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Heya this is Casey. An abbreviated version of this short story featured in my school's literary magazine last year. I wrote this after doing the Sleep Out Saturday two years ago, a church thing where people slept in boxes or tents on our church lawn all night.
Enjoy!
: ) CD
A Single Word
This is not a tale of brave knights and fierce dragons. This is not a story of love or adventure.
This is the story of a single word. One word, that changed many lives.
It began like this.
Hope.
Fiona smiled, taking heart from the good memories, not the sad. She gathered up her homework, unwittingly taking the word with her. She took the word to school with her the next day.
It fell out of her locker, and landed on the other side of the hall.
George, walking by, picked it up, not reading it yet, and stuffed the word into his pocket. In his house, far from Fiona’s, he read the slightly crumpled word, to the terrible "music" of his drunken father’s yells, rubbing a bruise his dad had given him.
Hope.
George sat still, remembering when his dad was a dad, playing Frisbee with him, and teaching him to throw the world’s best curveball. He left the word near his open window, where a draft sucked it out, onto the street.
The melting snow and slush wet the word, but it was not ruined. A shivering middle-aged woman, Raven, picked her way though the slush, trying to step in the shallowest bits, thus preserving her tattered shoes. The word was just dry enough to pick up, and Raven read it in the orange-yellow glow of a streetlight.
Hope.
Raven nodded, resolving to send in that transitional housing form the shelter people had given her. Folding the damp paper carefully, she stuck it inside her shirt, where it dried. When she reached a shelter, the word was lost.
One of the volunteers, a woman by the name of Terry, picked up the word. In a slight lull, she read it.
Hope.
Her mother was very ill, but she smiled for the first time in a long time, and decided not to dwell on the bleak future tonight. Her mother needed a daughter, not a worrier. She pinned the word to the bulletin board, her face bright instead of fretting.
A week later a newspaper reporter came to the shelter, intending to portray how less fortunate people spent their winter holidays. The photographer for the article saw the word and took a picture of the battered, slightly stained sign on the homeless shelter bulletin board.
Hope.
And twenty-eight people who read the article and saw the picture donated money to funds that help the homeless. One was a dying old man, who left four hundred dollars to the shelter mentioned in the article in his Last Will and Testament.
Fiona, already saddened by her mother’s death, would have become more and more depressed, until, in the next year, she would take too many sleeping pills, and never wake up on Christmas morning.
George would have run away from home, selling and using drugs to support himself, and eventually been arrested, imprisoned, and put into a detoxification program. He would never get a good job afterward.
Raven would have gone to the shelter to sleep every night, until, one day, the cold would freeze her as she walked toward the only home she would ever know.
Terry would have gotten more and more stressed until one bright morning in early February; she would collapse with a nervous breakdown, never completely recovering, though her mother finally would.
The homeless shelter, overloaded with too many people and not enough supplies, would have gone into debt and shut down, forcing many men, women and children to sleep in the cold city streets.
Twenty-eight people would have ignored the plight of countless people without homes.
And the old man would haveleft four hundred dollars to his sons and daughter, who would squabble over the money after his death, and irrevocably divide the once tight-knit family.
Fiona, by an act of will and of her own heart, pulled herself out of the downward spiral that would have led to her death. Though it was hard, she accepted the woman that her father began dating after going to volunteer at their nearest homeless shelter.
A teacher, recognizing the signs of abuse, rescued George from his father by making a single phone call to the Child Abuse Hotline. He is now being processed for adoption.
Raven has a home now, a real home, and a job at the local supermarket. She is well on her way to becoming self-sufficient once more.
Not long after the publishing of the article, a man, a widower, came to volunteer at the shelter. Terry was the one assigned to show him the ropes, and through casual conversation, found they had much in common. They’re married now, and Terry is a good mother to her stepdaughter, and Terry’s mother, of course, loves her step-grandchild.
Several of the twenty-eight people are now regular contributors to homeless shelters in their area. Because of their example, the number of compassionate people now number far more than twenty-eight.
And now, the daughter of the old man doesn’t walk right by buskers and beggars in the city streets, assuming that they are all drug-users and drunks. Druggie or not, she gives each one a dollar.
Dollars add up. Gratitude adds up. Love adds up. Every person helped may lend a hand to another. Every person shown a little love may spread love to another.
That is the power of a single word:
Hope.
A parting thought:
Did you know that the average age of a homeless person is nine years old?
Neither did I, until two years ago...
