Tag: Stories

This Really Happened

Posted on by Sierra

The elevator in the JFSB opened within 30 seconds of having pushed the button (which never happens, as you English-Languagey people might note, but that is not what really happened). I got on the elevator with a friend of mine, and we were busily discussing our futures that hung in the balance while the English Teaching department was close to announcing whether or not we’d be getting internships.
A man entered the elevator. A kindly man with a warm smile, approachable wrinkles and a plateau of nicely white hair. Also, where a right arm usually hangs, he had a silver hook—a real one, with a little clampy thingy that surely helped him be… dextrous (not a real word, but you know what I mean). But the armlessness seemed almost an afterthought next to his pleasant grin, and I merely pressed the 4 button and watched the door close.
That was when we heard the slightly exasperated gasp of two people on the other side of the elevator, who were trying to beat the doors before they closed them out and sentenced them to the stairs. I, being near the button station, clicked the open door symbol before the elevator began to lift, and the doors opened again with little hesitation.
“Oh! Thank you so much!” said the man, clambering onto the lift and into the back, “I was going to try and stop it myself, but I really didn’t want to lose an arm or something.”
The man with the hook just grinned privately to himself, and made no attempt to cover his missing appendage. 

A Place To Sit

Posted on by Sierra

(This is an old blog from my trip to Europe–I just wanted to sync my blogs, and this one I liked especially well.)




His black hair sprung out from beneath his patchy red baseball cap and was matted with grease to his shoulders. His lower lip jutted out, revealing a row of rotting teeth. His baggy gray shirt hung slack to his knees for it had barely a body to cling to, and his shoulders were more like wire hangers fro, the dry cleaner than organs of flesh and blood. The tongues of his high tops were pulled up past his ankles but the last thing I wanted to look at were his feet, because if I focused on them, I could feel in my own feet the absolute sacrifice that every step cost him. But then again, staring at his face was not an option either because in his dark eyes, I saw in behind them a thousand more darknesses, knowing that every morning for him ushered in one more day of misery. And yet gaping at his wiry body made me hungry with misery and so I had nowhere, absolutely nowhere, to look, and yet my eyes absolutely could NOT look at anything BUT this man. And suddenly and ashamedly I realized I was grasping, no clinging to my purse for fear that by stealing it, he would make me a pauper in a red baseball cap trudging aimlessly and painfully through a park in the middle of France.
I let go of my purse as he slowly past and he didnt lunge for it. He didnt even look at it. He just winced and stayed on his straight course down the path to a fountain in the middle of the park.
I wanted him to take off his shoes and dip his blisters in the fountain to reprieve him if only for a moment from the oppressive pain and heat of shoes. But he didnt. He just looked so immensely grateful for a place to sit.

I hate that society has made me afraid of a man that was just looking for a place to sit.