Cave Series 8: The House that Jack Didn’t Build (A New First-Grade Reader)

Jack, you live in a house you didn’t buy. You never viewed it or chose it, or paid for it or took out a mortgage on it. Somehow, you just got put in that house. Your parents and teachers shut you up in a closet in the cellar, with a few comic books that you learned to read. Now you’ve grown up a little and they let you crawl into an adjacent closet, also downstairs in the dark. There are no lights down there. You don’t know what’s upstairs. You’ve never seen a window, let alone the outside. You don’t even know how big the basement is. You have no idea about what’s going on upstairs, in the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, the study… And all those beautiful bedrooms and that sunny dormer window. And that garden outside, with trees, flowers and butterflies? And the farm, that supplies the food? No idea. You just sit around in one closet or the other and repeat the comic book words you’ve learned, occasionally adding a few of your own, and you start feeling very smart. Oh, what a good boy am I! I’ve stuck in my thumb and pulled out a plum, so yes, I certainly am a good boy, aren’t I!

One day there was a big storm, and it made a crack in the ceiling of your closet. You looked up. There was too much light, so you ripped out a page you didn’t much like from the comic book and taped it up. And not long afterwards, you heard a sound from above, and you wondered what it was. You didn’t know that word – it sounded strange! But you soon forgot it, and found solace playing with your shoelaces again. A few weeks later, someone must have spilled a pail of water upstairs because your taped-up hole started dripping little drops of clear liquid. But you stuck your sock in the hole to stop it up.

Outside the birds were singing. Why? The garden was blooming. How come? The breeze was blowing. Who could do that? You sat and you sat, and you got plump and fat, and you repeated the words from your favourite comic strip to convince yourself that all was well. Your world was so small, Jack.

But one day, you heard another sound. Someone was talking upstairs. There were visitors. And they happened to say “Comic book life is not life, there’s real life up here.” You were amazed. You stopped up your ears. You didn’t want to hear those words. It shook up your little world too much. And you went back to your shoelaces again.

You live in a dark closet in a house you don’t know. Wake up, Jack! Crawl out of your closet. There’s a whole new world upstairs, out there. The key to the closet is in your pocket, in the silver lining of your pocket. Search for it, Jack. Find it. And step up into the house. Come outside. Look around you. And see, Jack, see!