It was nighttime in the town of Salerno, Italy. Rain continually harassed the houses. All was dark, save for several faint candles flickering in several foggy windows. The waves in the harbor were dangerously high and men ran along the docks, trying their hardest to secure the boats. Overall, however, the town was peaceful, serene.

In one house, placed on a farm, inland from the docks, it was not peaceful. The windows blazed with the candles. Someone continually lit more, in a nervous, high-strung manner. The fireplace as well was lit and crackling merrily. No one inside noticed the cheery touch its glow added.

The father paced back and forth, back and forth, on a set track. Soon he would wear the floor down with his dragging feet. A boy, only nine years old, sat in a chair, looking into the rain, a hardened stare set into his brow. It made him appear much older than his nine years. Both father and son flinched as another piercing scream fled from behind the closed doors that shielded the mother from view. It could not, however, shield the screams.

Another child was fighting its way into the world. It was not, however, a pleasant entering. It was fighting with all the might an unborn child could have, and as of late, its efforts were still unhelpful. The mother was a lovely Frenchwoman with a lovely disposition. She brought smiles into any room as she entered. She was gentle, delicate and kind, beautiful and sweet. Her heart was filled with love, for her husband, her son and her unborn baby. She had, however, been fighting with her unborn child for what seemed like a whole day. Her little form wasn’t handling the struggle as well as anyone had hoped.

The battle continued. The screams continued. And at last the child was born. A tiny, innocent little girl, a swish of reddish-brown hair atop her squished, soft head, her minute little hands waving feebly. She was healthy and would thrive. The mother, however, had taken much more of a blow than the child. Her impoverished, underfed body had not had the strength to fight for a child for the length of time that it had took to bring her child into the world. Though she lived through the night, she was dead by the time the sun set the next day.

Having stated the events of that night, it is needless to say that the family suffered as well. Any family having lost the mother, or any member at that, suffers. The father never forgave his daughter, for in his eyes, his daughter was who had killed his wife. Someone had to be blamed. His beautiful, kind, loving wife had died and been replaced with this, a crying, whining little brat.

As for this description of the tiny baby the mother had given her life for, it was about the opposite. The child, though she did cry and she was little, soon learned how to live with her father and brother. (The latter whom barely ever even glanced at his sister.) By the time she was 6 months old, she had learned to be quiet without needing to be ordered. She learned to suffer silently and thus didn’t learn to speak fluently until the age of four. This did not, however, mean that she was somehow mentally incapable, as her father foresaw it. She was a brilliant little girl with a love for life and beauty and freedom.

When she became old enough to be sent to work, she did so at a factory that fed on child labor. A textile mill in the slums of Salerno, close to the docks. Here she worked for ten to twelve hours a day, feeding threads through machines that turned them into cloth. She was only five years old.

When she turned eight, however, a great change took place in her life. Her father did the best thing he had ever done for his daughter and moved the family to Manhattan, New York, U.S.A. The city was much larger here. There were more places to get lost, and more places to find danger, which meant that there were more places for her to hide and more places for her father to forget about her. She still worked at a factory, this time one producing artificial flowers to be placed in women’s hats and made into bouquets.

It was here that she found her first friend. There was another little girl that worked on the same conveyor belt that she did, sifting through the hundreds of green plastic stems that had just come out of the mold. On break times, the other little girl would take her hand and lead her to the place where the girls ate their meager lunches brought from home. She was also the one to give her lunch, as her father never provided her with one. It was from this little girl that she first learned the English language. She was a very quick learner, and though she stumbled through the impromptu lessons, she never fell and gave up. By the time she was ten, she could both read and speak English.

Her father worked as well, at an automobile tire factory. The wages didn’t add up to much, and it added up to less once he took money out for his new and growing obsession with alcohol. It was soon that he spent payday nights at the bar, drinking away the entire paycheck. This made him even less easy to live with. When he went on his drunken barrages, the would beat her if she came in his line of sight. One night he tried to beat her brother too. He was now 19, however, and a growing, muscly man. He fought back and put his father in bed for two weeks straight. He ran way that night, and wasn’t ever seen again.

At the age of twelve, the girl started to save up money. She kept it in a paper bag inside her dress. It was with her always, so that her father wouldn’t find it when he went through the house in a mad search for drink money. She saved and saved, taking mere nickels and pennies out of her own paycheck whenever she dared. She was saving for an escape.

One day, when she was fifteen and had money enough for what she thought was at least a month on the streets, she ran. It had taken her a whole three years to save up enough money for this one night. When her father had drank himself to sleep on a chair in the kitchen, she bolted. Running and running, she got as far away as she could possibly manage, away from her father. She spent that night on the docks of the East River, under the looming shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, which she hadn’t seen since the day they had arrived on the steamship from Italy.

The child, though she was barely a child any longer, had grown into a soft-spoken, quiet girl. She was terribly shy and afraid of anything and everything. She had tried to find her outlets. She tried screaming and wailing, but that had only brought her more pain. She had tried ignoring it, but the constant build-up only forced her to explode. She had tried writing, and there she had struck gold. The little girl at the flower factory had once brought her a present, bought from the pocket money her parents gave her. It was a tablet of paper and a bright yellow pencil, meant to aid her in her learning of English. It had provided her much more, however. It provided her a place to scream and wail where no one could hear her. It was a place to store her dreams and wishes, the wishes only a thirteen-year-old girl can make. So every time she ran out of paper or her pencil grew too short for use, she took a nickel and a penny out of her precious store and bought another pad of paper and a pencil. So the child had an outlet, that continued to thrive until it was a flaming talent, an obsession for the written word.

Her lovely French mother had been a writer. This was something she was never to learn. She had inherited her gift for the written word, and as it pained her father every time he looked at his daughter, she had inherited her subtle, plain beauty. She was more like her mother than she would ever know.

Living on the streets was nowhere as easy as she had hoped. There was more dirt and soot, less shelter and less convenience as to running water from which to get a drink and relieve one’s human needs. Her money, she soon found, didn’t last her as long as she had anticipated. She was soon begging for pocket change to buy food and was sleeping in boxes in crowded, dingy alleyways. This was not the sanctuary she had sought to receive, but there was no way she would return to her father.

One night, she walked the streets in the rain. It continually harassed her body, and it diminished the street lamps lining the streets. She walked somewhat blindly, wet to the bone and starving, for she had not eaten since two days before. The wind howled and the East River crashed in dangerous waves upon the warn wooden wharves. She ran into people often, painfully jealous of each of them. They had warm raincoats on, and umbrellas to shield them from the rain. They were returning home from a day at work to warm homes with loving families and fresh cooked dinners. She had nowhere to go, no warmth, and no love to search for. She had none of it.

Again she bumped into someone, a stout someone, and toppled backwards, splashing right into a forming puddle on the side of the road. The form didn’t move away though. It offered one of its hands to her to help her back on her feet. She saw his face, though clouded in the darkness, and saw a boy, her age or slightly older. He had the same look to his face as she did. The silent suffering. They had given up on living and yet were still unwilling to die. He looked into her face as well, and saw the same things. He saw suffering, pain, and beauty. He asked to know her name.

“Elise,” she replied. He smiled, took her hand, and led her to warmth.