Travelling in the Past

A short story

Author: Elena Stoyanova Vasileva,

Year 7, Age 13,

Personal Development Support Centre,

6 Slavi Doychev St.

the town of Aksakovo, the district of Varna

Tel. +359 52 762 063

E-mail: odk_aksakovo@abv.bg

Translated from Bulgarian by: Milena Bullock

Edited by: Simon Bullock

 

There was a small town, curled up at the foot of the mountain, not far from the capital. That was the home to my seven sisters – Portugal, Italy, Spain, Poland, Romania and Macedonia, my mother Europe, and me – Bulgaria.

We all had different talents and played different instruments – piano, violin, bagpipes, and had different hobbies. We lived in a big house with a large beautiful garden, full of flowers, aromatic forests, huge olive and orange trees and bushes. There was a crystal blue lake in the middle of our park with ducklings and swans swimming in it, and lots of small birds coming to drink water. There was an orchard behind the house with various fruit trees in it. That was where my family loved spending their time.

One day, Macedonia and I were playing on the grass. As we were running around, I tripped and fell, and my sister helped me get up. I looked at my scarred knees and tears came to my eyes from the pain. Then I decided not to cry and said:

‘Let’s look for the thing that tripped me!’

We started crawling and rummaging in the grass with our fingers. All of a sudden, I felt something – it was bulky and when I dug in the soil, I came upon a large red button with letters and numbers written around it.

‘Wow, what is this, Mace?’ I asked.

‘Looks like a button to me… What do you think it is for?’ replied Macedonia.

‘Let me press it,’ I said.

‘No, don’t! It might be dangerous!’

‘Look! There is something like a keyboard here! I’ll press this, and this, and this…’, and before she could stop me, I had already pressed the keys and the button.

‘Wait!’ screamed my sister. Then, it was as if time stopped for the next few seconds. ‘Bulgaria, are you OK?’ asked Macedonia, while getting up from the ground. ‘I felt weird, quite dizzy all of a sudden.’

‘Me too! Whatever happened??’

‘I think we are both sick.’

I looked around. There was no house, no garden, no beautiful park with a lake. There was an endless green field around us, but the mountain looked familiar.

‘Wow, we made a mess here! I think this is a time machine and we’ve gone back in time! And I have no idea how far back we’ve travelled!’

‘Bulgaria what did you do? Why did you have to touch that button at all? You have always been too curious for words! What shall we do now? All my clothes are back in 2019!’

‘Come on! You’re thinking about nonsense here! I think the city should be nearby, although not so modern.’

I felt I knew where the city was, so that was the way we headed. We walked for quite a while and, all of a sudden, we found ourselves at its walls. It looked like a big village to us, and when we got inside we saw that its people were just trying to survive under the difficult conditions. Its narrow cobbled streets were full of people – women wearing long skirts and their hair covered with scarfs, men wearing strange suits which we had only ever seen in museums. They all looked at us with surprise as our clothes were very different to theirs. The houses were small, wooden, with pointed roofs. As we were looking around we ended up at the town market. A young man was begging at a junction there. We went towards him to give him a coin. When we did it, his eyes were full of tears.

‘You are the first ones to give me anything today’, he said, ‘and I’d like to show you something you’ve never seen before.’

That was very mysterious, so I caught my sister’s hand and we followed the youth. We walked along the cobbled streets for about a quarter of an hour or so, until we reached a big house with towers – the kind of house you would see in fairy tale books. But there was no door visible. Our guide went to the wall, placed his palm in a niche and, with the other hand, knocked three times on the tile next to it. All of a sudden, the ground before our feet opened and stairs appeared.

We followed the boy without thinking. We walked down the stairs, then there was another stairway upwards. We reached the top eventually, all panting and gasping. Guess what we saw there! A school!

I tried to run away, but Macedonia grabbed my hand and said, ‘We are here because of you. Now you stay here! And besides, it would be really weird if we went back now.’

We had been walking in silence until then. But the beggar said, ‘I haven’t seen you around. Strange clothes you have, maybe you come from somewhere else?’

‘We’, I began, ‘come from a different time. When we were playing one day…’ and we told him everything.

Peter, that was his name, thought about it and asked, ‘You must have studied some science, as you come from a different time?’

‘More than we would like,’ replied Macedonia.

‘Do you know Geography, Literature, History, Maths?’

‘Anything but Maths!’ we both shouted in unison.

‘Ha ha ha, then I should tell the director of our school to stop complaining that nobody loves Maths, should I?

‘Wait a bit! Why were you begging when it’s obvious that you are a smart guy?’

‘I needed to find us a substitute teacher. Somebody who knows science as children still learn that the sun revolves around the Earth, that the atom is indivisible and other things we doubt about. And where can I find such a person but on the market, where everybody goes?’

‘Well, I think we could help you with this.’

My sister and I went to the school early the following day. The school consisted of various different rooms, dark and small, crammed full of children. We introduced ourselves and told them about the other time. We taught them all we knew and decided it was time for us to go back.

We said ‘Good bye’ to our new friends and went back to the place where we had started our adventure. We found the same button that we had in our garden. This time I was very careful and pressed 2, 0, 1 and 9 and off we flew. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, we were sitting on the grass in our garden. Macedonia was sitting next to me, desperately looking for something.

‘Where is it? Where?’ she was murmuring.

‘Where is what? What are you looking for?’ I asked.

‘Look, Bulgaria, you might laugh at me, but I’m looking for a time machine.’

‘And I thought that was a dream. Did we really go back in time and teach some children?’

We kept searching for the button, but did not find anything.

The following day, my sisters and I decided to play some basketball. Romania passed to Spain, Spain jumped, throwing the ball at the basket, and hit Poland on the head. She held her head in her hands and started crying quietly. It hurt her a lot. We all rushed to the doctor. Spain never stopped apologizing along the way. The doctor said she should not play basketball for a month.

A whole month! And we had a competition coming the following week! And she had a bump like a cherry… Cherry! Of course! The button was next to the cherry tree, not the apricot one! I ran there and found it. It could hardly be seen in the grass. I pressed a few numbers and then the button. I went a day back. My sisters were just starting the game. I rushed when Romania was passing the ball to Spain. Now was the time! Spain was throwing to the basket, Poland turned and noticed the ball flying towards her. Then I jumped and hit the ball. They all cheered.

After the game, they asked me how I could change events. I gathered them all under the cherry tree, and Macedonia and I told them about the button and our journey back in time, about the clean town, the united population and their thirst for knowledge. We showed them the button we travelled with. It turned out they were all surprised to hear about its existence.

Our mother, Europe, said, ‘It’s always been a dream of mine to look into the future. Let’s see!’

I decided there should be no harm in that, so I pressed 2, 3, 1 and 2, and the button lit green and a message appeared:

‘Future does not exist yet. It depends on yourselves!’