Eliza-Andreea Teușdea is participating in the International Literary Creation Competition, 7th Edition, from Bucharest, Romania and is 15 years old. We thank her for her participation and wish her success.

The Boy From The Library

A rumor is a living thing. It circulates from person to person, shifting and blurring until the boundary between fact and fiction dissolves. Yet, most of the time, it grows from a seed of truth, much like how every myth contains a fragment of history.

The story told on this particular rainy evening started small, passed between friends until it became a tale everyone knew but no two people told the same way. The rumor spoke of a street, in a city, where a strange library existed. From the outside, it was small, but inside, its dimensions stretched impossibly wide. It was said to contain books on history that held secrets the world had never known—and none of them bore an author’s name.

People laughed, how could a book have no author? But the crazy person insisted. They said the books were not written by hands, but by time itself. That the ink was made of memory, and the paper of moments that almost were. Naturally, nobody believed them.

But people are strange creatures. Tell them not to open a door and suddenly they need to know what’s behind it. Tell them a library exists and they will go searching. And they did.

Some searched for years and found nothing. Some claimed they had found it but returned with empty hands and vague descriptions. One said the shelves were endless. Another said there were only seven books. One swore there was an old librarian with no face. Another insisted there was only a boy.

That was the detail that remained unchanged. There was only a boy. Nobody knew who he was. Nobody agreed on what he looked like. Yet every version always included him.

The boy from the library.

The story of the rumor would have ended there if not for a university student. Not because he was special. Actually, he was terribly ordinary. He studied literature because he loved stories and hated certainty. He liked old books, underlining sentences he would never reread, and asking questions professors disliked.

One rainy evening he missed his bus. To waste time, he took streets he had never walked before. That was all it took, just poor timing for this story to be told. That’s when he saw it.

A narrow building squeezed between two apartment blocks. Above it, written in faded gold letters: ARCHIVE. With a dark green door that had a sign on it saying ‘Always Open’, even though it’s windows, contradicting the sign, led to complete blackness inside.

He stood there for a while. He had waled that road before. He was sure of it. There had never been a library. Yet, there was nobody at this hour on the streets to walk when exactly it had appeared. Still—

He tried the knob. The sign was right, the door was open and without another doubt if he should really go, he entered. The bell above the door rung in the dead of the night, adding to the already heavy and tense atmosphere.

Inside, the air smelled of centuries-old paper. Rows of impossibly tall shelves stretched into the distance, categorized by History, Philosophy, and Poetry. He pulled a familiar title from a shelf, but as he flipped through the pages, his heart skipped a beat. The text was wrong. It contained chapters he had never seen, unpublished endings, and altered historical dates. It wasn’t fake—it was simply written from an entirely different perspective.

„You shouldn’t start with history,” a calm voice interrupted.

At the center of the room sat a boy of about seventeen, wearing a dark school uniform. He didn’t look up from his book as he spoke.

„What?” the student asked, startled.

The boy closed his book with a soft sigh. „People always start there. There’s too much certainty in history. If you want the truth, look elsewhere.”

„Who even works here?” the student asked, looking around the vast, silent room. „Who writes all of this?”

„Works? No one writes these,” the boy replied matter-of-factly, stepping past him into an unlabeled section of the library.

Here, the spines bore no titles—only thousands of names. The student’s stomach dropped as he read them: his old teacher, his neighbor, a former classmate.

„Most people look for themselves,” the boy murmured, stepping aside.

Driven by a sudden, frantic urge, the student searched the shelves until his fingers brushed against a plain white book bearing his own name. He opened it. Written across the pages were his childhood memories, his private arguments, his forgotten dreams, and secrets he had never shared with a living soul. He read under a trance, watching his own life unfold in text until his eyes hit a chilling sentence:

He stood in the library and turned the next page.

The student’s hands froze. He slowly turned the page.

It was blank. A striking, empty red, followed by page after page of absolute white. He looked up at the boy, his breath catching in his throat.

„What happens next? Where is the rest of it?”

„The future doesn’t belong to archives,” the boy said quietly, turning to walk away into the shadows of the shelves.

„Wait!” the student called out desperate for answers. „Who writes these books then?”

The boy stopped, glancing back with a knowing, enigmatic expression.

„People always ask the wrong questions,” the boy replied. „Who told you someone has to?”

When the student blinked, the boy was gone.

The next morning, the student returned to the alleyway, but the Archive had vanished. There was nothing left but two ordinary apartment buildings and a stretch of blank brick wall.

Years later, the student became a writer. Whenever he found himself staring at a blank page, struggling to find the right words, he would pause and look out into the world—wondering not if someone was writing his life, but if, somewhere in an infinite library, a boy was reading it.