Write Your Chances

Anna took the small notebook off the park bench. “Someone must have forgotten it", is what she thought. She examined it for a bit, hoping to find a clue of who the owner was. However, the notebook’s clean, black leather surface didn't bear any marks. There was an elastic closure on the front and a ribbon bookmark tied to the spine. Flipping through the pages, she expected to find something written, however, it was completely empty.

“Who would forget such a nice notebook here?” She thought out loud. Anna shrugged and decided to keep the notebook in her bag. She was going to spend the next few hours studying for her midterm in the park anyway, so it wasn’t a bother for her to keep the notebook safe until the owner arrived.

Anna was majoring as a Historian, so she liked studying in this park. The park was quite a ways from her campus, and from most other things, for that matter, but that was precisely what Anna liked. The quiet environment, only interrupted by the occasional bird song, was the perfect place to churn all the info she needed for her tests.

After going over her notes, she took from her bag a particularly thick Latin American history book. The book was full of markers from past studying sessions. Sighing, Anna put it aside for a moment.

Remembering the notebook she had found earlier, Anna took it from her bag. She hadn’t seen anyone looking for the lost item. In fact, except for Anna, the entire park was empty. Not like that was particularly weird, it was empty most of the time, but she still thought it was unusual that no one had come to reclaim the notebook.

Flipping the pages of the notebook once again, she noticed that she had missed a tiny annotation on the inside of the back cover.

“Write whatever you desire? Uh… that’s what notebooks are used for, yeah,” Anna thought out loud, feeling that it was a shame that no one was near to hear that joke. “Well, I'm not making much progress with my studies anyway, so I might as well follow its advice and scribble something.”

Anna took a pen from her bag and tried writing something in the notebook.

“I want a can of soda,” Anna wrote in her neat handwriting in a corner of the first page. She felt a bit excited while she stared everywhere for a few minutes, but nothing happened.

“I mean, it’s not like a was waiting for someone to magically come and offer me a can of coke, but that was still a bit of a letdown,” She sighed.

Putting away the notebook, Anna kept reading the book. She felt that she wouldn't get much farther studying that day, so she was ready to pick up her things and go back to her apartment when a deliveryman suddenly ran past the bench where she was sitting.

Anna stared at the young man, who stopped after reading something on his phone. The guy stayed perfectly still for a moment and suddenly screamed in frustration. Then, he stomped to the bench where Anna was sitting and promptly took a seat beside her.

“Uh… is everything okay?” Anna asked a bit scared. The deliveryman looked at Anna surprised. "Uh? Sorry, I didn't notice that you were here… it's just that some jerk canceled his order after making me run in circles across this neighborhood,” the young man said. “IF ONLY HE JUST GAVE BETTER DIRECTIONS!” the man yelled to the sky.

“Man, that sucks… so now you must pay for that order?” Anna asked.

“Uh-huh… might as well eat it while it’s still somewhat hot,” the deliveryman said, unzipping his container, and taking a pizza box out of it, with two soda cans. “Want one?” the man asked, offering one can to Anna.

“Sure…” Anna replied, completely baffled by the entire situation. It had been in a pretty roundabout way, but she did receive a can of soda. Anna couldn’t help but think that the notebook had something to do with the whole situation.

After drinking the soda, Anna picked up her bag and waved the still angry deliveryman goodbye.

She quickly made her way back to her apartment and took the notebook out of her backpack. Anna stared at it for a while.

"Okay, perhaps that was just a coincidence… come on, Anna, you are a rational human being, there's no way that magical notebooks that grant wishes exist," she thought out loud. However, she still took a pen and the black little notebook. "Let's see… I want to receive $20,000,” Anna wrote while thinking out loud and pondering her last semester’s tuition payment. "If hypothetically this works and I somehow received that money… well, I guess life gets much more interesting.”

Anna circled around her apartment, waiting impatiently to see if something happened. After a couple of hours of absolutely nothing, she breathed in relief.

“Ah, I knew it, it had all been a huge coincidence,” Anna said looking at the notebook. “I mean, if somehow something like that existed, there’s no way it wouldn’t be an extremely dangerous item full of side-effects.”

Anna took a bath and prepared dinner. She planned to take the notebook to the same park the next day, perhaps its owner would appear then.

Anna slept soundly and woke up the next day full of energy, the event with the deliveryman had completely slipped from her mind. She did her morning routine as usual. She made breakfast, dressed sharply, filled her bag with everything she thought was necessary for today's lecture, and the notebook, so she could put it back on the park's bench.

On her way to the campus, Anna stopped by a local café owned by a really sweet lady. She loved the pastries the old lady made, so it was now part of her morning routine to have a snack there.

While Anna was sitting on one of the outside tables, she found a lottery ticket in the chair. She thought it was weird how she was finding so many things near her usual spots lately, but with a little thrill from the pit of her stomach, she decided to take the lotto ticket anyway. It was much more likely that someone would actually come to search it, unlike the notebook. So, Anna thought it was better to keep it safe in the meantime.

The cafe owner calmly turned on the TV, the morning news program was on. It quickly changed to today’s lotto raffle. Anna tensed up when she looked at the ticket in her hand, and the prizes on TV. If the ticket had the three first numbers right, she would win $20,000…

The announcer, a very pretty girl, began picking up the numbers. 8-12-3-65-20-82-80. Anna’s ticket had 8-12-3-44-10-5-67. Anna managed to hold in her desire to scream. While excitement ran through her body, she decided that she needed to get rid of the notebook ASAP. There’s no way there wasn’t a catch to all those ‘coincidences.’ She quietly paid for the snack, and made her way to the park. She couldn’t care less for today’s History lecture. Right now, it was more important to get rid of that small, black notebook.

Anna looked at the bench where she always sat and saw it was empty. Walking to the bench, she took the notebook and placed it back on the bench where she found it the day before.

"Perhaps I could have taken the chance to use it a bit longer… but I'm not taking any chances," Anna thought out loud. Looking at her winning lottery ticket and back at the park bench, she decided that perhaps things had gone as well as they possibly could. “I’ll let someone else deal with the magic notebook”, Anna thought as she walked away slowly. She was already late for her lecture anyway, so she might as well bid her time and cash out her $20,000 prize.