One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.
⁓ Groucho Marx

With the profusion of folks writing books, a whole cottage industry has popped up trying to sell aspiring authors everything from publishing to editing to marketing services to lots and lots of pie in the sky. “Step right up and see an elephant in my pajamas!”

I’m inundated daily with an onslaught of can’t miss offers, and to be honest, I’ve taken a couple of those offers, and guess what? They missed! I think my favorites in this genre of milking desperate people are the writing contests. They always appear to me to be nothing more than money grabs, promising prizes, and much more valuable to would be Ernest Hemmingways, exposure. In selling books, exposure is the name of the game, so the solicitations are tempting.

To the point that I decided to try one. However, as is my bent, I just couldn’t take it seriously, but I had some fun. In the swindle I picked, you were given 24 hour to write no more than 1,000 words on the following synopsis: She was on her annual trek to the Spring Fair to obtain that one essential item. She walked quickly, ignoring the tiny purple flowers dancing in the breeze. It had been a hard winter. While she knew it was wrong, this year she’d have to try to steal it…

I didn’t win, much to my great disappointment and surprise. However, I did get an Honorable Mention, which I think everybody who paid the entrance fee gets so that they’ll come back for more.

“Thank you sir, may I have another.”

Here’s what I wrote:

Helplessly Hoping Her Harlequin Hovers Nearby

Spring was a time of hope for most people, but not for Hope—she had little hope left. Most of Hope’s hope was left at the chapel door, five years ago, where she hopelessly waited for the groom, Hopo Hopper, to hopefully present himself in radiant and blissful hopefulness.

But amidst the blooming tulips and forsythia, Hope’s hope disappeared, along with Hopo Hopper, the only true love of her life, a life torn asunder and left helplessly impaled on the ragged remnants of radiant recrimination and a remorseful relentlessness.

It had been a long and hard winter, on top of four other long and hard winters, and Hope, in all obsessively-compulsive glory, had been waiting for her chance; every year waiting for the first hints of Spring to imbue the air with hope for Hope that she may ferret-out her fortuitous finale…finally!

Every year, the first week in May brought the annual carnival, a county fair replete with lots of county fair stuff, and most of all, rides galore, maintained and run by people with eighth-grade education—a virtual smorgasbord of “What could possibly go wrong?”

And what went wrong in Hope’s mind was nothing at all. Everything was merry in the merry, merry month of May, and Hope was agog with anticipation for a smorgasbord of possibilities and adventures. For what could be more adventurous with myriad tantalizing prospects than Satan’s Wheel of Death, with all its muscular build, tattooed arms bulging from a sleeveless t-shirt, multi-colored and critically opaque tattoos amidst the unrestrained and waggish flow of golden blond ringlets. At least, that’s what Hope saw when she reached the gayly spinning ride of centrifugal force?

Ah yes, it was love at first sight, with an unbridled desire that tingled up Hope’s leg and down the other, and if she wasn’t already completely smitten, Hopo’s loquacious rendering of his responsibilities as head potentate at Satan’s Wheel of Death, drove her around the bend and over the cliff.

“You see,” Hopo explained. “Me and my man, Hopalong, we smashed down the bend in the major strut holding down the thingamajig that’s attached to the big gear that controls the speed of the wheel, which gives the whatchamacallit a bunch more torque and a lot more speed.”

Hope just stared at him, mesmerized, not just with his good looks, but with his obvious technical skills.

“I like to get it going real fast and hear the folks scream,” he continued. “Every once in a while, one of them pees themselves and they come out all wet and embarrassed. Ha, ha, right?”

Hope was starting to pant as she twirled her long red locks in between her fingers.

“But the biggest rush, the coolest thing ever,” gasped Hopo, panting along with Hope, “is when one of them throws up and the upchuck swirls around the wheel, covering everybody in poke.”

The rest, as they say, is history, and not a good history from Hope’s point of view, but today she hoped to even the score by confronting Hopo at the fair and stealing back his heart. Of course, she’d been trying to do exactly that for the past four years, but Hopo wasn’t at those fairs.

This year would be different, she told herself, and she was right. She spotted him from a distance as she made her way through the crowd, although she hardly recognized him—he didn’t look the same. Walking quickly to Satan’s Wheel of Death while ignoring the tiny purple flowers dancing in the breeze, she was monomaniacal in her quest.

But when she stood in front of Hopo, she could not think of one thing to say.

“Hi,” he said. “Do you know me?”

Hope started to answer, but before she could get a word out, he cut her off.

“I lost my memory, so if we knew each other, I don’t remember. Five years ago, I was testing the wheel and was strapped in and happily spinning round and round when something happened to the main gear, and the wheel spun off its mooring and rolled down the midway…with me still in it. I finally loosened the safety strap, but then I got thrown all over the place. When they found me, I was unconscious and had been in a coma for five years. I only came out of it a few months ago, and the boss gave me my job back.”

Hope’s freckled face went limpish as she took a closer look at Hopo. His muscles had atrophied, the tattoos had wilted, his clothes drooped on him, and his hair hung limp and stringy.

Hope felt more hopeless than ever.

But just then, as Hopo asked, “So, did we know each other?” a good-looking stud walked by, muscled and tanned with dark, styled hair and a close-cropped beard.

“No, I don’t think so,” Hope said as she made a beeline for the hunk walking down the midway. When she caught up to him, she stuck out her hand and said, “I’m Hope.”

He smiled and took her hand. “Hi, I’m Hopalong Holleran.”

Hope springs eternal!