One Magical Morning

Lucy winced as another drop of water yanked her out of a warm, fuzzy dream and into cold, wet Seattle. A storm had knocked out the power the day before, and now there was a leak in the roof. She sat up and groaned, went and got a bucket from the closet, and called the maintenance guy, Greg. He told her that he had his hands full and that he’d be there as soon as he could. She checked the time on her phone.

Well, at least the leak woke me up in time for work, she thought to herself.

The alarm clock on her nightstand blinked “twelve o’clock” repeatedly, indifferent to the fact that she’d been late for work several times this month and was on the verge of losing her job. She wondered why the backup 9-volt battery she’d spent five bucks on was used for flashing the incorrect time instead of keeping the actual time and her alarm setting.

She walked into the dark kitchen of her one-bedroom townhouse and fixed herself a bowl of cereal, mostly so that the milk wouldn’t go bad. Her white Ragdoll cat Nugget that her friend Anna had given to her as a kitten pranced over to her chair and rubbed his head into her legs. He meowed for her to pick him up, and she quickly obliged.

“How’s my wittle Mister Nuggy Wuggy today?” she cooed as she squished his fluffy cheeks. He stared back contently and purred.

Lucy finished her breakfast and went back to her bedroom to get dressed for her job waiting tables at a local diner. Nugget followed closely behind. As she rummaged through the pile of clothes that she had yet to fold, something under her pillow caught Nugget’s eye, and he began to do some rummaging of his own.

“Nugget, stop that! You’re going to knock over the bucket!”

He didn’t respond; he was fixated on whatever had mysteriously appeared under the pillow. A chill went down Lucy’s spine, and a wave of uneasiness washed over her. She finished putting on her sweatshirt and flipped over the pillow to find Nugget with a strange little black book in his mouth. There was no title, no author, only a handwritten message on the inside of the cover: “Whatever you write in this book will come true.” A few of the pages had been torn out, and the rest were blank. It was a college ruled notebook.

Lucy’s mind began to race. No one had been over all week, and none of her friends would do something like this. They might give her a gift in person or mail one to her, but this was just creepy. She always kept the door and windows locked. Only her mother had a spare key, and she’d been on vacation since Friday. Well, only her mother and Greg.

What kind of joke is this, anyway? A magical genie journal just appears under my pillow while I’m sleeping?

She flipped back to the first page. As she read the message again, she felt childish for wanting to try it out. It was a notebook. Still, she found herself searching her desk for a writing utensil and resting her hand against the smooth paper, struggling to decide what to write first. Just the possibility of possessing that sort of omnipotence was overwhelming—not that she believed it for a second or anything.

“Whatever you write,” huh?

She suddenly became aware of the repetitive dripping sound resonating in the bucket.

“The leak in Lucy’s roof fixed itself,” she wrote. She looked over at the discolored spot on the ceiling and waited.

After a moment passed and nothing had changed, she shook her head and chuckled at herself for actually hoping that it would work. She placed the notebook in one of her desk drawers, still bothered by the fact that she didn’t know where it had come from. Nugget began scratching at the drawer as soon as she closed it. She did her makeup by the window with a compact mirror and grabbed her raincoat out of the closet. As she was giving Nugget a goodbye kiss on the head, she froze. Her eyes grew wide and shifted over to the bucket. The sound had stopped. The spot on the ceiling was gone, too.

You’ve got to be kidding me.

She sat there stuck for about three minutes before reaching into her purse and grabbing her phone. She opened her phone app, swiped to “recent calls,” and tapped Greg’s name. It rang a few times and went to voicemail.

“Hey, Greg? It’s me, Lucy. Um. I guess I must be having one of those days. There’s no leak in my roof, so don’t worry about stopping by. Thanks anyway!”

She put her phone away and gave her eyes a good rub. The ceiling was still spotless. She immediately opened the drawer containing the notebook and placed it carefully back on the desk.

This really is a magical genie journal.

She grabbed her pen and performed test number two: “A strawberry banana smoothie with almond milk appeared on Lucy’s desk.”

Sure enough, a delicious-looking pink smoothie in a fancy glass complete with whipped cream and a cherry on top materialized next to the notebook instantaneously. It even had a metal straw in it. She picked it up and confirmed that it was real by giving it a taste. Her jaw dropped.

Almond milk. Unbelievable.

So many questions flooded her mind at once. Where did the smoothie come from? Was there a magical genie cafe just waiting to whip up whatever she wanted, or did it disappear off someone’s table in the real world? What was “real” anymore?

She thought of her mother, to whom she told just about everything. She wondered what she would have to say about all this.

Wait a minute. Why wonder when I can just poof! her here?

She lifted the pen again and stopped.

If I did that, could it give her a heart attack? Would a group of people on the beach see her vanish from her lounge chair and experience the same kind of aneurysm that I might be suffering from right now?

She suddenly felt awful for almost using the notebook to control another person. The sound of the smoothie glass shattering on the hardwood floor snapped her out of her trance, and she gave Nugget a dirty look. He was unfazed.

“The smoothie returned to its original state before Nugget knocked it off the desk,” she wrote.

She gawked as the glass impossibly pieced itself back together and jumped back onto her desk with every drop still inside, good as new. This startled Nugget, and he leapt from the desk to the bed with his tail fluffed out before the miracle was even over. He stared back at the smoothie with eyes like dinner plates.

“Did you see that, Nugget!” Lucy yelled.

She looked back at the notebook and began nervously chewing her thumbnail, her other hand still holding the pen above the paper. The thing that had been causing her the most stress lately was creeping into her mind yet again. Could this notebook really just make her debt go away?

She needed to test something out first.

“A living, breathing dragon the size of a sparrow appeared on Lucy’s alarm clock,” she wrote. She looked over at the nightstand, and no such mythical creature appeared.

Alright, so this thing does have limitations, she thought. If it can’t create things out of thin air, it must take them from somewhere else. This means that the smoothie did come from somewhere in the real world.

It also meant that if she used the notebook to get twenty thousand dollars to pay off her student loans, she would be stealing it from somebody. She furrowed her brow at the idea and started rubbing her temples.

Think, Lucy.

Then it dawned on her. She wouldn’t steal the money from a person—she would steal it from the institution that prints the money. They wouldn’t even notice that it was missing.

She put the pen to the page and wrote, “Twenty thousand dollars disappeared from the United States Federal Reserve and appeared in Lucy’s living room.”

She closed the notebook and dropped the pen like it was a murder weapon. A storm of guilt began brewing in her gut as she walked out into the living room. That feeling was quickly replaced by something else. What she had expected was a nice, neat brick of 200 Benjamins in the middle of the floor. What she got instead was 625 uncut sheets of 32 singles, fresh off the printer. They appeared one by one beneath the ceiling fan and fluttered down in every direction, filling the room like oversized autumn leaves.

I guess I should have specified that I wanted big bills.

As she scrambled to undo what she had just caused, a knock at the door stopped her in her tracks.

“Hey Lucy, it’s Greg!”

No.

She opened her mouth to respond, to buy herself some time, but her words got caught in her throat. She looked around frantically at the sea of uncut one dollar bills covering the floor and failed to devise an emergency plan. The sound of Greg unlocking the door with his spare key echoed through the quiet townhouse as she grabbed the notebook and pen from her bedroom. By the time Lucy got to the front door, it was too late.

Greg stood in the doorway with the same look on his face that Lucy had been wearing for the past hour or two. He scanned the nonsensical scene before him and looked at her.

“Lucy, what’s going on?”

She was already writing in the notebook: “The sheets of money returned to their rightful place, and Greg forgot everything he’d seen in the past minute.”

Greg, why couldn’t you have just checked your voicemail?

She watched with sadness in her eyes as Greg’s expression of shock relaxed into one of unawareness. He looked tired as he shook his head before asking, “You said you had a leak in your roof?”

“Oh, yeah. I thought there was a leak,” she replied. “I tried to call you back but it went to voicemail. Everything’s fine.”

“Well, alright then. You have a good rest of your day, Lucy. Hopefully the power will be back on soon.”

“Thanks, Greg. You have a good day, too.”

She shut the door behind him and decided that she had to get rid of the notebook. First she had stolen money, and now she had stolen a human being’s memories. Having this power was warping her perception of reality, and she didn’t like it one bit.

She touched the pen to the first page of the notebook for the last time and wrote, “Lucy awoke to find that the day had started over. The notebook was gone. Hopefully it had found its way into the hands of someone who would use it for good—to make the world a better place.”

Lucy winced as another drop of water splashed against her forehead. She rolled over, slid her hand under her pillow, and found nothing. Perhaps it had all just been a crazy dream. As she went to get the bucket from the closet, she looked back to see Nugget scratching at the desk drawer.