THE CURIOUS BOOKCASE

This week, our 4th year students were asked to write a composition. The only thing I provided them with was the title. Just three words. THE CURIOUS BOOKCASE. 

All they had to do was free their imagination and tell a great story. It could be fiction, it could be an anecdote, it could be anything they wanted.

It turns out that some of our boys and girls wrote pretty awesome stories...and we decided to share them with you.

ENJOY! 

This is the story of a boy that loved to study. He knew all historical characters, from Plato to Goethe. He was new in the neighborhood. His mother told him that there was a library, a few blocks away from his new house, called ‘The Curious One’. 

He didn’t know that going to that place would change his life forever. 

The library was divided in sections: History, Fiction, Poetry, and Politics… What the boy didn’t know was that when you were reading a book, you actually entered it and lived the story as the protagonist. 

The boy preferred History, so he went to that section. He took a World War II book from the bookcase and started reading. He fell in the story as a soldier, but when he died shot by a German soldier, he exited the book and returned to the library. 

Afterwards, he felt like reading a Science Fiction book, so he grabbed ‘Star Wars: Episode IV’. When he fell in a galaxy far, far away, he became Luke and had Jedi powers. He fought Darth Vader and won. 

Finally, he chose ‘Maze Runner’. Even though in real life only two minutes went by, he stayed in the book for two days. He ended up getting in the maze to find a way out. The thing was that he couldn’t find a way out nor return to where he came from. 

After a few days, he died of hunger. 

It is a mystery why the boy didn’t leave the book that time. Nobody ever found him. 

Bárbara Levato and Lucas Figueras 

My name is John and I’m going to tell a story that happened when I was eleven years old. 

It was a rainy day in England and I was in Highland College, near Scotland. I was going downstairs when I saw a friend who was going to the library, like me. 

We were looking for information when my friend Scott found a forbidden section. We immediately went there and found a lot of books of black magic. 

It was half past seven when we began reading those books and the sun was going down. 

We opened an old book but the pages were empty. Five seconds later, appeared a sentence out of nowhere that said ‘The person who reads this sentence will die within the next 24 hours, unless he or she does two important things: first, out a venomous cockroach in Professor Harmly’s soup during lunch. Then, kill your friend Scott tonight. At twelve o’clock’. 

When I finished reading this, Scott asked me what I was looking for and I told him that we should leave and have dinner. 

After dinner, when we were getting ready to go to bed, I put some poison in his glass of water and went to sleep. He never woke up again. 

The following day, when the students were going to lunch, I put a cockroach in my professor’s soup. At two o’clock, she was dead. 

That evening I went to the library and opened the old book. It told me: ‘Well done, little boy. You are now a professional murderer’. 

Mariano Dib and Julián Lovito Guevara

This is the story of a curious bookcase. The bookcase was at the Paris Museum and it was removed and taken somewhere in the Bermuda’s Triangle. It was the secret bookcase of Attila the Hun.

Now, I’m going to tell you how I found it. I was a sailor before everything happened, of course. The last thing I remember is that I was on my ship in the Caribbean Sea, near the Bahamas, which was my destination. But something went horribly wrong. I don’t know what happened. I think I reached that infamous zone, The Bermuda’s Triangle.

When I woke up, everything that was around me were pieces of what used to be my ship; all those pieces are now my house. I was in an island in the middle of nowhere.

After building my house, I went to explore the place and I found an ancient construction. I decided to enter, even knowing that lots of things could happen. But I had sunk and I was alone, so nothing else mattered.

I had never seen something like that in my whole life. It was wonderful, full of rooms and secrets. In one of the rooms I found a crate and there were a few inscriptions on it and a big one that said ‘CIA. The content of this crate was removed of the Paris Museum because it’s DANGEROUS. Please, DO NOT open it’.

As I said, I had sunk and was alone, so I decided to open it anyways.

Inside it was that bookcase, Attila’s bookcase. It was a sort of Chinese wooden bookcase, obviously stolen by the Huns, probably from a Chinese village.

I think the Huns never knew about the bookcase. Attila had hidden the most secret books of his time in that place.

Since I found it, I’ve learned a lot about Ancient Asia.

If you read this, send a rescue team, please, SOS!!!

(A message in a vodka bottle from an unknown sailor) 

Ara Fermadjian and Andrés Ísola

It was an early winter of 1992. A family had a car accident. The father and sister died, leaving a widowed mother and an orphan son. 

After that terrible accident the mother, as she was not feeling well living in the family house alone with a boy and a missing husband and daughter, she decided to move and start a new life. 

They moved to a remote house near a city, where there was peace and tranquility. When John and Elizabeth arrived to the new house, they rested for a while and then began organizing their things. 

When they finished, John took a tour around the house and found a large door at the end of a corridor. 

He tried to open it and couldn’t. He thought it was no big deal and left. 

Days went by and one evening, after returning from school, John slept for an hour. When he got up, he was hungry and went to the kitchen to get something to eat and go back to his room. 

Suddenly, he heard noises from the door that he could not open before. He phoned his mother and told her: ‘Where did you put the key to that room?’ ‘Which room are you talking about, John?’ ‘The key to the door at the end of the hall’, said John. ‘There is no room there, honey’, replied Elizabeth. ‘Well, maybe I’m confused’. 

When John hung up the phone he started thinking about what had happened. Then, he reacted: he went to get an axe and broke the door. When he entered, he saw there was a bookcase, with many dusty old books. 

At the end of a shelf, he found a brilliant book and took it. When he opened it, the door closed shut. He threw the book, scared. He went to the door and tried to open it…but there was no door…

(To be continued)

Micaela Rolle, Belén Rivera Tola and Fernández Camila