Asher is in the 8th grade. His favorite pastimes are Ultimate Frisbee, soccer, fishing, and duck hunting with his grandpa. Asher won first prize in poetry last year for a poem about fishing. He is making his stage debut playing a bad guy in the Adath USY musical, Footloose. In a recent mock Presidential election at GrovesAcademy, Asher received eleven write-in votes for president, edging out Ralph Nader.
PROSE - 2008
Grades 7 - 9
First Place - Asher Mintzer
Third Place - Josh Crandell
Grades 10 - 12
First Place - Aviva Oskow
Third Place - Yehudis Mizrachi
Prose, Grades 7 - 9: First Place
The Rescue Asher Mintzer
There was a small community of marshmallows living on a shelf of a Cub Foods store. This particular settlement went by the name of State Puff. Inside the bag, life was great. No marshmallows were going stale and they had not seen their nemesis Chocolate in months. But this all changed in an instant.
It was the 23rd of May, or as the marshmallows called it, “Campfire Season.” Statistics show that the marshmallow population drops from 49 billion to 800 million at this time. Those who are chosen to be eaten suffer a painful death. They are impaled on a stick and burned over a fire. If your bag is picked, it is like a death sentence. So when the State Puff settlement was picked by the Reztnim family, fear naturally spread through the community. The only thing that calmed them down was when their leader, the State Puff Marshmallow Man, told them they were probably being moved to a different shelf at Cub. Little did they know how wrong he was.
Within a few days, weird things started happening. Marshmallows were going stale and nobody knew why. One day, an adventurous little marshmallow named Jimmy was exploring the far side of the bag, the side you are not supposed to go to. Jimmy discovered something horrifying.
The bag was opened. And right next to the bag lay their arch-enemy, Chocolate. Jimmy was so scared that he turned and ran away as fast as he could. Before he could get back home, a big, ugly hand reached into the bag, shooting past him. In the distance, he heard marshmallows screaming and then he saw Mr. State Puff being taken away. The next thing Jimmy knew, the whole community was gathered around and staring at the open bag. Nobody knew what to say. But Jimmy knew exactly what they had to do.
One night when the other marshmallows were asleep, Jimmy broke the most important rule in the community. He sneaked out to talk with the chocolate. At first, the chocolate was apprehensive, but then they started telling stories about seeing Mr. Puff getting burned over the fire and how their own friends were getting melted. That night Jimmy and Chocolate devised a plan to escape.
Making the plan was the easy part. Getting the settlement to believe in it was the hard part. Jimmy explained that the settlement would roll the chocolate off the counter to the refrigerator. The marshmallows would stack on top of each other to get inside the refrigerator and spill lemonade on themselves and on the chocolate. Once the Reztnim family found out how bad they tasted, the family would send the bag back in a recall package. Although the plan sounded ridiculous, the community tried it later that night.
Epilogue.
The plan worked perfectly. All the marshmallows and the chocolate ended up tasting like spoiled lemonade. The Reztnims sent them back to the store. After that, the settlement was returned to the State Puff packaging plant. They lived the rest of their lives happily on the recall shelf.