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A Thousand Stories in his Eyes

By Theo Nick Dioso

The clothes he was wearing were obviously rummaged from the dumpster, while his crooked fingers holding a soft drink cup said ‘McDonalds’. As the light turned red, he jumped on to the pavement and began knocking on tinted windows holding out his McDonalds cup for a few coins.

Unmindful of the heat, his bare feet making an almost inaudible sound on the concrete road as he moved from car to car, he got closer to me and I could see that painful grimace on his face. As the tap-tap of his small feet grew louder I tried to fix my gaze on the tailgate of the big SUV in front of me. I told myself that if the occupants of that SUV had no coins to spare, how could I also part with my precious coins? And then he was at my window. I froze. The light was taking forever to change. ‘What’s going on? Is it broken? He is still at my window’. Then I remembered our university priest saying, ‘Give a man a fish today, and he will have fish for one day . . . teach him how to fish and he will have fish for the rest of his life . . .’ ‘That light is definitely broken’, I thought.

With all the strength that I could muster, I tried not to look into his face but somehow a giant vise seemed to grip my head and turned it so that I was face-to-face with him. Then I saw him, or rather his eyes. They say that the eyes are the windows of the soul, but in his eyes I saw sadness, the sadness of a person who had been born into this world without hope, without a future, without life. His eyes were even hungrier than he looked and something told me that it wasn’t only food he was longing for.

His face held a thousand stories and I was sure that they were not bedtime stories. I was even sure that he had never heard one of those. Despite the tiny white foam forming at the corner of his mouth that said his tongue wasn’t only thick with thirst but also heavy with hunger; his McDonalds cup was still empty.

I felt sorry at that moment, for that single cry of hope in the night when his mother gave birth to him, that fateful night that brought him onto the street, that night his joyful mother looked up to heaven in praise for her son, her son that was now standing before me trying so hard to stand on his toes to reach up to my window, holding out his empty McDonalds cup. I was sorry indeed. Could a few of my coins atone for his suffering?

Ah, the light finally turned green. They were the most precious three pesos I ever parted with. Like a wisp of smoke he quickly disappeared from my side mirror, where, after all, a small boy does not take up much space. As for me though, questions began to rain down. The most prominent of all was: Did the unknown author of the words, ‘Give a man a fish today, and he will have fish for one day . . .’ think of him when he came up with that expression?