- A hungry little street girl discovers the magic and the dangers of an opera-singing ogre's kitchen.
- A full moon hovered above the old Italian village as a hungry girl was scavenging for some food scraps in a dirty dumpster in an alley. First she seemed happy to find a sardine can, but it was empty. Then she saw the tail of a fish but she pulled out only a bare bone. Her stomach started to growl louder and louder. It was very cool and her scarf and coat did not give her enough warmth. She was cleaning her wet nose with the sleeve when she heard a man singing an aria from an unintelligible opera. It was like a call she could not resist and had to follow.—Jorge Villegas A (jorge.jorgehumbertovillegas@gmail.com)
- Scavenging for food, an impoverished street urchin goes dumpster-diving. Suddenly, the sonorous and musical voice of a male opera singer catches her attention, and as one thing leads to another, the hungry little girl finds herself before an unprecedented, mouth-watering sight: mountains of fresh, nutritious food are within her grasp. Has her dream come true?—Nick Riganas
- A full moon hovered above the old Italian village as a hungry girl was scavenging for some food scraps in a dirty dumpster in an alley. First she seemed happy to find a sardine can, but it was empty. Then she saw the tail of a fish but she pulled out only a bare bone. Her stomach started to growl louder and louder. It was very cool and her scarf and coat did not give her enough warmth. She was cleaning her wet nose with the sleeve when she heard a man singing an aria from an unintelligible opera. It was like a call she could not resist and had to follow. On the street, at ground level, she saw a glowing window that led to a basement. The walls were painted with green and orange stripes and at the top there was an arch made of an irregular brick arrangement. As the girl tried to see what was happening down there, the window flipped over and opened. She fell down through what seemed to be a dense mist made of smoke or steam and fell on a huge kitchen table with giant tomatoes, all kinds of cheese, vegetables, cups, dishes and bottles of wine, vinegar and olive oil. Now the lyrics were quite clear: the man was singing about his food and recipes. The little girl took a piece of cheese and continued walking on the table. She had not noticed the man, but when she walked by a huge knife, the singing chef grabbed it and took it from the table. She could see he was an enormous old man with a big round stomach covered by a red shirt and a white apron. He had big gray eyebrows and a long straight mustache. Of course he was wearing his long white hat, but this one was very narrow and long. In fact it looked more like a long stocking attached to his head. As he sang his recipe, the pasta that was on a giant bowl moved by itself and reached for the ingredients from pots and shelves around his kitchen. One of his ingredients was kids! A little boy was sleeping in one of the shelves opened by a piece of spaghetti. She could see the spaghetti procession carrying children at the top, ready to put them in the pot. She tried to reach them by standing on a handle, but the pot bent down and fell on the floor. The chef turned around and saw the little girl next to some cups on the floor. As the chef was trying to catch her, she jumped and kicked his angry face and reached a higher place in the kitchen, but she did not see a piece of cheese in front of her and fell down again. She could see how the marching spaghetti soldiers put the kids into raviolis, and getting them ready for cooking. While the other kids were still sleeping helplessly, the girl climbed some piles of sliced carrots and other vegetables which hit the evil chef on his face as she tried to get away from him. The girl could reach a big piece of cheese and got inside through one of the holes. The giant chef peeped through the holes with his big eyes as he moved the piece of cheese to get the girl out of it. She fell on a tomato and the evil man prepared his knives to kill her. The girl did not stay there and jumped over a bottle of wine which had a corkscrew on top. She made it twist and the cork popped out, taking her away from the man. When she fell, she was close to a turned over small jar with a red hot chili pepper that had fallen from it. She got an excellent idea: she dressed up the pepper with a mushroom on its top, a lettuce leave and other things she had at hand. The evil man took the pepper and bit it at once, thinking it was the little girl. In his desperation, the man looked for something to drink and pushed the pasta dish aside. It fell on the floor and all the kids started to wake up and ran away. The evil chef kept drinking wine to put out the fire inside his stomach and the kids took advantage of that to make a human ladder towards the window that would lead them to freedom and safety on the street above. The girl was so hungry that she had distracted collecting some cherries to eat. The last boy in the human ladder tried to grab her hand, but the other kids pulled him up and the window closed. She stayed alone down in the evil chef's kitchen. He had drunk so much wine that he looked like a balloon on the floor. The little girl climbed and stood on his stomach as she held a fork in her small hand. She smiled at the man whose face now showed his fear: she let the fork fall from her hand. The man exploded making a loud noise as if he were inflated with hundreds of cubic meters of air. That was the end of the ogre of the opera who had been catching homeless children in the town for years to make his pasta recipes.
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