Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

Happy Birthday

My best birthday experience goes back many years. I believe I was turning ten years old at the time. And, like many kids turning ten, I wanted to go with my friends to Macdonalds!

It was a lovely afternoon outside, so we took our food outside to eat at the picnic tables - you know the old, big, round concrete kind. We had all settled in when we noticed that at the next table over there was beginning to be a noticeable commotion.

Being ten years old and very nosy, I leaned over and asked what was going on. The table was crowded with five young men, probably about twenty years old, but it's hard to say with the passage of time. They certainly seemed too old to still be in high school to me at the time.

"This guy here is trying to wolf twenty cheesburges in twenty minutes for twenty bucks," one of them said to me.

Now this news made my now ten-years-old day! I quickly announced to all of my buddies at the table the news. They were ecstatic , too. My mother had that understanding yet rolling-her-eyes-here-we-go look on her face.

We all put our food aside and stood up to gather around the table to watch this Olympian feat. To our ten-year-old minds, this was a challenge worth taking on. And twenty bucks was no small sum of money back then.

"But what happens if he can't scarf the twenty cheeseburgers in twenty minutes?" asked my buddy, Nick.

"Well then he owes each of us five bucks each."

Years later, when I saw the movie "Cool Hand Luke" for the first time, I had a flashback to this moment in my life. If you've ever seen the movie, you'll know the scene - Paul Newman says he can eat sixty hard boiled eggs in one hour. If you've never seen the movie, I wont ruin it for you - just make sure that you watch this movie. It's a tremendous movie scene. Just writing little piece is going to make me go to me tv and throw in the DVD to watch the scent.

But I digress.

We all did the math in our heads. Clearly the other four had all staked five dollars each against the contenders twenty. This was a fair sum back in the era of ten cent chocolate bars and 25 cent cheeseburgers.

By the time the contender got to burger number fifteen, he was starting to look a little green under the gills. Suddenly, with very little fanfare, he stood up, walked over to the nearby bushes and proceeded to start to chunder up all fifteen burgers. We all howled with delight. To a ten year old, this was a magic moment.

He returned, pulled out his wallet and handed five dollars to each of the others. He then walked away without a word. But even though he was unsuccessful, we all thought that he was a true champion.

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