ONCE UPON A TIME

• author of Once Upon a Time

  Nadine Gordimer
• A man writes to the narrator who is a writer and request her to add a story to a collection of stories for kids. This man heard that all writers should write a children's story but she says no because she doesn't write for kids.
• She talks about what happened the night before. The narrator wakes up in the middle of the night to the sound of footstep steps on floors that are quickly. The narrator tries to hear if the footsteps are coming toward her bedroom, her heart is rushing even though she doesn't have a gun or security bars on her windows she already feels like a victim of a crime.
• She talks about recent dangerous crimes that happened close to her home.
• The narrator figures out that the sound of creaking is in coming from someone breaking in, there are a number of mines thousand of miles below the base of her house. Every so often the hollowed out rock collapse and fall to the ground below making the house move and grown in her mines are either no longer being used or have become a graveyard for all the miners most likely foreign workers who died down below.
• The narrator decides to read herself a bedtime story because she can't fall back asleep.
• A man and a woman who are happily married are at the start of her story, they have a little boy that they love very much, a reliable housekeeper, a skilled gardener, a pool that's fenced so the boy can't fall in and drown.
• A neighborhood watch sign to keep people out and a lot of smart insurance policies. There is insurance on the family for things like storms and fires, but not for riots like the ones going out outside the city right now. It makes his wife feel better.
• He puts automatic gates at the front of the house. The little boy is enthralled by the sound system which lights people outside talk to someone inside, it's a walkie talkie for him and his friends.
• When break-in start happening in the family's neighborhood, the couple puts alarms in security bars on the doors and windows.
• The little boy's cat can sometimes set off the alarm and mice or pets can also set off the alarms next door.
• The loud sirens start to sound more like frog singing in the background because they happened so often. Robbers often strike when the alarms are going off so that no one can hear them coming and going.
• Overtime, black people who are out of work start looking for work in the areas. When the woman wants to send food to them,.her husband and housemaid strongly warn her not to because they think the people outside are thieves.
• They choose to build an even taller ball in their yard. Still, the thefts happen all over the area all the time, day and night.
• The husband and wife decide to add some kind of protection to the walls after seeing the little boy's cat carefully climbing up the wall of the house.
• It's easy to find choices in this neighborhood, there are lances, spikes, and concrete walls with broken glass embedded in them. At the same, the little boy and his dog are running happily.
• The couple chooses the scariest security system of all

  A set of metal bonds with razor blade holes
• The security system looks like it would work in a prison camp. The set of metal bonds with resource blade holes was made by a company called Dragon Teeth.
• The next day workers put the coils on the couple's house. The metal shines very brightly in the sun. The man tells his wife that it will weather over time, but she tells him that metal doesn't weather. They hope the cat isn't stupid enough to climb up the wall.
• The woman reads her son the story of Sleeping Beauty that night. In the story, the brave prince fight his way through a thicket of thorns to save sleeping beauty. The next day, the boy plays the role of the prince and tells himself that he has to climb over the metal coils that surround the house.
• As soon as the boy wiggles his way into a metal coil, the blades cut his skin. He screams in pain getting more caught in the wire. The housekeeper and gardener run over to help. The gardener rips his hands up as he tries to save the boy. The cat sets of the house alarm. They were all speechless.
• Heavy machinery is used to remove the little boy's injured body.