Diverting Eyes

I walked down the cement sidewalk focusing only on trying to avoid the large cracks in walkway.   I could feel the grime settling on my exposed skin, the smog resting in my hair, the oily residue falling onto my face like a mask.  I was not a city girl.  I was disoriented and anxious in the dingy surroundings. And those noises! horns blarring, tires scrapping the ground, people yelling on thier phone.  People, too many people, crowed the sidewalks and the roads in a disorganized fashion.  I began to feel claustrophobic as the group surrounding me grew at the awaiting light.  When the light turned I breathed a sigh of relief, the once clustered crowd had began to disperse into the industrial vicinity.   I kept walking, trying not to make eye contact and to keep myself from bumping shoulders with others, as I had done every few minutes.  When I looked up I was caught off guard, I was surrounded in an area that smelt of week old fast food, it was filthy, and the air tingled my nose as I inhaled.  When I gazed around I noticed people, dirty, and desperate, and...lonely. They've been branded as beggers, "lazy" people who mouch off of society's upper and middle class because they cannot support themselves.  They sat on the gum stained sidewalk with their overgrown beards and straggly hair.  They wore ripped and torn clothing that smelt like it had come from the city’s trash.  I felt a knot forming in my throat and my heart began to ache.  They had signs pleading for small change, bus tickets, anything that people would give them, to me they simply read "HELP".  I stopped and looked around to see who stopped...no one did.  Most made a point of advoiding eye contact and walking forward, some pretending to receive a phone call just as they reached the homeless men and women.  The water was pricking my eyes.   I couldn’t handle this, I didn’t know what to do, how to act.  Should i keep walking like so many others did? I began to reach in my pocket when my dad grabbed my wrist gently. 

“Sweetheart you cannot give money to every homeless person on the street”.  I knew he was right, I would have if I could have, but I simply couldn’t.

“Just a couple dollars?” I pleaded to my father.  I couldn’t walk away now.  Even if it was small I wanted it to bring them hope. 

“Be quick” My father replied.  I noticed him looking as far from the people sitting on the street as he could, but not in the way so many others had.  But because he felt terrible about it.  I knew my father, and this killed him inside.

 I walked over to the old man with the straggly beard and placed the change inside his palm.  He snapped his hand shut over mine and made me jump.  I was about to look to my Dad for help when he spoke -

“You are a kind soul. I thought maybe they stopped caring”.  Tears formed at the corners of his eyes and my vision was blurred by the water from my own.  He was looking right past me, he was blind.  I bit my lip to stop the tears.  I turned to my Dad to see him smiling approvingly, then the man released my hand.   I walked back to my father and we walked in silence.

Author's Note

Down Town Toronto is a scary place for a girl who lives in farm country.

Reviews

[Aleyah]

Hey! I saw you reviewed my poems, thank you!
Anyhow, I find your writing style in the story kind of similar to mine. I feel like if I wrote a story like this, my adjectives and places of different words would be the same, haha (: But my favorite part is that this sotrypaints a picture in my mind as soon as I read the first sentence. Very quirkily descriptive, in a good way. A very good short story, realistic, yet not boring. Deep, and somehow inspiring! Ace!