to say!”
This brought the good natured wrath of Mom down on his head and an end to the morning ‘coffee hour’.
“You better get out to that school table young man or I’ll have something quite big to say!”
And thus the school day began and the writing challenge was once again pushed to the back of her mind in lieu of more important things to accomplish.
The week went along as per usual and with each passing day Cherry felt sure she would have nothing to submit for her writers’ group weekly challenge. Each day many other things would be checked off her list; Prayers - check, goat and dog chores – check, Mikey’s school subjects taught - check, meals cooked (and eaten) - check, laundry done – check (sometimes), the house cleaned - check (albeit with a lick-and-a-promise), made it to scheduled work shifts - check. But writing a 750 word essay? Not so easy...especially when the word prompt was ‘Wall’. And thus, this ‘to-do’ went unchecked for days.
One morning mid-week, after a very long and tiring night shift, Cherry came home at 7AM. As she was rummaging for a morning snack before retiring for a bit of sleep, she found on the counter two small ‘booklets’ made of torn pages from her journal notebook that had been subsequently stapled together. Bold block letters in pen ink warned:
DO NOT LOOK! UNLESS YOU’RE PART OF THE F.B.I. OR THE POLISE.
TOP SECRET
Of course, and despite being a member of neither of those prestigious departments, Cherry looked! The interior of those sloppy torn-out pages that had been stapled meticulously together enclosed a story from the mind of Mikey. The story was true to his passion for detective and crime books such as Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys and followed a similar pattern. There was a hero PI, there were criminals, there was murder and mayhem, there were “18 cops and plain clothes men” showing up here and there with sometimes sirens on and sometimes sirens off. It was the most action packed and riveting story she’d read since abandoning Cherry Aims and Nancy Drew for more sophisticated books in her own youth.
Sitting on the edge of her chair, sleep forgotten for the moment, she made her way through “Tom Bullet’s” adventures. She applauded his decisions and actions, cheered his successes, and breathlessly sat beside him in the death-defying car chases. This book(let) had her from start to finish. She laughed at the end when Tom Bullet read the “New York Newspaper headlines” which proudly to the world proclaimed “Detectove smashes crooks” and “New York Saved by Tom Bullet”. The final pages offered the cherry on top: carefully, in cartoon style, each crook was depicted with a mug shot along with his name block letter printed above it.
Mikey had never written an entire story before. He had read probably a thousand books or more in his 11 years and drawn many cartoon pictures with caption style tidbits around them. But this time, and spelling be hanged or forgotten in the books his mother made him laboriously ‘learn’ from, Mikey had written the real deal with illustrations and all. And in the reading of it, suddenly the wall that had kept the muse firmly off limits to Cherry’s mind, tumbled down and inspiration flooded in. For good or bad, and definitely in the eleventh hour, her essay for the challenge would tell of how inspiration comes from the most surprising directions and can shatter even the most solid of blockades. After all, hadn’t Mikey’s best seller book inspired greatness in her!
The End.
Historical Fiction
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This is not only fascinating but also spiritually relevant. Salvation and Holy Spirit baptism, quite often, are experienced in the same way for many people. I am one of them. Well-done!