“At last! I’ve finally finished it!”
Franklin had wanted to be an author since he was an adolescent. He’d finally completed his first book, a collection of short stories based on the world’s strangest and scariest concepts: the end of the world, the demon realm, death. He checked his watch; 2 a.m.
“Yikes! I should get to bed!”
Exhausted from wrestling with demons, Franklin collapsed on his bed ready to fall asleep. But sleep did not find him. Instead, thoughts jostled within his mind; he perseverated about whether his book was missing something.
“Fall asleep. Fall asleep” he kept thinking to himself. Eventually, he lost consciousness.
When he arose the next morning, or what he thought was the next morning, his entire room was dark.
“That’s odd,” he thought to himself. “Whenever I wake up, the sun usually is up.”
“It will never come up,” a mysterious voice called from the darkness. “It will never come up again.”
“This can’t be real,” he thought. “There is no way.”
The voice made Franklin sweat.
“The end of the world has come. The sun shall never rise again.”
“This is what I just wrote about in my book,” Franklin thought.
“The demon realm has opened. No one will ever live again.”
Franklin woke up, screaming.
“I knew it wasn’t real,” he thought after he calmed down from his initial shock.
Still exhausted, he fell back asleep, though his body fought against it. He arose from his bed again; his room was dark.
“You can’t escape me,” The voice said. “For I now coexist within your imagination.”
Franklin was worried. Would he have to deal with these nightmares for the rest of his life?
“You don’t exist. You’re an imposter. You shan’t exist throughout my imagination. Wake up!” He thought. “Wake up.”
“You will never wake up. You are done for.”
Suddenly, Franklin began to see a tiny ray of light.
“Light always triumphs over darkness,” he said to the voice.
More rays began to emerge.
“No! I am done for!” the voice croaked.
Franklin woke up, the sun shining bright light in his eyes. He got up, dressed himself, drank some coffee, went out the door with his manuscript, and headed to the publisher.
Benjamin Lee is a seventh grader at La Scuola International School. He lives on Pennsylvania Street.
Steven J. Moss 