Once upon a Crime

This is an exercise on the idea of taking a common phrase -- in this case, once upon a time -- and changing no more than three letters. Kudos to the Internet Writing Workshop's Practice group for offering this and other great writing topics.

Once upon a Crime

Payday!

There it was, a nickel bar of peanuts and caramel whispering my name. Psst! Hey Ricky, take me home. Mom stood ahead of me in the grocery line, and no one noticed as the Payday bar slipped into my pocket.

And so began my career in crime. I saw a girl drop a quarter and I snatched it off the dirt. The loss must have crushed her, but it was a big score for me. The change slots in the pay phones were often good for ready cash. Sometimes I could shake the whole thing and unstick a couple of dimes, or even a quarter. Walking through the left field during a baseball game that older kids were playing, I saw a half-dollar coin laying in the grass, Lady Liberty looking up at me. There was no doubt it had belonged to the left fielder, but finders keepers was as good as law. I told my friends of my find, and we spent it on a plain cheese pizza at a place on Rantoul Street. We’d heard that the pizzeria owner had killed a man, which made my escapade even more exciting.

My friends and I had a legitimate business, too. We collected Coke bottles and redeemed them for two cents apiece, and sometimes we’d collect old newspapers, bundle them up, and sell them to a dealer for a penny a pound. To relax, my gang and I would light up the half-smoked Pall Malls we found in the gutters – not a crime, of course, but our moms would kill us for it.

Maybe my longest-running caper was unscrewing the little caps off the air valves of tires. At one point I must have collected hundreds of them. We’d hear news accounts of grown-up criminals going to prison for stealing hubcaps, and I fervently hoped we’d never be caught. As a good Catholic boy, I confessed all my sins, but told him I’d been stealing hubcaps. Is it a sin to lie in confession?

Then one day, my gang and I got caught stealing nails from a construction site. The cop made us get in the cruiser; we were going down to the station and on to jail. But he drove us around the corner and let us out with a warning. Meanwhile, I’d peed my pants.

That close call ended my criminal career.

Defining the border

Gene Keller, the speaker at today's El Paso Writers' League meeting, gave us a 15-minute writing exercise to "define the border." Since El Paso is flush against the U.S. Mexican border, that's the one he meant and the one we wrote about. Here is my effort:

The border is a line we've agreed upon—a river, a wall, a treaty. Land that once was theirs but now is ours, and they had better not show up without their papers.

It's a line between us and them—our language and theirs. Our money and their drugs; our guns and their crime. It's a line we cross every day, enjoying the benefits of each others' culture. It's a line that once kept shifting but now is fixed in the ground. It's a line that is both distinct and blurred.

Love potion #9

On the first Saturday of every month, I chair the general meeting of Mesilla Valley Writers here in Las Cruces. For February 7, I've promised a Valentine's Day writing exercise. Members usually write for 20 minutes and then read aloud to the group. 

Here's what I have in mind:

A young man has a date with a young woman, but he is afraid to profess his love to her. So he purchases a potion on the Internet that is "guaranteed" to make her fall in love with him. Show us what happens on that date. Does the love potion live up to its promise?

What do you think? Can you suggest any ways to improve this exercise?

Writing practice

Our Mesilla Valley Writers met today, and the speaker, Susan Long, presented us with a brief exercise. We were to pick out a photo or postcard from a stack and write a brief story based on the picture. I happened to pick a postcard with an old photo of a swimming pool surrounded by lots of sunbathers. There were a few tall palms, and I guessed the photo to be from the 1940s or 50s. The large pool was empty except for one person in the middle. The idea was to scratch out whatever we could in ten minutes. This was my take:

We all stood aghast as the body floated in the swimming pool. The gunshot had seemed to come from nowhere. It seemed just fantastic luck that the victim was the evil maitre d' whose repellent squid soup had so recently brought us all such gastric distress. We were all innocent of the deed, but on reflection we all wished to buy the killer a margarita.

Lord, that's bad writing. It was fun, though, and the most creativity I've shown in days.