Franklin and the Little Black Book

Franklin had become quite shocked when he had opened up his book bag and had found a mysterious little black book. With a hint of hesitation, he reached into his bag and pulled it out and held it right in front him. He thought that nothing about the book came familiar to him at all, in fact it seemed quite new, yet old fashioned at the same time. From the bindings to the covers and the pages underneath seemed so mysterious and interesting that its potential origins began to bother him as anxiety began to creep throughout his body from the thought of it. He placed it down on the table in front of him and began to flip through the pages and analyze it more thoroughly, but they were all blank except for a small sentence on the first page that read, “Who Are You?”. “Who Are You?’, Franklin read out loud, and then just after that as he began to go through it one more time, he saw those same words appear on the next page, and then the next, and then the next one after that. He started flipping through them in a rush, becoming more entwined and focused on it, until the sudden bark of a dog made him jump and he came out of the trance.

His focus came back to the world around him, realizing that he was sitting with his back towards the street at one of the picnic tables outside of his favorite coffee place, “Eagle’s Coffee”. Franklin is a student in his senior year of college, he has brown hair and eyes and is rather tall standing at five foot eleven and has a pale complexion, he is wearing his usual style of a red and black flannel with a gray t-shirt and brown pants and black shoes. As he looked up at the dog that was standing near the door of the coffee shop, when he saw his friend and roommate Arla walk out holding two cups of coffee walking towards him. She was almost as tall as him standing at about five foot nine, she had blonde hair and blue eyes, and also had a pale complexion, she was wearing a red cardigan above a gray t-shirt and had on black pants with black shoes. She reached the table put down the two cups of coffee, took of her mask that was covered with the image of roses and sat down across from him with her back towards the coffee shop and said, “I still can’t believe that you get something decaf at a time like this, and even with no cream or sugar just doesn’t sound good at all.”. She looked at him and saw he was shaking a little bit and then said, “Well maybe I’m wrong about the decaf you seemed hyped up already…Frank is something wrong”, she asked. He pushed the book up to the middle of the table.

He looked at her and said in a rather worried tone, “It’s this book its freaking me out.”. She looked down at it and said with a smile, “A book.”. “Yea this book.”, he responded, she gave a little laugh and said to him, “You’re freaked out by this book…ha man this whole pandemic has got your wires all shot out.”. He gave her a look and rolled his eyes at her and said, “No I’m serious I do not know where this book came from and it has letters just appearing in there and it is putting out this weird vibe I just…”. Arla picked up the book and interrupted him and said, “Frank its just a book don’t worry your mind is just probably playing tricks on you…don’t worry zoom university has got all of us tired just put it away and lets focus on our work, we have a big paper to turn in.”. Franklin gave a little huff and said, “alright”, and put the book back in his book bag and took out his papers and his textbook and began to study. They spent about a few hours studying and writing down notes. Even though he was trying to distract himself he still could not stop thinking about that book sitting in his bag. He was thinking about it all the way back to their apartment. When he got back he just wanted to stop thinking about it, so that night when he got home, he took it out of his bag and put it in his closet and threw some old clothes on top of it. When he closed the door, he said to himself, “Out of sit, out of mind”, and he tried to go on with his night.

That night he had tried everything to distract himself from that book, staying up late and hanging out with his roommates to avoid sleep. Yet, eventually sleep won out and he went to bed. Usually, he was a heavy sleeper but tonight was different. He eventually would fall into a a very shallow sleep. Then in the middle of the morning while it was still dark outside, he was awakened by a loud rumble in his room. Laying on his side he was rather hesitant and a little frightened to just jump out of bed, so he just opened his eyes and scanned around the room. He then heard it again he slowly sat up in his bed and looked around more closely at things in his room. He didn’t have a lot of things to his name, even so his room was rather small to actually fit stuff in. His bed was in the right-hand corner of his room and the only pieces of furniture was his desk facing the window on the left wall from the bed and a bookshelf full of books as he loved to read. As he looked around, he saw the door to his closet was what was shaking. A deep sinking feeling filled his body as he stared at the door. Then it slowly creaked open wider and wider until it touched the wall now fully open and sitting there out in the open away from the clothes it was buried in was the little black book and it was open.

Then out of the book appeared a ghostly man who was shown from the shoulders up. He had long white hair from his head and beard, yet he was bald on top, strangely reminding Franklin of a Benjamin Franklin kind of haircut. He also had a wrinkly face that surrounded two large piercing blue eyes. Franklin tried to speak yet no words would come from his mouth, but then the spirit spoke to him loudly in a way that seemed like a declaration to him, “You have been selected! Selected for judgment!... WHO ARE YOU?”. Finally, Franklin was able to say something, “I am Franklin Townsend”. “NO!”, the spirit shouted, “Not who are you but, who are you…really.”. Franklin sat there in his bed frozen still and could not move a muscle. “This is what the judgement shall determine, and this will decide your fate, you will be given a challenge, you shall not know what it is nor how many there will be, but they will determine your fate.”. His eyes seemed to pierce straight into Franklin’s soul as he said one final time, “Who are you?.”, and then there was darkness.

Franklin awoke in the morning in a cold sweat and immediately sat up in his bed thinking was that a dream or did that actually happen, then he looked up at his closet and the door was closed. He jumped out of his bed and ran to the door, opened it, and moved the clothes away and there it was the little black book sitting underneath them closed. He picked it up and ran out to the living room where Arla was sitting at the table eating her breakfast. In the middle of eating her breakfast she looked up at him and said, “Dude you look like you had a bad night.”. He sighed and said, “girl you have no idea.”, then he sat down and told her about what had happened. She sat there taking in all the information with a slight worry on her face and said, “I believe you… I have just never seen you like this so worried…”. That answer gave him a sigh of relief as if he felt like he was not going crazy for just a moment. “So, do you have any ideas about it.”, he asked her, “Well…”, she said, “I think this is a question on good or bad, if there trying to determine who you are, and it seems like really who you are it will be something in which you have to choose to do good or evil.”. “Well how will I be able to do that if I know I’m being tested won’t I just do it to pass the test”. Arla looked at him with a rather worried face and said, “I don’t know, we will just have to see I guess.”, and then she had a look on her face as if she remembered something and said, “Oh this was in the mail for you”, then she handed him a letter.

He took the letter and opened it and it is a check for twenty thousand dollars and he read out loud with the letter in one hand and the check in the other. It said that he had won a radio contest from the local station and won money. “Wow! That’s awesome dude, I didn’t know you entered a radio contest.”. Franklin sat there confused and responded to her, “I never entered into a contest.”. “Oh!”, she said in a moment of realization, “Maybe this is one of those tests.”. Franklin stood up and said in a rather somber voice, “Maybe…um I’m going to go for a walk to clear my head.”. She shook her head to him and then went to get ready, grab his bag and the book and walked downtown. He thought about the book and the challenges all the way there trying to figure out what they might be, but he also tried to stay very observant in order to make sure he did not miss them. Then he arrived downtown and was walking up to the edge of an intersection when he saw his friend Maria standing not to far away from him on the side of the street, where she waved to him. As he was walking over to her, he noticed that there was a car with the driver looking at his phone heading right for her. In an instant he rushed over to her grabbed her arm and pulled her out of the way just in time as the car went past them into a planter on the side of the street.

He and Maria stood up and she hugged him and thanked him for saving her and then he remembered something and turned to her and asked, “You’re a philosophy student, right?”, she nodded yes and then he asked, “Can I buy you a coffee.”, she said, “Yea of course.” And then they went to “Eagle’s Coffee”. He told her everything about what happened and her advice to him was, “Look good and bad are rathe subjective terms, there not absolute in anyway and I think this will also be true here, my advice would be to live like you would and just try to be the best you can.”. So, he took that advice and spent the twenty grand in many different ways, he paid for his roommates rents for a couple months, bought textbooks, donated money to different charities, and tackled any other problems. He checked the book everyday it now being blank most of the time, but about a month later it read, “Now We Know Who You Are”.