Patty Brown

Alone in her room, while her roommate was away at work, wept a young black woman. Her feet and legs ached from work, herself. Five hours at the gas station after an early morning shift at the restaurant for the third day in a row left her very tired. She was exhausted, but she could not sleep. She laid there on her bed, staring at the ceiling and counting the endless ticks from the clock in the living room.

She had only just started working at the gas station a week or so ago, but everyone knows they always liked to withhold first checks, and she was so far behind on her car loan, they repoed her car while she was working. The gas station was only a block from their apartment, but the restaurant was a bit farther, and she was going to have to get up almost two hours earlier to catch the bus. Which meant she would have to wake up to get ready for work in four hours. She wept because she was exhausted. She wept because she couldn’t sleep. She wept because she felt hopeless.

And that was when it appeared to her for the third and final time.

Her name was Patty. Patricia Brown, really, but she always went by Patty, like her birth mother. Patty was eight when a freak accident at the dam upstream stole her family and home from her. She stayed with several different foster families, until one finally stuck.

When the little black book first came to her, its initial peculiarities hardly even fazed her. She was just twelve years old, walking home from school. The new school year had only just begun. All of the other students pined for warm summer nights where the parents let them stay up late and eat junk, but Patty didn’t mind going to school; it was the one thing in her life that remained constant.

Normally, Patty would have cut through the plaza parking lot next to the school, but that day, there were boys fighting in the grass blocking her way, so she went around the back of the plaza.

The black book was there, hidden by shrubbery as Patty walked. A sparkle from the shadowy underbrush caught her attention. The book’s gold-striped binding glistened under the bright sun as she scooped it from the ground.

It was heavy. A lot heavier than she expected. The gold strip glowed in the afternoon sun. The smooth leather cover was flawless. Patty could hardly take her eyes off of it. She slowly opened the cover but found nothing but blank pages through the whole book. There wasn’t so much as a speck on a single one of the bright white pages.

Patty was already crafting the perfect story to fill the book for herself. Excited, she ran home, and before long, she was at the light blue house where her foster family lived. She flung open the door and hurried through the kitchen passing her foster mother, Jacky, who was peeling carrots.

“How was school?” Jacky called out just before Patty closed the door to her bedroom.

“Fine!” Patty shouted through the door.

Inside her smallish room was a twin-sized bed and small nightstand, a wooden wardrobe, and a vanity/desk with a mirror and drawers. The brown carpeted floors were clean and fairly new, and the purple walls were her choice of color; the whole family helped paint it when she first moved in eight months prior. A small door on the other side of the room led to an empty closet. She only had a few possessions, all of which could easily fit in the wardrobe. In addition to some clothes and school supplies, she had a teddy bear and a charm necklace from her birth mother. The necklace was the only thing she managed to hang onto when the dam burst.

Patty got to work right away at the desk, but in no time, she concluded the book was odd. She could not mark the pages with neither pen nor pencil. The graphite in her mechanical pencil would only crumble, and not even that dust could streak the page.

Patty closed the book and huffed, bewildered. She was suddenly aware of hunger gnawing at her belly and left the book on the desk. Jacky was still in the kitchen, now chopping carrots.

“Hey, sweetie,” she said. “How was school today?”

“It was alright,” Patty replied. “What’s for dinner? I’m starving; I missed lunch today.”

“Chicken and veggies.” Jacky handed Patty a full carrot. “What happened to the lunch we packed?”

Patty briefly considered recounting the circumstances that led to the loss, but decided against it. “Just lost it. Can I help with dinner?”

Jacky wanted to press for more. It was obvious, the way her gaze lingered on Patty’s eyes as if hoping to see the truth in them, but she held her tongue and put Patty to work peeling potatoes.

Patty was quiet, letting her mind wander. She glanced at Jacky every so often. Jacky was so clumsy. She was the sweetest thing—genuinely kind, unlike her previous foster mothers—but she was not graceful. Every other move she made left her with a bruise, bump, or scratch.

For a brief moment, their eyes met, Jacky smiled, and Patty turned away, focusing on the potato before her. It was mostly skinless, but there was a big indentation on the ameba-shaped yellow blob, and the insides of that crater were still covered by skin. Furiously, she scraped at it until the crater blended in with the rest of the potato.

After dinner was done, Patty couldn’t find the book. She searched for it for a while, but when she couldn’t find it, she eventually forgot about it.

About two years later, Patty was suddenly jolted out of her sleep. She looked over at the clock on her nightstand, 2:13, and listened for the sound that had awakened her. She heard nothing save the pounding of her own heart. She scanned the room using the light from the street lamp outside, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. After a moment, she heard a thud from her desk drawers. First just one, then one after another as if it was being shaken.

Patty shot up and flew to the desk. She pulled open the drawer, revealing the mysterious black leather book. The moment the drawer was open, the book jumped out and onto the floor, open to a page in the middle of the book. On the center of the otherwise pure white page was a word written in glowing gold calligraphy. At least she thought it was a word, but it wasn’t an English word nor was it anything that used Latin letters. There were five characters, five little pictures, each with their own details.

Patty felt strange looking at the word. She didn’t know it yet, but the word represented her. Each of the five characters described a defining aspect of her character or personality. The last of these five characters represented water. It was made up of two curvy lines and made Patty think about the current that carried away her former life.

Patty studied the word with the light from the street until she drifted off to sleep. It was gone in the morning. She spent a few minutes looking for it, but she had to move on to get to school on time.

Ten years passed before Patty saw the book again. She was alone in the apartment that she shared with a friend she met in a writer’s class last semester. Patty was laying in bed, stressed and exhausted, tears soaking her pillow, when there was a peculiar light brightening the night. There was one small window in her cramped room, and at first, she thought the light shining on the wall and was from outside. She soon realized that it came from underneath her bed. She was startled to find the black book there, its gild strip spine shinning. It seemed to hum as she reached for it.

The book was warm to the touch. The spine of the book no longer shone quite so brightly, although there was still an unnatural glow about it. A swarm of butterflies flooded her stomach as she slipped her fingers along the pages and slowly flipped open the front cover to the first page.

There were some markings right in the very center in two rows. The second row had the same five symbols she had seen ten years before, plus two new ones. The second page was full of the markings. Patty had no idea what they said, but she knew it was a powerful story.

Then, there was a new cover page with those seven symbols. All of the seven symbols had its own entourage of words, its own story. Patty marveled at the writing, unable to understand and unwilling to look away.

When Patty reached the end of the last of the seven chapters, which had led her to about two-thirds of the way through the book, she marveled once more at another peculiarity of the book. Each and every remaining page of the book was now a golden swirling impossibility. She stared at one such page, mesmerized by the ever-changing design.

All at once, the random swirls and swooshes shifted, and a golden image of the apartment door appeared. Patty closed the book and carried it with her to the door, just as the knocking began. The first rapid suction of thumps sent a fresh wave of butterflies in her stomach and made her flinch. She hurried quietly the rest of the way to the door and checked the peephole. It was an unimpressive white man in a cheap-looking grey suit holding a black folder. His arms obscured some sort of emblem on the folder.

Patty opened the door as far as the deadbolt chain would allow.

“Patricia Brown?” the man inquired.

“Yes?”

“Today is your lucky day. Your great-uncle has passed away, and left his life savings to his living blood relatives. You are one of forty-six recipients of his almost two million dollars. He was very particular about who gets what percentage, and your amount comes to just over twenty thousand dollars.”

The man carried on about how the uncle had lived a meager life, buying for himself only what he needed in order to save as much as he could on the direction of a mysterious book that told him, when he was just a teenager, that someone important in his family would need some money. It was easy to believe that someone would need money, but he was already a poor black man at the bottom himself like the rest of the family.

“He sure was dedicated,” the man continued. “He lived in a tiny room for most of his adult life, wore the same few outfits every day. He even clipped coupons. All because some magic book told him to save money, can you believe it?”

Patty was dumbstruck. She couldn’t believe it. It only raised more questions. Was the book unique to her family? Who else had seen it? How did it speak to her great-uncle? Did he know the language?

“Here, it’s all in here.” The man handed her the folder. “The check, the story, how he wanted his money divided.”

Patty looked down at the folder and back at the man, unsure of what to do. He smiled at her, bobbed his head, and said, “Miss” as he turned and walked away. Patty closed the door, leaned against it, and slid to the ground.

She wept once more.